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How to use paid Meta ads to target our audience

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Jude Clarke Media and PR Manager at National AIDS Trust Posted 10 months ago

Hi - does anyone have any great tips or resources for understanding how to best target an audience when using paid ads? This is something we (National AIDS Trust) struggle with - our paid ads don't tend to get results and I'm looking for ideas on how we can improve.
[Disclaimer: I'm not the Digital Comms expert in our team, but I'm their manager and am looking for ways to support them in this aspect of our work]
Also - I'm new here, hello đź‘‹
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Gorjan Lakaliski

Gorjan Lakaliski Staff PANEL

Assistant Coordinator Content Department at Zurfte Empowercare Foundation and Hekima Non-profit 8 months ago

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Not everyone clicks on your Call-to-action link and lands on your website. Therefore, target engagement audiences or people who have engaged with your Facebook page: people who have liked a video, image, post, etc.
With this feature, you can target everyone who has engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page within a couple of days. Another option is to target people who have shown interest in a certain event you’ve promoted on Meta. Last but not least, target people who have watched a video for a specific length; for instance, 90% of one of your videos.
Charity Connect limits the number of characters for every post. Send me a Direct Message with your preferred communication channel and I will help you set up Meta ads targeting.
 

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Gorjan Lakaliski

Gorjan Lakaliski Staff PANEL

Assistant Coordinator Content Department at Zurfte Empowercare Foundation and Hekima Non-profit 8 months ago

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If you haven’t received a single donation on your site yet, you can use Facebook’s data to reach people interested in your cause. You can target people who have shown an interest in AIDS and HIV. Facebook offers a search bar in which you can write keywords and see Facebook pages that are related to AIDS.
Or, you can choose categories related to your cause by clicking on the search bar; you will see a dropdown menu, and you can select a category that matches AIDS.
If you search AIDS, you may or may not get related pages to your cause. Sometimes you need to feed Facebook with more specific keywords, such as HIV awareness, AIDS symptoms, dating for people with AIDS, etc.
Choose to target pages with ads that have affinity score of minimum 80x and at least, 80000 users. Even better, target Facebook pages with larger affinity score(s) than 80x and larger audience than 80000

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Gorjan Lakaliski

Gorjan Lakaliski Staff PANEL

Assistant Coordinator Content Department at Zurfte Empowercare Foundation and Hekima Non-profit 8 months ago

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You can use the Lookalike audience feature to target Facebook users who share similar characteristics as your donors. You can choose to target prospects who have
        â—¦ Visited a donation page on your Website
        â—¦ Donated an amount to your cause
        â—¦ Purchased Something from your website
    • Engagement Audiences or audience who has
        â—¦ Engaged with Your Facebook Page
        â—¦ Engaged with Your Instagram Profile
    • Newsletter Subscribers
You can choose the location you’d like to target. Use your donor list to see where most of your donations come from.
Meta has an option for you to choose if you’d like your ads to reach people who are very similar to your ideal audience at the expense of reaching fewer people. Or to reach more people at the expense that these Facebook members are slightly different than your ideal donors. That is, they have similarities with your heavy donors, but they are not that alike.
You decide which option you prefer with a spectrum from 0 – 10; if you choose 1 – 5 on this slider, Facebook targets audience that is very similar to your target audience. If you choose 6 – 10, then Facebook reaches a larger audience.
 

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Gorjan Lakaliski

Gorjan Lakaliski Staff PANEL

Assistant Coordinator Content Department at Zurfte Empowercare Foundation and Hekima Non-profit 8 months ago

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Another option is to create a custom audience. A custom audience is an audience that you’d like to target on Meta. Meta will match your ads to the audience who have similar characteristics to your ideal audience. Your ideal audience can be people, such as your website traffic, your email list, donor list, volunteers list, etc.
To create a custom audience, insert your ideal customer features:
â–Ş People who have completed your Donation form
           â–Ş People who visited your donation form. You can target people who have spent a significant time on your site:
â—¦ Condition
            â–Ş Visitors by time spent
            â–Ş Top [percentage] (example: 5%)
           â–Ş In the past [number of days]. You tell Facebook to target people who have completed a conversion, or who have performed a different task on your site within a specific time frame.
You can upload a file of your donor list, so that Facebook can use that file to target donors who use the same email on Facebook as the one they used to donate to your cause.
         

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Gorjan Lakaliski

Gorjan Lakaliski Staff PANEL

Assistant Coordinator Content Department at Zurfte Empowercare Foundation and Hekima Non-profit 8 months ago

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Hi, Judy Clarke. To use Meta targeting, make sure you have Facebook Pixel enabled on your website. Meta targeting starts with your objective(s). For instance, if you want more donations on your website, you can use the custom conversion feature.
The custom conversion feature tells Facebook to target all people who are similar to your donors.
With the custom conversion feature, you ask Meta to target people who  
     â–Ş have completed your Donation form
     â–Ş Meta needs a URL keyword from your donation URL. You can include checkout from your donation URL.

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Hirsch Sharma

Hirsch Sharma Staff PANEL

CEO at Boardroom Consultants 10 months ago

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Hi Jude
The following may help;
https://www.platypusdigital.com/
Here is what they offer:
We use the internet to connect charities to the people they need, like donors, fundraisers and people who need their vital services. We believe that digital success lies in joined up thinking. That’s why we cover all digital angles, from Google Ads to digital strategy and everything in between.
 
Warm regards

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Beverley Adams-Reynolds

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Founder at The Data Protection Lady 10 months ago

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can I just add to responses, that you should consider a Data Protection Impact Assessment if you've not used the FB C-API or Custom Audience tools......... before you used them. You still need a lawful basis to share data with FB. Yell if that doesn't make sense.

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Milly Moss

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Freelance Marketing & Communications for Third Sector at milicomms 10 months ago

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Hi Jude,

You might like to bring on some freelance consultancy as Olly suggests below, or if your officer does have some capability in this already and merely needs extra support or training, you could try Digital Candle (free): https://www.digitalcandle.org.uk/, Digital Boost (free): https://digitalboost.org.uk/digital-boost-free-1-to-1-support-for-startups-small-businesses-charities/ or also check out https://www.platypusdigital.com/ for both training and consultancy.

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Olly Du Croz

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Deputy CEO / Marketing and Communications Manager at International Nepal Fellowship 10 months ago

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Hi Jude, as a fellow learner in this space it is a bit of a minefield and the targeting options have changed so they're not as wide-ranging as they used to be. A basic answer is to test (then test again), but I have sought some great advice from a true expert (and a good value, accessible freelancer) to help work through some of our issues: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-broniewski/?originalSubdomain=uk

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Edward Hibbert

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Founder and CTO at Freegle 10 months ago

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Just checking - are you using Google Ad Grants? 

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