Digital Advocacy: Advertising Campaign Goal Setting Part II

by Sophie Thurber (She/Her)

Digital Advocacy

Digital Advocacy Advertising: Making the Most of My Campaign.

In our last blog post, Digital Advocacy: Advertising Campaign Goal Setting Part I,  we talked about how to develop digital advocacy strategy, cost per acquisition (CPA) campaigns, email programs and the best ways to utilize ad testing. In today's post, we take a closer look at using tactics like paid digital advertising, social media and analytics for digital advocacy. You can also read more about this in our latest ebook, Guide to Digital Advocacy.

Digital Advocacy Advertising

There are a lot of different ways to approach paid digital advocacy advertising. Typical metrics for determining the success of a digital advocacy campaign includes, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rates (e.g. petition signatures, or another action that goes beyond simply clicking the ad) and impression levels. You might also be looking to increase quality site traffic (people who take the time to look through your site, take an action, etc.).

With paid digital ads, it’s important to formulate your goals with your budget in mind. For instance, if you’ve got $10,000 to spend, you’re not going to be able to saturate an entire state with digital ads, or even target multiple legislators in their district. You may, however, be able to run ads in highly targeted publications or choose a very narrow audience to serve ads to (e.g. running ads in a political newsletter with a high open rate that you know is regularly frequented by political staffers). Remember, you’re never going to be able to do everything, so it’s better to be strategic with your money and do one or two things really well. Above all, your metrics for success and your digital strategy should track with your overall goals and, of course, your budget.

Social Media

Social media is a great tool – it’s comparatively cheap to have an impact, it’s interactive, and it’s a great way to create an audience for your message. A lot of people will argue that their goal with social media is visibility, maybe also engagement. Those are certainly important pieces of the puzzle (social media platforms are probably the cheapest and most pervasive tools you can use to plaster your digital advocacy advertising campaign across the internet), but they should not be the only things you come away with.

In other words, your secondary goals are critical here. How is social media (both the paid and unpaid portions of your program) uniquely positioned to help you achieve those goals? Can strong engagements and repeated interaction help you to bring an online supporter to an offline, real-world volunteer event? Does a certain amount of social media engagement translate into an increase in the likelihood that a follower will donate? Take stock of your interactions and examine what’s driving the types of conversions you’re looking for to help optimize your plans, ads and interactions.

Website Analytics

Another important tool at your disposal is Google Analytics. It’s free for almost everyone, and it provides a wide variety of information about a site’s traffic. Digging into your site’s analytics can be illuminating, providing you with information that basic ad metrics likely won’t. For instance, you may be achieving a CTR that’s off the charts, but a look into your analytics may reveal a high bounce rate as well, meaning that you’re getting a lot of traffic, but that it’s not sticking. That may indicate that your ad’s ask doesn’t match the content on your landing page, or that most of the bounces are coming from mobile traffic and are attributable to fat finger syndrome – without a peek into your analytics, you wouldn’t necessarily know these things.

These are just a few of the things you should keep in mind when setting goals for your digital advocacy advertising  campaign. If you have questions on digital advocacy strategy, feel free to drop us a line, check out our digital advocacy ebook, or check out our recorded webinar on Goal Setting for Digital Advertising.