case study
Achieving 61% Conversion Rate for AARP's Retirement Campaign
AARP, the Ad Council, and Llama Lead Gen collaborated on a financial planning campaign on Facebook/Instagram (Meta Ads) to educate Americans 40+ on the steps to get to plan for retirement. With a goal of conversion, we needed to drive users from the Meta platforms to a landing page with a quiz complete, resulting in a personalized financial plan. The campaign wrapped with an 11% CTR, 61% Conversion Rate, and 6,200 Americans completing their retirement quiz.
#non-profit
#insurance
#retirement
#financial
#financialmarketingagency
Introduction
America is facing a looming retirement savings crisis, with 7 in 10 Americans approaching retirement having less than a year’s income saved. With this fact in mind, the Ad Council and AARP partnered with Llama Lead Gen to launch the “This is Pretirement” initiative in order to tackle this issue with awareness and education about prepping during one’s pre-retirement years.
AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to advocating for and empowering Americans age 50 and older. With a large portion of Americans close to retirement feeling unprepared to go into this next phase of their life, AARP launched the Pre-Retirement campaign to help them start thinking about retirement earlier and provide resources to empower them for success.
As a part of this campaign, an online quiz was created to help users better understand where they stand on their own journey toward saving up for retirement by simplifying the steps to get there. The object of this campaign is to drive completed quizzes for the users to receive their personalized savings plan. The Pre-Retirement website features a wide range of tangible steps such as enrolling in a 401K or IRA and how to start paying off debts to help our audience start on their journey to a secure retirement.
Llama Lead Gen is incredibly savvy in managing our campaigns from start to finish. What I find most impressive is their agility, quickness to respond, and the feeling that they were our teammates through and through. The wrap-up reports they provide are exceptional. I look forward to working with Llama Lead Gen in the future.
Laurie Keith
VP of Media, Social & Emerging @ Ad Council
The Challenge
AARP and Ad Council came to Llama Lead Gen to help refine its media strategy around the Pre-Retirement campaign. They wanted to maximize their budget and amplify their messaging against qualified users who are within the pre-retirement age group (A40-60) and who would find this information beneficial.
One key challenge of the campaign was the multi-step nature in order to achieve our conversion goal of “quiz complete” on the landing page. The user needs to be guided from the Meta ad that they see on Facebook/Instagram to then click into the AARP landing page before finally completing the full flow of the quiz in order to get their personalized financial savings plan. Due to this, it was crucial for our team to hone in on finding highly qualified users who are heavily invested in their financial planning to take the time to complete this multi-step process.
The Ad Council and AARP were looking to partner with Llama Lead Gen to solidify their approach. With the past success of campaigns between Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen, we were able to leverage this existing trust and relationship to collaborate on a plan to spread the message about preparing for retirement.
Llama Lead Gen's pace of being able to start a project is impressive. They are able to jump in and reach out to our team and get the information they need in order to get things moving quickly!
Felicia Carmichael
Director of Media, Social and Emerging @ Ad Council
Strategy
Given AARP’s goal to empower more Americans between ages 40-60 to start planning for their retirement, Llama Lead Gen chose to focus on Facebook and Instagram (Meta) for its ability to provide AARP’s message with a massive reach while tapping into advanced targeting capabilities.
Across Meta, we are able to leverage a mix of 3rd party and platform interest and behavioral information to ensure AARP reaches the most qualified users who are the most likely to complete the online quiz. The campaign is specifically aimed at A40-60 with a household income (HHI) between $40-99k. Llama Lead Gen honed in on a select group of key audiences who fit this profile.
We reached users who are employed, have an interest in financial planning, or are owners of a 401K as these are likely users who are already thinking about their financial future and would be receptive to additional information.
Lastly, we retargeted those who have visited the Pre-Retirement website as well as users who share similarities with current site visitors. From a budget strategy perspective, budgets were allocated against each audience group based on their potential reach and size on Facebook and Instagram (Meta). We allocated more budget against Meta behavioral and interest targeting (Employed and Financial Planning Interest) as historically we have seen more efficient CPCs from these types of audiences.
Financial planning around retirement can be a daunting topic for most, so Llama Lead Gen also partnered with the Ad Council team to come up with ad copy messaging that would resonate with this audience. The messaging and creative assets within this campaign aimed at simplifying this topic to make it feel more attainable for our audience. A mix of video and static assets was leveraged to allow platform optimization flexibility. With video assets that allow for the message to be conveyed fully in a more engaging manner, we also mixed in static assets that are quick and to the point in order to guide our audience to the landing page.
Solution & Implementation
After gaining a full understanding of the strategy and goals of this campaign, we started by collaborating with the Ad Council and AARP to align on finalizing ad copy for the ads as well as ensure that the target audiences that we have selected resonate. The Llama Lead Gen team took full ownership of the execution of the campaign set up within the Meta Ads platform.
The campaign was launched after careful QA to ensure that our campaigns, audiences, and ads were set up properly. Our team monitored the performance daily and adjusted the budget accordingly based on what ads and audiences were performing well. Shifting dollars into more efficient audiences and ads.
I’m most impressed by how proactive the Llama Lead Gen team is with managing our campaigns. Deliverables are always on time (with little to no edits needed); recommendations on how to improve our campaigns are expected. It’s truly a breath of fresh air to have partners who are always on top of everything. I also find it very inspiring how involved each member of the team is when it comes to both large and small tasks.
rasheia harris
Digital Media Director @ Ad Council
Performance & Data
The KPI of this campaign was to drive conversions (completed quizzes) on the landing page. Mid-funnel KPIs such as clickthrough rates and landing page views provided additional data points to gauge the success of each audience/creative to guide optimization decisions. Throughout the campaign we were able to drive a total of 6,210 quiz completes at an average cost-per conversion of $24.
Tracking the flow of users through a multi-step process, we saw that out of the 43K users who clicked through to the ads, about a quarter of those users got to the landing page and from there nearly half of those landing page views converted to result in a “completed quiz”. This is a great indication of the seamlessness of the landing page experience for these users as we see such high conversion once they got to the website.
43,619
Clicks
10,199
Landing Page Views (23% from Clicks)
6,210
Quiz Completions (61% from LPV, 14% from Clicks)
Moving Forward
With so many Americans close to retirement age feeling insecure about their financial standing, Ad Council, Llama Lead Gen, and AARP set out to empower them with tactical steps and information to help them start planning early. By leveraging Meta, a platform with a significant reach and advanced targeting capabilities, we were able to help 6,210 Americans aged 40-60 get a personalized plan toward a secure retirement. Additionally, the campaign received 7 million impressions, 43K clicks, and 10K views on the landing page. The ads also generated discussions amongst our audience, with our top-performing creative receiving 300+ shares.
There were many learnings throughout the campaign. We noted that the majority of quizzes were completed by those in the 55-60 age group, this made sense as they are the group closest to retirement therefore this is more top of mind. However, the surprising factor is that it is specifically women who made up the majority of the quizzes completed. Shortly after launching the campaign, we noted that the static image creative drove our audiences to the website most efficiently.
Coming out of the campaign, there were many future recommendations based on our learnings from a creative perspective. With the majority of the conversions coming from women 55-60, we recommended that future iterations of the campaign’s creatives should feature more women in this age group. We also recommended creating additional static assets as we saw that they were able to more effectively drive conversions on the Pre-Retirement landing page.
