Targeting: Who to Reach (and Who Not To)

The targeting below worked both in 2024 and in 2025. So this is a proven tactic.

🔥  Start with warm audiences

• • Petition signers/email subscribers

  • One-off and regular donors

  • Website visitors

  • Social engagers (engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page)

Every 2025 top performer leaned primarily on warm audiences. Some bundled mailing list, engagers and donors into one ad set and let it run, some were going for 1 group - 1 ad set. Here it's mainly about your budget - you have thousands of EUR? Separate groups into more ad sets so you know which are working better. Do you have less? It's better to bundle the warm audiences together.

The audiences above are your essentials. If you have capacity for more testing, then use audiences below as well.

🔍  Add cold audiences

• • 📘 Definition: Cold audience = audiences based on general interests or demographics. They’ve likely never interacted with your content before.

  • Special type of cold audiences are lookalike audiences: people on Facebook or Instagram who are similar to your existing donors. Meta analyzes what your donors have in common - like age, location, or interests - and finds other users who share those traits. You create lookalikes based on a source audience, like your donor email list. You can find more info here. Don't worry if lookalikes don't work. It's usually quite random, sometimes they work, other times not really.

  • Some orgs started working with Advantage+ targeting and it's actually worth testing it.

🎯  Meta targeting settings

• • When setting up your campaign, think about targeting as a spectrum - from the warmest audience (people who already know you) to the coldest (people who’ve never heard of you)

  • In most Meta campaigns, you’ll want to create 3–5 different target groups (defined in your ad sets) so you can test what works best. Further down the guide you can find more info on this.

  • Start with warm audiences like petition signers - these usually give you the best results. Then, if you have budget and capacity, test broader groups like lookalikes or interest-based segments.

  • The "narrow to wide" principle means:

    • Narrow = warm audiences (people who signed your petition, visited your site, or engaged with your posts)

    • Wide = cold or broad audiences (people Meta thinks might care, but who don’t know you yet)

    • You can also narrow within an ad set by layering filters (e.g. women aged 25–45 living in cities, interested in vegan food).

  • Always compare performance between these groups.

Creative & Messaging

Now, you can do variations of the proccess above. Different headlines, different photos, different animals, different graphic elements. Everything can matter.

First, some rules to follow:

📸 Build a content library – prepare a folder of usable, high-quality images and videos of animals. Think emotional appeal. Close-up. One animal. Real story. These will be the base for your content.

🎨 Make it work with what you have – don’t have quality photos? Ask partner orgs or check your archive – create graphics using older images and simple overlays ("Only 10 animal defenders left", "Donate now"). If you have content which worked for you in the last year, use the same content this year.

🎥 Video can work, but it’s hard to nail – production takes time and budget. Unless you already have powerful raw material and editing capacity, don’t make video your main bet.

🧪 Test everything – there’s no universal best format. Run at least 3–5 creative variants per target group and let the data guide you.

Now, let's see in more detail what actually worked for different orgs:

✅ STATIC VISUAL

• Graphics with an emotional photo and text on the image + social proof with donor counter + urgency is the usual way to go.

• Carousel. Had a real moment in 2025, it was best-performing creative of one organization, especially in the final urgency phase. Each card can show a different animal or a different moment in a story. Definitely worth testing.

• But it doesn't have to be only graphics. You can use just photos as these will be accompanied with headlines and primary texts in dark posts (❓What are dark posts? These are ads that you do not post on your Facebook or Instagram page - they’re shown only to targeted audiences and are build in Ads Manager. They only appear on the news feed, and are labeled as sponsored content).

• Drastic images worked usually best. Don't use images with a lot of visible blood as this can be rejected by Meta, but animals clearly in distress worked the best.

• Which animals to show? This is very specific for different organizations based on the campaign goals. If your campaign however allows showing different animals in the ads, definitely try it out and test it. For one organization, images of piglets were the most effective. In another, hens in poor living conditions outperformed all other visuals.

