Run the Month is the first and largest of Prostate Cancer UK’s three virtual fundraising events, followed later in the year by March the Month and Cycle the Month. We needed to recruit supporters to sign up to run 26 miles in January, raising awareness of the support the charity provides to men with Prostate Cancer and driving donations.
Virtual events have gained popularity since the pandemic and running challenges are consistently the most popular fundraising events, making Run the Month Prostate Cancer’s biggest virtual fundraising event. The event runs throughout January, following the peak Christmas donation season when people feel most generous and coinciding with a time when many set New Year’s Resolutions.
With high target KPIs and a YoY decrease in budgets for this campaign, we prioritised the channels that we know generate the strongest efficiencies most likely to achieve the outlined targets. We also built on top performing audiences and search terms to ensure we were focusing budgets towards areas we knew converted most efficiently the year before to maximise budgets.
Our paid search and paid social campaign ran across Google Search, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
In the lead up to the Run the Month campaign we had been testing the use of greater AI features across both paid search and paid social. Based on our findings, we launched Advantage+ within Meta across a broad audience optimised towards our primary goal of driving signups, allowing the engine to incorporate AI to focus on greater CPA efficiencies.
Our strategy was to incorporate a blend of broader audiences at the start of the campaign, alongside more specific interest and look-a-like focused targeting as the campaign progressed. Previously, we had testing using a broader audience later in the campaign period, however historic performance indicated that bringing this forward would maximise the data.
Meta and Instagram placements had previously been separated from a budget perspective for greater budget control. However, as Meta has developed, you’re now more likely to pay a higher media rate using this approach. We had seen success in our Individual Giving campaign for Prostate Cancer UK by merging the Facebook and Instagram placements on Meta. In doing this we delivered a cheaper CPM and could generate greater impressions and reach within budget. This also meant that we weren’t spreading our budget too thinly across a higher volume of targeting lines, so could generate greater volumes of conversions resulting in exiting the learning phase quicker. Because of the positive results seen here, we decided to test this approach for our Run the Month event campaign.
We developed a creative testing roadmap ahead of the campaign launch, phasing different creative content and ad copy tests. Historically, ‘incentive content’ where we push the ‘freebies’ a participant can receive from signing up or reaching a value-raised target such as a free t-shirt, had performed well, so we decided as part of the strategy to launch these ads when we started to see conversion rates fatigue or YoY results fall behind to act as a boost to sign up volumes.
Throughout the campaign we looked to develop new ways to optimise audience testing. The first test we ran was retargeting past event participants who had donated a higher value. This resulted in a strong conversion rate at consistently higher donation values.
We also worked with Anonymised to test its new Audience Lift product which enriches first-party data with live interest and intent signals using privacy-by-design, on-device technology. These audiences allowed us to expand our targeting beyond Meta’s audiences as well as provided a workaround to Meta’s healthcare restrictions, enabling us to retarget those who had visited the website but were yet to convert. Overall, this activity achieved a 35% reduction in CPAs in just two weeks.
Our campaign resulted in a total donation value of £482k from paid media channels, maintaining the same conversion rate as the previous year in a time when paid search and paid social advertising are becoming increasingly expensive.
The optimisation tests delivered such strong results that we are deploying these approaches across future Prostate Cancer UK fundraising event campaigns.
