Below, we give one example from a relevant context, illustrating (with screenshots) what choices you might make, what it would look like, and how to implement it.

See also: Facebook split-testing issues and Videos - Facebook

Getting started

"Meta Business Suite"() is the starting point of your ad campaign. If you have a Facebook Business account, you should have a "Meta Business Suite":

Next, click on "Ads manager" (See the megaphone on the left).

The next step is to select "Create a campaign" and choose an "objective"... the interface gives you some idea of what these aim for:

Budget optimization

When creating a new "Traffic campaign" ('cold traffic campaign' referenced ) there are a lot of options to help you optimize your delivery while minimizing your expenses.

You need to opt-in to these tools by ticking "create A/B test" and "Budget Optimization" on the first page of your "ad campaign manager." Since there is no downside (we would like to learn which ad design works best), we decide to opt-in to each of these.

Budget optimization is closely related to the choice of the target group. In general, the larger the target group, the cheaper it becomes to reach a certain amount of "link clicks".

Targeting the ad

Suppose we wish to create a targeted ad for a particular Facebook audience. For example, we might wish to put an ad...

• in the 'feed' of US Americans who are interested in charity or volunteering or philosophy

• giving them a link to a page encouraging them to learn about EA

We can use the "schedule and duration" function not only to automate the timing of our campaign, but also to estimate its cost. For example, we assume that we need 800 participants to click-through to start the 20 fundraisers (i.e., a rate of 2.5%).

Below, we see that FB estimates 172-497 link clicks per day for 10 Euros per day for (a different_ case.

You can specify

1. Demographics

2. Interests

3. Behaviors

"Include" seems to be the default when specifying these ... it 'expands the audience'. You can click 'narrow further' to constrain the audience.

During this process, you can see a concise statement of your choices, and the estimated audience size further up on the page:

How should we (EA, effective giving) target ads?

We have some evidence that narrower targeting helps. An obvious candidate is

Traffic choice

The next big choice is 'where do you want to drive traffic?'. You'll enter more details about the destination later.

Since we want people to click our web app, we chose "website".

Version testing

We may have several versions of the ad we want to try out, and we want Facebook to iterate towards the one that is more successful using their algorithm. Ideally, we would like to learn as much as we can about 'which ads perform better on which audiences'.

We can set up Facebook's ("meta") algorithm to dynamically optimize 'over which will get the most clicks.'

Where do we actually specify, enter, and style our ad content?

Finally, we have to decide which delivery we want to optimize.

We may want the ad that gets the most "conversions traffic to our page". Therefore, we choose the option "link clicks".

However, we might instead want FB to optimize the ad presentation in terms of which ad not just leads to the most 'clickthroughs' but leads to the most "conversions" or some other action taken on our page To do that we need to set up a "meta pixel". See

Cost and cost controls

DR: In my past experience, you ended up paying Facebook based on the number of "clicks" you got not simply on how long your ad was up. But it's probably a combination of these, and there are probably different pricing plans. You can tell Facebook to put a limit on either of these do not go "over budget". Facebook will aim to spend your entire budget and get the most link clicks using the lowest cost bid strategy.

Currently EUR 315 is the max for new users ... but for our present pilot we may want less than this (check: how much do we expect to pay for 800 clicks, let's split this up into ... first 100 clicks, next 300 clicks,.. to see if its going OK )

Designing your ad

Finally, you enter the third and last page of the ad creation process. Here you have to verify your ID and Facebook page and choose the actual design of your ad versions. ["of which the most important one is whether you want to have a video or single image." (?) ]

The last step before publication is to specify the destination for your campaign.

We chose a website and simply copy the URL into the mask to make sure the ad is linking people to the right destination.

Payment (and monitoring)

Optimizing and pixels

Setting up the pixel

The pixel includes content from Facebook that needs to be integrated into your website/page of interest. (To do: link instructions for this).

Adding pixel 'events' to your web page

One simple way of doing this: "Events setup tool"

Once you are in the ads manager for an ad, go to the 'Events Manager':

"Add events", choose "from the pixel"

"Events setup tool"

Put the URL for your site in and 'Open website'

As seen below, this opens our page, and show what things have already been associated with a Pixel. Here the "create fundraiser" button on this page has been associated with a button on this page with the "Initiate Checkout". (We use default names Facebook is familiar with, even though there is no 'checkout' in this case).

