RECOGNITION FROM META

StoryCorps’ strategy and results were exceptional – and pretty universally applicable! As such, CI’s own Aly Gomez, the Consultant working with StoryCorps, has actually been featured by Meta in a video series that is being used by several different departments.

While not every business or organization has a primary goal collecting email addresses, nearly all can benefit from a robust lead collection strategy. These leads help build your accessible, target-able first-party audiences, which is increasingly important given the deprecation of cookie-based tracking across most platforms.

LEVERAGING META’S MACHINE LEARNING

StoryCorps’ cost per lead on Meta at the end of 2022 was $3.14 – and in 2023, we honed in on increasing the efficiency of these campaigns over time. By the end of 2023, the cost per lead was down to $1.82 after months of iterative optimization, including the incorporation of Multiple Text Option ads.

In early 2024, the CI team noticed StoryCorps’ cost per lead getting closer to $2, and immediately pivoted to Dynamic lead ad content, which has dropped current cost per lead down to $1.54/lead (a 15% decrease from last year’s low of $1.82, and a 50% decrease since 2022’s initial $3.14 rate). We also turned on Advantage+ Audiences, which has expanded the pool of people the ads can reach, giving Meta more opportunities to optimize targeting based on what they learn from folks who do fill out the form.

Another important factor in the 2023 success was the ongoing nature of the lead gen campaigns. This allows Meta’s machine learning to continuously optimize, and results in smarter use of dollars over time. This kind of ongoing learning and steady efficiency gain can be more challenging with one-off or stop-and-start campaigns.

ASSESSING LEAD QUALITY

A whole bunch of new email addresses on the mailing list is great – but it’s not worth much if those people aren’t staying engaged with StoryCorps. To ensure their investment in lead generation via Meta was truly paying off, StoryCorps kept an eye on this audience specifically and compared their “stickiness” with that of leads from other sources.

They found that the folks who joined their email list in 2023 through Meta were in fact less likely to unsubscribe than those who came in from elsewhere.