Which animal in an ad drives more sign-ups for an animal welfare quiz?

This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack. The goals of this post are to: 1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...

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Let's taboo the V-word

lincolnq·2d ago·8m read

“How long have you been v*g*n?” This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers. But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...

Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level

abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸·2d ago·16m read

AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix. Cross-posted from Good Structures. Executive Summary * Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...

Recent opportunities to take action

The experiment

The campaign promoted a free quiz called World's Biggest Problems (specifically the animal welfare module), co-branded with ClearerThinking.org. I wanted to test one simple variable:

Does the animal in the image affect ad performance in terms of CTR (Click-Through Rate) and CPA (Cost Per Action)?

So I kept everything else identical:

Same platform (Meta, including Facebook and Instagram)

Same audience (US & Canada)

Same headline, body copy, and CTA (Call To Action)

The only difference was the image in the ad: a cow, a chicken, or a pig.

The original images included organization logos and colors, but I’ve converted them to black and white and removed the branding to protect the organization's identity.

The results

The chicken was the clear winner. Total spend was roughly $230 per version, making for a clean comparison.

Animal	CPA	Quiz Completions	CTR	Lead / click conversion
🐔 Chicken	$5.70	41	1.38%	15.60%
🐷 Pig	$6.51	35	1.36%	12.60%
🐄 Cow	$10.00	23	1.22%	10.60%

The table above summarizes the findings. For those interested, here is the spreadsheet with the raw data.

The chicken ad generated the most leads at the lowest cost.

What’s particularly interesting is that CTR remained relatively consistent across all versions. People clicked the chicken, pig, and cow ads at roughly the same rate (the cow was slightly lower, but not by much).

My hypothesis is that the image acts as a filter (as it happens very frequently with paid ads, especially on Facebook and Instagram). While the total number of clicks was similar, the chicken image likely attracted a higher share of people genuinely interested in engaging with the subject matter, and consequently, the type of people who actually finished the quiz.

Who is this actually useful for?

I think this is most relevant if you are promoting animal welfare content via paid Meta ads, especially at scale, where small differences in CTR and CPA might mean a huge difference in the absolute number of leads you get.

I hope this provides a helpful starting point for your own creative tests! Let me know if you have any questions.