5 Key Strategies to Optimize Your Cost-Per-Acquisition Digital Advertising Campaign

May 6, 2024

In the fast-paced world of political advertising, campaigns have limited resources and unlimited goals—maximizing the efficiency of your digital campaigns is crucial to achieving your fundraising and list-building objectives. CPA campaigns are not quick fixes, but when used in the context of a long-term campaign, they can offer great opportunities to growth.

Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaigns offer a strategic approach to reaching your target audience and optimizing your advertising budget. Don’t be fooled, though—CPA Campaigns aren’t an easy fix to endless donations and list sign ups. This is an advanced feature that should be used by professionals who are familiar with CPA optimization.

If you’re ready to launch a CPA campaign with Turn It Blue Ads, here are five ways to optimize your campaign to get the best bang for your buck:

Define Clear Conversion Goals:

Before launching your CPA campaign, you must establish clear conversion goals tailored to your ultimate outcome. M+R has done research into the average costs of conversions within the nonprofit sector, and they have shared some insights into the costs of running these campaigns:

Donation campaign via display ads: $102 per donation
Donation campaign via video ads: $239 per donation
Donation campaign via CTV ads: $972 per donation

Furthermore, As M+R notes, lead generation can be a key part of a healthy email program, but the average ratio of ad-acquired lead to start-of-year email list size was 0.06. That means that a campaign that started 2023 with 100,000 email subscribers would acquire 6,000 new leads via ads via 2024.

Whether your objective is to drive donations, increase email sign-ups, or encourage volunteer participation, defining specific and measurable goals is critical to providing clarity and focus to get the results you’re after—after all, these are not cheap or quick solutions to your campaign woes. By aligning your conversion goals with your overall campaign objectives, you can effectively track and measure the success of your CPA efforts.

Target Relevant Audiences:

Effective audience targeting lies at the heart of a successful CPA campaign—identify and target audiences that are most likely to engage with their candidate or cause, tailoring that audience even more narrowly to those likely to engage with your specific goal. Utilize data-driven insights to segment your audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and political affiliations—and at Turn It Blue Digital, we've done the hard work for you by making one-click donor audiences available within Turn It Blue Ads!

Zeroing in on relevant audience segments allows you to optimize your ad spend—lowering the cost per acquisition and increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Optimize Ad Creative and Messaging:

Compelling ad creative and messaging are essential components of any successful CPA campaign. The user experience is tantamount to a successful CPA campaign—users should invest time and resources into crafting attention-grabbing ads that resonate with their target audience. Tailor your messaging to align with the values and priorities of your candidate or cause, emphasizing key campaign messages and calls to action. Additionally, A/B testing different ad creatives, headlines, and copy variations can provide valuable insights into which elements drive the highest conversion rates.

Implement Conversion Tracking and Optimization:

It’s nearly impossible to effectively optimize your CPA campaign without robust conversion tracking and optimization—from the first click to the ultimate conversion. Tracking pixels or tags across your digital assets allow you to monitor user interactions, conversions, and key performance metrics (you’ll set these up when you choose to launch a CPA campaign with Turn It Blue Ads). Leverage conversion tracking data to identify high-performing ad placements, audiences, and creatives—this allows you to allocate your budget more efficiently and learn which messages and ads are producing results so you can improve your campaign on the user-end while allowing the proprietary Turn It Blue Ads optimization strategies improve your campaign on the ad-side.

Monitor and Analyze Campaign Performance:

Regularly monitor and analyze your campaign performance to keep an eye on your creative, click-through, experience, and user pipeline—usually on a monthly or quarterly basis. Track key metrics such as conversion rate, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, and audience engagement to learn where users are engaging and where they’re dropping off after the initial click. Utilize analytics tools and dashboards to gain actionable insights into campaign performance trends, audience behavior, and emerging opportunities. By staying agile and responsive to performance data in the long term context of your campaign, you can refine your CPA campaign strategy over time to achieve optimal results.

Optimizing your cost-per-acquisition digital advertising campaign requires a strategic approach—know your goals, perfect your creative, and monitor your analytics. When done correctly, your CPA campaigns will drive meaningful engagement, foster supporter growth, and achieve campaign success.

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Unlock the Secrets to Powerful Digital Ads Campaigns

By Reilly Shelton • October 18, 2024

Launching an effective ad campaign can seem daunting, but with some tips and the right plan, you can achieve great results. We’ll give you important tips and best practices to ensure your campaigns not only reach but resonate with your audience. Planning Your Digital Ad Budget Don't draw your digital budget from leftover money! For digital advertising to be effective, you want to aim for 6-12 impressions per voter per week. You’ll need enough funds to reach every voter the desired number of times throughout your campaign. Tip: Our 💥 Budget Estimator Tool 💥 (view on desktop) can help you plan your budget based on audience size and campaign length. Build Your Audience Strategically When you think about building your audience, consider: Voter geography. Narrow your audience to only those who can cast ballots in your election. Voting history. Are members of your audience registered voters? Do they have a history of voting behavior? Our ads platform also has this information built for easy targeting. Voter preferences . Are you targeting strong progressives to increase turnout? Or persuading voters likely to agree with you? Use voting history or third-party data to predict voters’ behavior. Tip : Plug in your target demographics with our Custom Audience builder , and you'll be serving ads to the right people in no time! Turn It Blue Ads also makes it easy for you with our expert-curated One-Click Audiences . Are you focused on getting out the vote? Use our General Election Turnout Universe to get in front of your voters! Key takeaway : Don't get too granular. Cast a wide net and reach voters in your area who have voting behaviors consistent with your strategy to reach your win number. Don't Be Afraid to Run Multiple Campaigns You may need to achieve a few different goals with your digital approach—that isn't uncommon. You might consider running ads asking your base voters to volunteer while reminding infrequent progressive voters to head to the polls. Alternatively, you could run ads to increase name ID, followed by ads highlighting your key values. The great news is that you can execute all these strategies simultaneously! Here are three ways you can break up your campaign plan to achieve multiple goals: Target based on voting history behavior. Your message should be different when talking to people who consistently vote than when you talk to people who are irregular voters. Divide based on target issue preferences. If you need to persuade voters to reach your win number, split your audience into two or three main groups based on likely issue propensities. This way, you can send a message that matters to them. Divide based on timeline. Your goal may be to do all of these things at once—and that's okay! Try breaking your ads down based on the election timeline. By embracing these strategies, you can harness the full potential of digital advertising and drive meaningful engagement to achieve your campaign goals. Turn It Blue Digital is here to support you throughout your journey, providing expert guidance and tools to ensure your campaign's success every step of the way.

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