You’re probably familiar with a somewhat eerie phenomenon: You search for a product online, then see advertisements for that item later on other sites. The technology has been widely used for years by for-profit companies like Amazon.com to follow potential customers around the Internet with targeted sales pitches.
Known as remarketing, the practice is now spreading among nonprofits as well, often with great success.
Advocates of the practice say it can help make their nonprofits’ voices heard amid the cacophony of the Internet.
“It’s harder every year to get above the noise,” says Molly Brooksbank, senior director for digital engagement for the Sierra Club.
And the technology is relatively easy to implement.
It all starts with “cookies,” bits of identifying information that advertisers place on users’ computers when they visit particular sites and behave in certain ways, such as clicking on a donation page but not making a donation.
For a period of time determined by the advertiser (often 30 days), an ad created to appeal to those users will appear while they use search engines or spend time on websites that are part of an advertising network that recognizes those cookies.
To set up remarketing using Google AdWords, one of the largest online advertising networks, an organization adds a line of code to its web pages and creates lists of the types of site visitors it wants to target.
Someone who clicks on the Kars4Kids frequently asked questions page, for example, may later see an ad from the nonprofit offering answers to questions about how the program works, says Esti Landau, the group’s advertising manager. In May, Kars4Kids had more than 13,000 clicks on its retargeting ads and received more than 100 donations from those viewers.
Remarketing has raised privacy concerns, but Madeline Stanionis, creative director at M+R, a marketing agency that works with nonprofits, points out that people are able to turn off cookies on their computers. And she’s heard anecdotally that some people prefer to see relevant rather than random ads.
The Sierra Club hasn’t heard any negative feedback from its remarketing efforts, says Ms. Brooksbank. The nonprofit doesn’t have identifiable information on site visitors, so it can’t discern details about where individuals go or who sees the ads, she says.
And the cost is relatively low, she notes. The Sierra Club spends between $1,500 and $4,500 a month on remarketing.
For one campaign that began in April, she says, the organization saw a 778-percent return on investment in the first month.
“Now anyone who visits a Sierra Club donation page may see membership ads for about a month afterward on Facebook or the Google Display Network,” she said in an email.
“At any given time, we are running three or four distinct versions of [advertisements], and we refresh that every few months.”
Facebook has a remarketing tool for ads on its site that works similarly to Google AdWords but with a twist.
Once a nonprofit organization has cultivated a group of people using the Facebook remarketing tool, it can use another Facebook utility to identify “look-alike audiences” of Facebook users who have similar attributes and interests, and direct ads to them.
That’s much more precise and effective than the tools available as recently as two years ago, Ms. Stanionis says. Back then, an M+R client like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would have had to settle for searching for people who “like dogs.”
Today’s techniques bring immediately positive returns on investment to many nonprofits, Ms. Stanionis says, and the approach is relatively affordable even for small nonprofits. “The rewards are incredible,” she says.
