click-through rates

Online advertising metrics basics

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You may be saying “Mr. Direct to Donor, why would I read this?  My online advertising budget is limited to whatever I can find between the couch cushions.”

First, please call me Nick.  Mister Direct to Donor is my dad (actually, Dr. Direct to Donor, DDS, but that’s another thing).

Second, knowledge of the basic online advertising metrics, along with a deep knowledge of what you are willing to pay for each type of constituent or click, can help you bootstrap an online marketing budget by making investments that will pay off in shorter timeframes that you can get offline (usually).

So, first things first.  Online advertising is dominated by CP_s.  The CP stands for “cost per” and the _ can be filled in by C for click, A for acquisition, or M for thousand.

(Yes, I know.  It should be “T is for a thousand.”  However, youmille-feuille_franc3a7ais_1 can do that most American of things — blame the French — for this one.  M technically stands for mille, which is French for one thousand.  You may have encountered this in the dessert mille-feuille, which is French for a cake of a thousand sheets, or in the card game Mille Bourne, which is based on being chased by a thousand angry Matt Damons.)

The big question for advertising is “one thousand what?”.  In this case of CPM, it’s impressions.  You are paying whatever amount (the average is $3-4 right now) for one thousand people to see your ads.  It’s basically like every other advertisement you’ve ever seen (pre-Internet) where you buy a magazine ad from a rate card or TV ads based on how many people are watching.

With this new thing called the Internet, however, you don’t need to pay this way in almost any case.  You can measure at a greater level of interaction, so most advertisers will allow you to pay per click, especially in the areas of greatest interest to we nonprofit marketers like search engine listings, remarketing, and co-targeting.

But even that is not enough control for some, who wish to pay to acquire a donor (or constituent) and that’s where cost-per-acquisition comes in.  This is not as popular as CPC, as the publisher of the ad is dependent on you to convert the donation or registration, but has maximum advantage for you as an advertiser.

What you are buying in each successive step closer to the act that you want to achieve (usually donation) is certainty.  With CPA (also CTA or cost to acquire), you know exactly how much you are going to pay for a constituent; with CPC, you know how much you are going to pay, assuming this batch of people converts like the last batch; with CPM, you are spraying and praying other than your front-end targeting model.

The beauty of this level of control is that it can be used to justify your budget.  There are vendors who will run CPA campaigns where they get all of the initial donations from a donor.  Assuming they are reputable, these can be of great value for you, because you then get to keep the second and subsequent donations (that you will get because of your excellent onboarding and stewardship process).  Others will charge a flat CPA; if your average gift is usually over that CPA, you can pull in even these first donations at a profit.  Some are even doing this for monthly donors, where you can calculate a payout and logical lifetime value.

Once you have those running, you now have the budget (because of your additional net revenue) to look at CPC ads.  If you have your donation forms running and effectively tested, you should be able to net money on these as well, by targeting well and testing various ad copy/designs and offers.

So use your knowledge of ads to help bring in some extra money that can be used for… more ads (if profitable)!

Online advertising metrics basics

Web metric basics

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We talked yesterday about email metrics; now it’s Web site metrics’ turn.

We start here with the most generic of all online metrics: traffic.  No less an authority that FiveThirtyEight says that we still don’t know how to measure Web traffic. The difference is how unique visitors are measured versus total visits.  If you are an advertiser, you want to make sure the 1,000,000 visits a person is claiming to her/his site aren’t just a guy hitting reload over and over again.  This can be done by cookie, by IP address.  

My advice on this is sacrilegious for a metrics guy: don’t worry too much about it as long as you are using a consistent system for measurement.  I’ve used mainly Google Analytics for this, because it’s free, but any system will have its own way of determining this.

From this number, you can derive revenue per visitor by simply dividing your annual online revenues by your number of visitors to determine revenue per visitor.  This is a nice benchmark because you can see what all of your optimization efforts add up to; everything you do to try to get someone to a donation page, what you do to convert them, your average gift tweaking, the value you derive from your email list — all of it adds up to revenue per visitor.

But more than that, revenue per visitor also allows you to see what you are willing to invest to get someone to your site.  Let’s say your revenue per visitor is right at the M+R Benchmarks Report 2016 average of $.65 per visitor.  If the average blog post you do results in an extra 1000 visitors to your site, you should in theory be willing to pay up to $650 to write, deliver, and market that blog post (because revenue per visitor is an annual figure, so acquiring someone at cost that you can then engage in the future is a beautiful thing).

I say in theory because revenue per visitor varies based on the type of content or interaction.  I’ll talk about this at the end because we need to go through the other metrics to break this down more efficiently.