• Choose images with contrast, clear emotional expression, and visible context (e.g. living conditions, cages).

• Other formats to try: Carousel posts work well for storytelling - each slide can show a moment in the animal’s journey.

📝 TEXT ON IMAGE

• "I" perspective: "I am suffering every day"

• Urgency lines (“Only few days left to donate”, “Only 10 people missing”)

• Social proof: Already X people decided to help animals

• Matching offer callouts (“Your donation = 3x impact”)

• Social proof (“100+ donors joined”)

📣 PRIMARY TEXT / HEADLINES (TEXT NOT ON IMAGE)

• Empower the donor:

  • ❌ "Factory farms harm animals."

  • ❌ "Our organisation works to…"

  • ❌ "We believe that…"

  • ✅ "Your monthly gift ends their suffering."

  • ✅ "You have the power to save lives."

  • ✅ "Become a defender of animals."

  • ✅ "Join 621 heroes."

• Short intro, then quick CTA: “You can stop this suffering. Donate now.”

• If testing longer copy, keep it focused on why now and why you. It's good to build on the story already in the text on image, for example when using single animal's voice in first person ("I was born in suffering and this is my story...").

🎥 VIDEOS

• Only worked well when:

  • Emotionally strong scenes (e.g. inside factory farms)

  • Short and punchy (under 30 seconds)

• Doesn’t have to be high production. A simple 10-second phone video can work if it shows something emotional or urgent.

• Video example: someone from your organisation (e.g. campaigner, director) talking directly to the camera with cuts back to animal footage.

🐴 WHICH ANIMALS WORK

Young animals usually outperform. Piglets, calves, chicks, lambs. Across 2025:

• Piglets: strong in LT, CZ.

• Chicks / hens: strong in UK, DE, CZ, LT.

• Calves: strong in NO (historical), LT.

• Horses: unexpectedly strong for Tušti narvai in storytelling video.

• Fur animals (foxes, mink): can work but more testing is needed, usually outperformed

🧾 MESSAGING TIPS

• Urgency drives action: countdowns, limited-time matching, end-of-year framing (“Matching ends tonight” → urgency spike).

• Social proof boosts trust: "Hundreds already donated"

• Concrete number of donors usually works "Only 10 donors missing"

• Empower the donor: use "You can help" or "Your donation changes lives."

Links to more content of different orgs can be found here.

Important note: due to Meta Ads policy changes, we were scared that a lot of our content will get rejected. None of the organisations had their content rejected however some were using less political language.

Links to more content of different orgs can be found here.

Campaign Setup & Optimization

How to structure your campaign

1️⃣ Campaign Level

• Usually it's best to use objective as “Sales” → “Conversions” → "Website donations"

• You don’t need hundreds of conversions for the Meta algorithm to "learn" - but it still helps to have a focused setup. Conversions can be expensive, especially if your budget is tight.

• If you're splitting your budget too thin across many campaigns or ad sets, you won't give any of them a fair shot to optimize.

• In low-budget or early-phase situations, it can make sense to run Traffic or Landing Page Views campaigns instead — but only if you're tracking results via UTMs and backend reporting.

• Traffic can be a solid warm-up phase to bring people to your site - followed by retargeting with conversions.

• ⚠️ Meta’s native A/B Testing tool ("Experiments") is often clunky and rigid. It locks your setup and makes changes harder. Better to test manually by duplicating ad sets or ads.

2️⃣ Ad Set Level

• Audience is defined here. Start with 2-5 ad sets (per campaign) based on different groups:

  • One-off donors

  • Petition signers

  • Website visitors

  • Lookalikes

  • Cold interests

• Budget strategy: either split your total budget between sets or use CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) on campaign level. There isn't really a better solution here as this is mainly about how much flexibility are you giving Meta alghorithm and how much control do you want to have.

3️⃣ Ad Level

• Upload 3–6 ad versions per ad set (different images, different copy, etc.)

