Care Net

How the kind of conversion event used in paid Facebook ads impacts conversion

Experiment ID: #12169

Care Net

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 01/24/2019 - 02/25/2019

Care Net offers people the opportunity to take a free online course called, Pro-Life 101. This online course gets promoted through paid Facebook ads. The course has been running for over a year and since the start of the course, we have continually been optimizing the acquisition funnel in an effort to decrease name and donor acquisition cost and increase conversion. While we have been able to significantly impact name conversion, instant donor conversion hasn’t been as strong. All of the Facebook campaigns were set up using Facebook’s custom conversion event. This event was based on the email form submission. We hypothesized that testing this conversion event with Facebook’s purchase conversion might help improve instant donor conversion. 

Research Question

What kind of impact would Facebook’s purchase conversion have on name and donor conversion?

Design

C: fy19 Pro-Life 101 Via Negative Pledge
T1: fy19 Pro-Life 101 Via Negative Pledge - NEW NA APPROACH

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: fy19 Pro-Life 101 Via Negative Pledge 0.02%
T1: fy19 Pro-Life 101 Via Negative Pledge - NEW NA APPROACH 0.14%677.9% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 2,991 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 98,273, 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
× 677.9% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

By using Facebook’s purchase conversion, we were able to significantly impact instant donor conversion. In fact, this conversion event increased instant donor conversion by 678%! The results of this experiment dramatically changed the method in which we view and execute paid acquisition campaigns moving forward. 
The purchase conversion allows Facebook to pull in additional purchase data to optimize the campaign instead of relying on a singular conversion metric that we tell it to do. 


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

Question about experiment #12169

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