Nonprofit Organization

Macmillan Cancer Support

UK charity uses Meta Advantage+ sales campaigns to grow fundraiser success

Macmillan Cancer Support has spent more than 100 years helping people living with cancer. Cancer can disrupt your whole life, and it can be made worse simply because of who you are and where you live. Macmillan does whatever it takes to help everyone with cancer get the best care the UK has to offer, whoever and wherever they are. Macmillan is 98% funded by donations, so fundraising is vital to supporting people living with cancer.

Challenge

The charity wanted to grow the proceeds generated by one of its key fundraising campaigns: Brave the Shave. The popular program invites people across the UK to shave their heads in exchange for donations from friends and family. Macmillan’s goal was to improve effectiveness, driving more sign-ups at a lower cost — outperforming their business-as-usual (BAU) approach.

Solution

Macmillan and their media agency, Performics @ Zenith UK, wanted to know if Meta Advantage+ sales campaigns could outperform the organization’s BAU approach to program engagement and optimization. The AI-powered advertising solution is designed to maximize online sales by increasing efficiency through automatically applying AI across a campaign’s audience, placement and budget.

To measure Advantage+ sales campaigns against its existing strategy, Macmillan’s agency used A/B testing offered by Ads Manager, the central hub for creating, managing and analyzing Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. The A/B Testing tool, found in Experiments in Ads Manager, allows advertisers to compare two versions of an ad. Macmillan showed each ad variant to a designated segment of its audience while ensuring that no individual saw both ads. They then compared the response results to determine which version performed best.

Results

Using the Meta Ads Manager A/B Testing tool, Macmillan and Performics @ Zenith UK saw that Advantage+ sales campaigns could deliver better results than their BAU approach. The new strategy drove more sign-ups and better campaign performance at a lower cost per result (CPR). The outcome shows that Advantage+ sales campaignscan be effective for campaigns focused on a primary conversion event.

29%

Decrease in CPR

1.4x

Increase in value per pound spent

83%

Confidence level in the A/B testing results

“Brave the Shave is an important fundraising event for Macmillan. Meta Advantage+ campaigns allowed us to reach new supporters with precision, scaling our sign-ups significantly while keeping acquisition costs low. That meant we could raise more funds to support people living with cancer.”

Cara Shearer, Senior Marketing Manager

Learnings

Apply best practices early for stronger test outcomes: Before launching its A/B test, Macmillan aligned its strategy with Meta Advantage+ best practices — ensuring a stronger foundation for gaining meaningful performance insights.
Let AI optimize for results in real time: Macmillan used Advantage+ sales campaigns to automatically show the right creative to high-intent audiences, boosting campaign performance with less manual optimization.
Use A/B testing to compare strategies head-to-head: Macmillan ran a controlled A/B test to evaluate which campaign approach drove stronger engagement and conversions, giving them a clear, data-backed direction.
Turn testing into actionable insight: The A/B test didn’t just validate performance, it gave Macmillan a benchmark to optimize future campaigns with greater confidence and cost-efficiency.
Match the tool to the goal: Macmillan found that Advantage+ sales campaigns aligned perfectly with its dual goals: improving performance while reducing CPR.

Learn more about Meta Advantage+ sales campaigns.

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