• Too often, teams make 3 similar ads and give up. Push yourself to create at least 10 strong, clearly different ads. The good ones will stand out in testing. Ideally the more you have the better.

🎯 Goal: The structure should help you learn what audience + message + visual works - and give you room to adjust fast.

Budgeting, Testing & Scaling

Once your campaign is running, your job isn't done. How you manage the campaign daily can make the difference between success and wasted money.

Budgeting & scaling

• Don’t "set it and forget it" - monitor results every day. Scale up the ads that are performing well (they are bringing in donors at your target cost), and pause those that aren’t. A good rule of thumb is to spend at least double your target cost per donor acquisition before making decisions.

• Most donations come in the last 3–4 days of the campaign. Plan to increase your spend near the end.
  
  

How this looks in practice?

• set a realistic target cost per regular donor (for example 100 €)

• Let ad set spend roughly 2× that amount. So around 200 € per ad set with several strong creatives inside

• From this level of spend, you can already clearly see whether the ad set has potential or not, without burning your whole budget -> if ad set doesn't have any conversions when double the amount of the goal per donor is spent - it wouldn't perform well even if learning phase would be finished.

• it's IMPORTANT to not only have good creatives within the ad set but also test different target groups, because some creatives may work with broad group but wouldn't with a more narrow one and viceversa.

So how could your campaign look like?

• 1 campaign, conversion goal

• 5 ad sets --> Adv+, People with animal welfare interests, Custom audience: Engaged with our posts in last X days, Custom audience: List of your current donors, Custom audience: List of your database

• 50 EUR per day spend per ad set (SMALLER GROUP LIKE LIST OF DONORS CAN HAVE LESS DAILY SPEND, SEE THE FREQUENCY OF YOUR ADS)

• Let it run for 2 days -> that's where you will have 100 EUR per ad set spent (500 EUR totally) and see if any of the ad sets is hitting the goals

• if not --> let it run for 2 more days --> 200 EUR per ad set spent --> 1000 EUR spent totally --> ideally you have your winning ad sets and creatives now so you can scale up the winners

Seems like too big of a budget and risk? Then try this set-up:

• 1 campaign

• 3 ad sets

  • • whole database (25 EUR per day)

    • donors (10 EUR per day)

    • animal interests (25 EUR per day)

• strong creatives in each ad set (they can be the same)

• let it run for 3 days -> 180 EUR spent and you can make a decision. 

Where most donations happen

The last 3–4 days of the campaign. Plan to spend 30–40% of your total budget in the final week and prepare fresh urgency and matching creative specifically for that phase. If you treat December 30 like December 10, you will miss the biggest conversion window of the year.

What to test (and what not to)

You don’t need to test every tiny thing. Focus on testing what actually makes a difference:

• Visual type: photo vs. graphic

• Message angle: longer storytelling vs. bold short text

• Format: static image vs. video vs. carousel

Test big differences, not small tweaks. Beginners often create 3 ads that are almost the same and then conclude "ads don’t work." The more different versions you test, the more likely you'll find one that clicks.

Daily monitoring is a must

• Check your ads every day. Focus on cost per donor.

• Meta's algorithm often needs some time to learn. Give each ad or ad set enough time and budget to show potential - ideally around double your target cost per donor as mentioned above.

• If after 2–3 days of spending that budget you still see no results, pause the ad or lower its daily limit to minimum and test new creative. Big budget burns early on are rarely effective - scaling slowly based on real performance is the better move.

• Meta won't auto-fix your ads - it's up to you to monitor and adapt.

Don’t trust Meta blindly

• Meta attribution is generous towards its own results in the Ads Manger.

• Track results with your CRM or donation system through UTM.

• Clicks aren’t conversions - confirmed donors matter.
  
  

Use UTM tracking to stay in control

• Add UTM tags to all ad links.

• Track results in Google Sheets or Looker Studio.
  
  

What to measure

• Compare Meta vs. real donations.

• Segment results by audience/content variations