Battle of the Donation Forms, Facebook Benchmarks & Cool Data Gifs

Election Data Saga, Take 10
I’ve reported before about the Trump campaign’s use of Facebook data to target voters with messages designed to appeal to their personalities. The New York Times says, yeah, it was exaggerated. Not sure if this is a big deal? Well, the Times would have you think otherwise: “At stake are not merely bragging rights, but also an emerging science that many believe could reshape American politics and commerce.”

And, in other Facebook data Trump news, this algorithm, which was designed to determine your marital status from your social posts, thinks Trump is a bachelor (surprise!).

Battle of the Donation Forms
Behave.org features an A/B test of the week and asks viewers to guess which one won. This week’s test is a donation form. Answer A has the typical suggested donation buttons; B has an open field. Which did better? Well, you have to click through and see.

Oops! New Search Pages’ Bad Data
Last week, this email talked about AMP pages, Google’s new mobile-friendly search results. Well, they are probably making a mess of your Google Analytics. Here’s Marketingland.com on that.

Nonprofits Do Case Studies Too
Although this article is filled with gobbledygook marketing speak, it’s still cool to hear how Wildlife Conversation Society used data to overhaul its digital strategy and grow its email list from 1 million to 5 million.

Round up
How journalism nonprofit The Marshall Project crunched the data for their (and the Los Angeles Times’) piece on “pay to stay” programs in the California prison system. Uber is doing shady things with their data (shocker!) to find riders who are actually undercover cops.

Advice of the Week

Benchmarks for Facebook Ads
As much as I dislike being asked for social media benchmarks (every audience is different, guys!), when it comes to ads, it’s handy for setting a budget and expectations. So here’s one Facebook advertiser sharing their average ad CPC and other stats.

Cool Visualization of the Week

Turning Data into a Gif
Lena Groeger designs interactive graphics at ProPublica, and her collection of data gifs is awesome. I absolutely love this idea. (Just click the right button to scroll through all of them).