I was asked this recently and the answer in 5 steps is the following:

1. Run a series of reports in your Web Analytics platform to understand the best performing causes and basic demographic / intent data of your very best donors. 

2. Rank those resulting combinations of Donor Profile and Causes they donate to.

3. Create audience segments of those top performing profiles and push them into Google Ads for remarketing activation. 

4. Create a few creative options for each segment based on the content from Cause pages or donation forms on your website. 

5. Once the initial performance data starts flowing through, duplicate those retargeting campaigns and target the Look-a-Like segments of those audiences to instantly increase your reach and start attracting new high-value donors. 

Here’s how to action the above:

A successful digital marketing campaign should work as a “match-maker” between your potential donors, causes they deeply care about at a given time, and ways your organization can support those causes. The first step towards building that vehicle is understanding who already cares about your brand enough to donate. Get back to basics. This will have an enormous impact on performance in the short term, while increasing the budget available for further initiatives. 

Google Analytics can help answer core questions like: 

1. Which pages on my website have the highest Conversion Rate? (which causes my donors are donating to the most?)
2. Which pages on my website have the highest Monthly donation conversion rate? (which causes are driving my most engaged donors?)
3. Which pages on my website have the highest return rate post donation? (which causes are driving my repeat donors?)
4. What are the Affinity and In-Market segments that characterize donors donating on all of those pages the most? Are those segments different between pages? (what is the intent of my core donors?)
5. In which metro areas and zip codes do these donors live? Is it urban or rural areas? Are they donating from mobile or desktop? (what else can I learn about the environment and time when my donors are most likely to donate)

Build out a “master spreadsheet” to house the answers to these questions. 

Most teams I work with can identify 25 – 100 unique combinations of donor profiles and causes their donors care about. But focus your effort and just identify the 3 most prominent ones. I use a “potential ranking system”, and assign each segment a separate rank for a total number of donations, average donation value, and conversion rate. See the spreadsheet I created below if it helps to visualize the segmentation and ranking effort:

Next step – convert those who look like the best donors and have already been to the website within the last 30 days but haven’t donated yet. Rather than the generic “All Website Users” retargeting tactic, try the following instead:

Push “Segment Definitions” from Google Analytics as “Audiences” to a Google Ads account, and then manually create 15 options of creative (5 per segment)  that align with the identified causes. This is max no more than 2 hours of work and it helped me achieve a 3x improvement in Conversion Rate.

You can easily create these audiences in the Admin -> Audiences section of your Google Analytics property, where you can export them directly into Google Ads right after setup: 

The last step is to create look-a-like audiences off the segments in Google Ads and launch those same creatives for them. Done! This technique has helped me immediately drive tens of net-new donors per day, whatever the size or budget of the operation.