Insights from CBA Digital Advertising 201-In Practice Webinar, presented June 18, 2026. Watch the full webinar above, or read on for the key takeaways.
Digital Advertising 201: What Separates a Program That Works from One That Doesn’t
If your station is already running digital campaigns — some Meta ads, maybe a Google campaign, perhaps a Google Grant — you already know that having campaigns active and working are two very different things.
On June 18, we hosted Digital Advertising 201 – In Practice, the second session in CBA’s three-part June webinar series for public media professionals. The 101 session covered foundations. This one was about what you do once you’re up and running.
Here’s a look at what we covered. The full session recording is above.
Your Campaign Goal Is the Compass — And it Needs to be Set Correctly
Every campaign you run in Meta or Google has a conversion event at its core — the action you’re telling the platform to optimize for. Video views. Website visits. Email signups. Donations.
What many stations don’t realize is that the platform is, in effect, blind until it has collected enough conversion events to understand who it’s looking for. Choose the wrong event — or a high-bar event like donations before you’ve built any audience data — and the platform has nothing to learn from. The result is an expensive campaign chasing signals that don’t exist yet.
The right conversion goal at the right stage of a program changes dramatically depending on where you are. And getting that decision right — or wrong — shapes everything that comes after.
“The conversion event is the compass of where your campaigns are going. If you start with video views, the algorithm learns who watches. Then you can retarget those viewers for a second campaign with a harder ask. That’s how you build the funnel.”
A Funnel Is Not One Campaign
This is where we see a lot of stations stuck. They’re running ads — but they’re running one type of ad, aimed at one outcome, at an audience that isn’t ready for it.
An effective digital program runs at least three campaign types simultaneously, each designed for a different stage of the donor relationship: awareness campaigns that introduce your station to people who’ve never heard of you, engagement campaigns that deepen the relationship with people who have, and fundraising campaigns that make the ask — but only to people who’ve been through the first two stages.
The key word there is simultaneously. These campaigns build on each other. Running a fundraising campaign without the upstream stages is a bit like asking someone on a first date if they’d like to meet your parents. The answer is usually no.
“A lot of times, organizations get nervous about awareness campaigns because they don’t see revenue from them right away. But it’s important to remember: even though our ultimate goal is to raise money, we have to make those deposits first. The judgment of these campaigns can’t only be on the end result — it has to be on what they’re actually designed to do.”
Retargeting: Reaching the Right People at the Right Moment
Retargeting — serving ads specifically to people who have already engaged with your content in some way — is one of the most cost-effective tools available to public media stations. It’s also one of the most underused.
The reason it works is straightforward: the second time someone hears from you is almost always more effective than the first. Research consistently shows it takes 14 or more meaningful touchpoints before most donors give — and that number includes every channel, not just digital. The email. The direct mail piece. The station sign they drove past. The Facebook ad they scrolled past twice before pausing.
Done well, a retargeting strategy can guide a prospect from initial awareness through genuine interest and all the way to a gift — without any single ad doing too much heavy lifting. Done poorly, it means showing the same message to everyone regardless of where they are in their relationship with your station.
The difference between those two outcomes is strategy. It’s knowing which audiences to build, which messages to serve at which stages, and how to sequence the whole thing into something that feels — to the person on the other end — less like advertising and more like a natural progression.
Attribution: Why the Numbers Are More Complicated Than They Look
Here’s a scenario that happens in almost every multi-channel program: Meta reports that it drove a conversion. Google reports that it drove the same conversion. Your email platform may claim it too. They’re all technically correct — and that’s exactly the problem.
Attribution in digital fundraising is genuinely hard, and the difficulty has grown alongside privacy changes, cross-device behavior, and the increasing role of AI in how platforms track and model conversions. What looks like a clean report from any single platform is almost always a partial picture.
Understanding how to read attribution data — what each platform is actually measuring, where the gaps are, and what your analytics platform reveals that the ad platforms won’t — is one of the most valuable skills a digital fundraising team can develop. It’s also one of the most counterintuitive.
We spent significant time on this in the session. The short version: stop looking for one channel to crown as the winner. Start understanding the path.
Budget Discipline: One Number Most Stations Aren’t Running
Before we wrapped the session, we talked through one of the most practical — and most overlooked — principles in digital budget management.
When you’re allocating a digital advertising budget, the instinct is to think in totals: we have $10,000 for this campaign. But the number that actually determines whether a campaign can work isn’t the total. It’s the daily spend per platform.
Divide $10,000 across three platforms over 90 days and you’re at roughly $37 per day each. Depending on your audience size and competitive landscape, that may be more than enough — or it may be far too thin to generate the volume of impressions and conversion events your campaigns need to learn and optimize. The math is simple. The implications are significant.
Watch the Full Session
The topics above are a starting point. The full 201 session goes considerably deeper — into the specific mechanics of how funnels are built and sequenced, how audience segments are constructed and matched, how to read attribution data across platforms, and how to diagnose campaigns that aren’t performing the way they should.
More in the CBA Digital Advertising Webinar Series
101 – Foundations
Already running some campaigns? We’ll show you how to choose the right platforms, build better audiences, and measure what’s actually working.
Check Out the 101 – Foundations Recording & Recap
301 – Advanced | Thursday, June 25
Ready to go further? Sophisticated strategies, emerging channels, and how a smart multi-platform approach drives growth.