How optimizing for a purchase in a Facebook campaign affects instant donor conversion
Dallas Theological Seminary
The DTS mission is, “to glorify God by equipping godly servant-leaders for the proclamation of His Word and the building up of the body of Christ worldwide.” They strive to help men and women fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, or more simply: Teach Truth. Love Well.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 02/25/2019 - 03/11/2019
DTS was running a campaign on Facebook for their free Hebrews online course. They typically use custom conversions in Facebook to track course signups, and Facebook shows ads to people in the targeted audiences based on this conversion. They recently discovered that Facebook has a native Purchase event that would allow them to optimize for donors, rather than course signups. This test involves a duplicate Hebrews campaign where the only element changed is the conversion event- Custom Conversion vs. Purchase.
Research Question
Do we get more donors from Facebook through optimizing for a custom conversion (Hebrews Course Signup) or Purchase?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Custom Conversion Optimization | 0.03% | ||
| T1: | Purchase Optimization | 0.12% | 297.6% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 6,396 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 73,236, 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
× 297.6% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
Optimizing for purchase targeting led to a 297% increase in donors from the Hebrews campaign. This confirms our hypothesis that Facebook shows ads to more donor-motivated people when optimizing for purchases. It allows them to pull in additional purchase data from Facebook instead of relying primarily on data that we give to them (for example, a list of prospects or a lookalike audience).