("Facebook Pixel Helper" extension in Chromium might be helping here, but I'm not sure how).

"Track new button" lets you see what click options you could associate with a pixel.This highlights clickable things you can do this with. ('Create fundraiser' is not highlighted, probably because it's already been assigned).

For example, I could click 'who are we' on a page and associate it with 'view content'

I could 'add a value' to this, if it makes sense.

After this 'finish setup' ... it gives you the chance to see what you have asked it to do and confirm or cancel it.

Using the pixel events for Facebook ad optimization

Once you have nice pixels set up, you can use this in helping Facebook decide which versions of ads to serve, which audiences to serve them to, etc. You set up your ad, define an objective etc...

Define your goal as 'conversion', and define what 'conversion' corresponds to in terms of pixels:

Here we're choosing 'initiate checkout', which we defined as clicking on a 'create fundraiser' button on the first page of our site (early in the funnel)

The warning below might not matter as we

Facebook tracks people for a while. So in optimizing, you can change 'what time period of outcomes it attributes to which (version of the ad)':

I assume that the same 'conversions' target defined above is used in optimizing the 'dynamic creative' if you turn that on.

Doing and funding ads

Video ads/Best-practice guidelines

Targeted ad on FB, with variations: setup (next subsection: Collecting outcome data)

Other marketing/implementation resources

• : Design and implementation of marketing; EA aligned and savvy.

  • See

• JS Winchell offers advice on how to do this right and leverage certain grants and do good marketing.

Opinion: Digital marketing is under-utilized in EA: JS Winchell Post

Videos - Facebook

Youtube seminars

Email from JS:

The YouTube team holds quarterly workshops to explain how best to build and use your organic (not paid) YouTube channel. Based on previous discussions it sounds like this is something that might be of interest to your orgs.

Note: This is aimed at beauty and fashion brands but I'd imagine 80% of it would apply to GWWC/80k/1ftw

Agenda for the workshop:

• Explain why YouTube is crucial for your brand identity

• How to claim your narrative on this platform

• Reach and engage new and existing audiences through content

Register your interest for future workshops .

Cost of ads: benchmarks

Reinstein, FB ads tied to fundraisers.

My costs have been:\

• about $0.01 per impression

• about $0.50 - $1.20 per click

Targeting at Universities ... Facebook's estimates

The estimated cost per impression (?‘reach’) and per click varies with the targeted audience. In general, narrower is estimated to be more costly. I think this is about ‘a larger audience allows FB to serve the ads to a larger number of people who tend to be click-happy’ Some data points:

• For Oxford, ‘In College’, living in the UK: They claim we will get 4-18 clicks per day for $50 per day over 2 days (29 Mar 2022 check on FB ads manager)

• If I put in Birmingham instead I get a fairly similar figure.

• If I remove the only-one-university narrowing, it gets cheaper. They claim I’ll be able to get 86-250 clicks per day for the same cost …

Meta allies

Research advancement manager:

EA groups (employees) within Meta

If you run a lot of ads FB will assign you external consultant helpers. They are somewhat helpful, but they don't seem to know everything.

FB tips for charities/fundraisers

28 Nov 2022, Zoroob:

Meta has just released a recorded series of videos () to help non-profit organizations meet their year-end fundraising goals. Some of these materials may also be helpful for researchers using Meta ads (e.g., materials on designing effective ad creatives), so I am passing the info along. Blurb below.

The three-part series of virtual webinars provides nonprofits with advertising training and best practices around how to use Meta technologies to further their missions:

: Get started with Meta advertising with our today.

The session also features that enable donation transactions within the Facebook app.

: Learn what great nonprofit creative can look like with best practices from Meta.

Consider saving our to learn more about the five key creative considerations that apply to cause-driven campaigns.

: Introduce yourself to measurement best practices on Facebook and Instagram! Afterwards, explore split testing, lift measurement, and the experiments tool, on our

Other links and issues

(collecting data)

Seems particularly useful but access is limited; they hope to make it more generally available some thing like mid- spring 2023.

Google ads grants

JS Winchell presentation:

Tomasik (2014) post

General grants -- see "" section