A close cousin to revenue per visitor is site donation conversion rate, or how many of the people who come to your site donate.  Instead of dividing your annual online revenues by visitors, you’ll divide the number of donations by visitors.  This is one of two key inputs to revenue per visitor (the other being average gift) and is a good way of testing whether wholesale changes to your site are helping encourage people to give.  

I recently worked with someone who put a thin banner at the top of their site encouraging donation.  He was disheartened because less than half a percent of the people who came to the site clicked on the banner.  I asked him if the total clicks were additive to donation clicks (that is, they represented people who wouldn’t have clicked to donate otherwise) or substitutive (that is, total donation clicks didn’t go up; they just moved from another donate button to this bar).  We were able to tell not only because of the donation clicks went up over baseline, but because the site donation conversation rate went up.  Now we are working on a strategy to test this bar throughout the site and with different context-specific asks.

Drilling down from the site donation conversion rate is the page donation conversion rate.  This is people who donate to a donation page divided by visitors to your donation page.  It’s a standard measure of the quality of your donation page.  This and average donation on a donation page combine to create the revenue per page.  

Revenue per page is not only a good way of measuring which donation form is better — it’s a good way of getting a feel for the valuable content on your site.  See how many of the people who come to a page end up donating directly from the page (you can do sophisticated attribution models to determine this — going directly to a donation is a quick and dirty way of doing it) and what their average gift is.  Divide that by the number of visitors you have to that page and you can see what the revenue per page is on a non-donation page as well.

This is great information to have.  Let’s say the value of a visitor to your home page is 10 cents, to a program page is 20 cents, and to an advocacy page is 40 cents.  This helps you make decisions about your content.  Do you need better calls to action on your program page?  What should be your next home page feature? (Answer: probably something about advocacy)  Where should you direct the bulk of your Google Grant traffic?  Etc.

However, there is one thing missing from all of this.  You will note that I said site donation conversion rate and page donation conversion rate.  Usually metrics folks won’t put donation in there — it’s implied.

But there’s another conversion rate that’s vitally important and that’s conversion to a constituent.  Remember that the conversion to donation process often is a series of smaller steps.  You need constituents who subscribe to your email newsletter, volunteer for your activities, and read your social media posts (OK, maybe not that last one).  A person has given you permission to talk to them is a valuable thing and should not be forgotten about.

So there’s also a site constituent conversion rate and page constituent  conversion rate — how good are your pages at capturing people.  Only when you have this to add to your revenue per page do you have a true measure of page quality.

But wait!  How do you add people converted to revenue?

That’s the topic for tomorrow as we discuss how to value a constituent.

Web metric basics

Email metric basics

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Every field does its best to be impenetrable to outsiders and the world of online testing is no different.  We measure KPIs instead of “important things.” The differences among CPA, CPC, CPM, CPR, CTA, CTR, and CTOR are all important (for example, one of these can save your life, but isn’t an online metric) and there are TLAs* that I haven’t even talked about.

So this week I want to look at measuring online successes (and not-yet-successes), but first, we need to get our terms straight so we know what we are trying to impact, starting with email metrics.

For me, this is easiest picturing the steps that would go from email to action.  An email is:

  • Sent
  • Delivered
  • Opened
  • Clicked upon (or unsubscribed from)
  • Responsible for a completed action

Almost all of the other important metrics are ratios of the number of people who did this (or the number of unique people who did this — unique meaning the number of people who did something, not the number of total times something was done.  For example, 1000 people clicking on a link once and one person clicking on a link 1000 times will have the same click-through rate, but very different unique click-through rates).

The most important of these ratios are:

Delivery rate: emails delivered divided by emails sent.  This is inexact, as different email providers provide different levels of data back to you as to whether an email was a hard bounce (email permanently not delivered) or soft bounce (temporary deliver issues like full email box or email message too large).  But as long as you are using the same email program to send your emails, you will have consistent baselines and be able to assess whether it’s getting better or worse.

Open rate: emails opened divided by emails sent.  There are a couple minor problems with this.  First, opens can’t be calculated on text emails.  That is, only HTML emails have the tracking to determine whether they were opened or not.  Second, some email clients allow people to skim the contents of an email in a preview pane and count it as an open.  Third, some email clients don’t count an open as an open (even if the person interacts with the message) if it is only in a preview pane.  So it’s an inexact science.

However, open rates are still a good, but not perfect, measure for testing the big three things that a person sees before they open a message:

Why isn’t it a perfect measure?  Because it’s hackable.  Let’s say your control subject line is “Here’s how your gift saved a life.”  If you test the subject line “Your gift just won you a Porsche,” it might win on open rate, but you’ve lied to your donor (unless you have an astounding back-end premium program).  That will spike your unsubscribe rate and lower your click-throughs**.

