NextAfter

How your Facebook (Meta) Advertising performance goal impacts video campaign reach

Experiment ID: #139109

NextAfter

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 01/31/2023 - 03/15/2023

As a part of NextAfter’s “Fundraising Genius” branding ad campaign, our team wanted to experiment with the video awareness campaign goals to monitor what performance goal would achieve the greatest “reach” (which is defined as: how many people in the target audience received at least one ad impression) with the campaign.

So, our team decided to try the “Maximize number of impressions” goal (as the control) vs. a new awareness building campaign goal called “Maximize ad recall lift” (as the treatment).

Otherwise, the two campaigns were identical, targeting the same audience.

Our research questions really were:

Which campaign setting would generate the greatest reach, and to what amount are we trading off “frequency” of ad placements (eg how many times anyone in the audience sees an ad per day)? And,
Which of the two campaign types is more cost effective for the investment?

Research Question

We believe that using the “Ad recall lift” goal in Facebook (Meta) Advertising for our awareness campaign will achieve a more cost-effective reach because the algorithm is showing it to whoever it believes will likely “remember” seeing the ad.

Design

C: Maximize number of impressions goal

T1: Maximize ad recall lift goal

Results

	Treatment Name	Open Rate	Relative Difference	Confidence
C:	Maximize number of impressions goal	20.3%
T1:	Maximize ad recall lift goal	38.9%	91.3%	100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 46 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 340,800, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.

Flux Metrics Affected

The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:

91.3% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The key learning from this experiment is that using the "Maximize ad recall lift" goal in Facebook advertising for awareness campaigns is more effective than using the "Maximize number of impressions" goal because it reached nearly 2x the number of people on just 12.8% of the spending of the control audience.

This was confirmed by a 91.3% increase in "Reach" (how many unique people in our target audience received at least one impression) with a 100.0% statistical level of confidence.

To put that another way — the cost to reach 1,000 people in the control ad setting was $34.84, while the cost to reach 1,000 people with the treatment ad setting was just $2.68 (which is is a 92.3% decrease in cost to reach 1,000 people).

Having said all of that — it's worth noting that our frequency has plummeted, dropping from 12.4 in the control campaign to just 1.3 in the treatment.

Conclusion:

If you're looking to reach far more people in your target audience with at least one ad impression, prioritized to whomever the platform believes is most likely to consume the ad and remember it, you should use the "Awareness > Maximize ad recall lift" campaign setting.
If you just want to overpower your competitors and ensure high ad frequency for a smaller number of your target audience, then you should use the "Awareness > Maximize the number of impressions" campaign setting.

Experiment Documented by Greg Colunga

Question about experiment #139109

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.