The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate

How the purchase conversion pixel impacts donor acquisition

Experiment ID: #10687

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: 02/13/2019 - 03/13/2019

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate launched a Facebook campaign to promote an offer called Lenten Prayers. Historically, the campaigns have been optimized for email conversion using a custom conversion in Facebook. In recent months, Facebook released a new Purchase pixel conversion that allows you to optimize the campaign off of people who donate. We tested this new approach against the name conversion optimization. 

Research Question

What is the impact of Facebook’s purchase conversion on conversion and revenue?

Design

C: 2019 Lenten Prayers Offer
T1: 2019 Lenten Prayers Offer - Purchase Optimization

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: 2019 Lenten Prayers Offer 0.08%
T1: 2019 Lenten Prayers Offer - Purchase Optimization 0.32%284.6% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 2,258 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 170,916, 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
× 284.6% 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 284.6%! 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 #10687

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