So you probably want to look at this in combination with click-through rates (CTR).  This is another one of those metric pairs that prevent you from cheating the system that I love so much.  Click-through rate is number of people who clicked (assuming you are using unique click-through rate) by divided by emails sent.  It’s a good way of measuring how well your content gets people to (start to) take action.

Another good way to look at how your email content performs is click-to-open rate (CTOR).  This is number of people who clicked (assuming you are using unique CTOR) by divided by opens.  As you might guess, it fits very nicely with the previous two metrics.  Let’s say two emails both had 1% click-through rates.  One of them might have had a 20% open rate and a 5% click-to-open rate; the other might have had a 5% open rate and a 20% click-to-open rate.  In this case, you’d want to see if you could take the subject, sender, and pre-header of email #1 and combined it with the body copy of email #2.

You also need to look at unsubscribe rate (number of unsubscribes divided by number of emails sent), but not as much as many would think. If it starts going too high, you may want to worry about how you are acquiring your subscribers; likewise, it’s good to compare unsubscribe rates across types of constituents (that is, do your advocacy supporters unsubscribe faster than your white paper downloaders?  Perhaps it’s time for more segmentation and better advocacy content).  But don’t let it drive the boat.

Finally, you want to look at conversion rate: those who took the action divided by those who clicked through.  While not strictly an email metric, I include it here because a person could try the same underhanded tactic with the Porsche to boost click-through rates (to bait and switch the clicker) and because it’s so vital to be measuring and optimizing against.

But that’s another post.

If you want to benchmark your metrics, I strongly recommend M+R’s benchmarks study here.  And please sign up for my free newsletter here.  We have strong metrics (40% open rates and 8% click-throughs) so others are (hopefully) finding it to be useful nonprofit direct marketing content.
* Three-letter acronyms

** Also, it’s wrong.  Don’t do it.

Email metric basics

Using your real estate better: preheaders

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You have your subject line science down — you do an A/B test in the morning and you roll out with the test in the afternoon.  You ask questions to entice someone to open.  You create urgency.  And you are still seeing your open rates going down.

Maybe it’s that right after your subject line, people see “To view this email in your browser, click here” instead something of interest.

Gone are the days where the subject line was all that mattered.  The first lines of your email now matter, because in many email clients, they are shown alongside the subject line.  This verbiage is called the preheader and it’s valuable real estate that many otherwise really strong marketers ignore.  For example, here are my last few emails from Home Depot as I write this:

home depot

If you thought that these were the first emails I ran to open, you would be incorrect.

Not only to preheaders show up in this way, but they also travel with the subject line to show up in the lower-right corners of Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook accounts.  Additionally, the preheader can entice someone to read the email (gasp!), not just open it.

So what do you want to do with this to draw your readers in?  Some ideas:

Keep it relatively short.  Not subject line short, but make sure that it gets your point across in the first 75 characters or so, so mobile email clients will show what you want shown.

Tag team with your subject line.  My best email newsletter open and click performance was on the same email.  (Hey, if you thought we were getting through a post on email pre-headers without me plugging that you can sign up for my free weekly e-newsletter, which gives the story version of the week’s blog posts plus super secret extra benefits, you were sorely mistaken.)

The subject line was “Lead gifts and priming and men, oh my.”  The pre-header was “And the details on how social proof works in direct marketing and the power of hedonic good comparisons, but that made for a really long subject line…”

If you have only 75 characters, you get the gist of what the email is going to be about.  And if you have more, it’s a paired attempt at humor.  This had an 80%+ open rate and 40%+ click-through rate.

Another good tactic here is to ask a question in the subject line that you begin to answer in the pre-header.

Personalize.  A pre-header can start with “Dear Mary,”.  (This, of course, only works if the recipient’s name is Mary.  If it’s Vlad, you may be in trouble.)  Anyway, this pre-header establishes that you know the person’s name.  This, sadly, differentiates it from many other emails that don’t know your name, so it’s more likely to get opened.

Tell them what’s in the tin.  If you have a video in your email that thanks the person for being a supporter, your preheader may not have to be any fancier than something like “Watch a thank-you video from our president.”  If you don’t have content that is worthy of being in the pre-header, rewrite the email.

Make the call-to-action.  Not “Donate now!”  I haven’t tested that as the beginning of a pre-header only because I anticipate it would go down in flames.  But “Today, you can save a life with one minute and two clicks.” does a nice tease of the content as well as creating urgency and timeliness.

So make sure you are testing this valuable real estate.  And when you do get that email from someone who just has their logo’s alt text as the pre-header, forward them this email if you like the organization (and if you don’t, prepare to steal their donors).

Using your real estate better: preheaders