The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate

How the use of an illustrated image over a real photo in a Facebook ad can impact click-through and acquisition

Experiment ID: #6589

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate are a Roman Catholic congregation of priests and brothers founded after the French Revolution by St. Eugene De Mazenod to work among the poor. Today there are nearly 4,000 missionaries working in more than 60 countries around the world.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 05/05/2017 - 05/09/2017

The Missionary Oblates developed a Novena prayer in honor of Mother’s Day. They promoted this content offer through paid Facebook ads in an effort to acquire new names. We traditionally use images of real people in Facebook ads, but we wanted to test the image of the ad with something more illustrated. The illustrated image was also the same image used on the cover of the Novena prayers and acquisition page.

Research Question

Which Facebook ad would acquire more email addresses

Design

C: Real Photo
T1: Illustrated Image

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Real Photo 0.67%
T1: Illustrated Image 1.1%66.6% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 3,826 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 58,896, 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:

    0% increase in traffic
× 66.6% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

People were not only more motivated to click on the illustrated image over the real photo in the Facebook ad, but once they got to the landing page they were more highly motivated to get the offer as well. There was a 66.6% increase in emails acquired with the illustrated image over the real photo. The increase in click-through and acquisition can be attributed to the call-to-action being reinforced on the image, the congruency of the image used in the ad and the imagery on the acquisition page and because the image was more centric to the faith of the organization.


Experiment Documented by Courtney Gaines
Courtney Gaines is Vice President at NextAfter.

Question about experiment #6589

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