RSPCA achieves a 71.5% increase in ROI

At the beginning of 2020, the RSPCA faced two key challenges: increasing donations despite restricted advertising budgets, and addressing a shortfall in digital skills.

The charity needed to grow revenue from its existing audience while building the internal capability to run ongoing experimentation.

Towards the end of 2020, the RSPCA’s Digital and Fundraising Team requested our support for a CRO project with the following aims:

• Kick-off a programme of high-velocity A/B tests

• Train the marketing team to bring CRO in-house

• Increase long-term revenue through optimisation

RSPCA required a partner that could deliver immediate performance improvements while also developing their team’s CRO maturity.

To kick off the project, we implemented Google Optimize 360. Our Analytics and Data team performed a full Google Analytics audit on the RSPCA website, reconfiguring goals and events and updating tags to improve data hygiene.

By integrating Optimize 360 with the RSPCA's existing Google Analytics platform, we could analyse each test from several angles.

Next, our CRO specialists worked with RSPCA staff to establish a backlog of A/B test hypotheses. These concepts drew from quantitative and UX analysis and included insight from user testing on revenue-generating pages.

We prioritised these hypotheses using a scoring matrix and built a development roadmap to coordinate the briefing, sign-off and production of tests with internal stakeholders.

As a result of this project, between 2021 and 2022, we completed 12 A/B tests with nine winners ready for hard coding. The revenue uplift from this programme generated a ROI of over 71% above the retainer value in the first year alone.

Within 12 months, our work had produced some spectacular results:

• Growing average donation values by 8.79%

• Increasing the donation page conversion rate by 10.23%

• Improving the visibility of deeper underlying donation-type pages.

The RSPCA then in-housed their CRO activities. We provided documentation and induction materials to assist this transition and remained available to support the Society in the months after our programme concluded.