Digital Growth Engine for GOD TV

When GOD TV approached Arkyard in 2025, they weren’t looking for a paid media agency. They were looking for a strategic partner who could build and continuously optimise the full digital system needed to turn impressions into viewers and viewers into donors. Since partnering with Arkyard, Q1 2026 paid social donations and VOD viewers are both up 250% year-on-year, and with US expansion underway, the biggest chapter is still ahead.

The brief

GOD TV came to Arkyard in the summer of 2025 with three bold, specific goals and a clear-eyed recognition that their existing digital capability wasn’t built to deliver them.

Their objectives were:

• Grow to 35,000 active donors to sustainably fund their global mission
• Reach 5 million monthly VOD viewers across their content platform
• Drive 1 million monthly active users on the GOD TV app

At the time, parts of their digital presence were being managed in-house, but there were no donor acquisition campaigns running at all, no tracking infrastructure to measure what was working, and no joined-up strategy connecting activity across channels to their bigger goals.

GOD TV knew that reaching a billion people required digital to work harder and more systemically than it ever had. What they needed wasn’t more tasks completed. They needed a partner who could build the system.

The approach

Rather than responding to the brief with a menu of services, we proposed a growth partnership built around what we call the Digital Growth Engine.

The principle is straightforward: instead of buying siloed services, paid media here, a landing page there, GOD TV would have a single integrated partner with responsibility for optimising the entire digital funnel across all three strategic goals.

We started work in August 2025. The immediate priority was clear – get donor acquisition activity live from scratch. But getting campaigns live was only the starting point.

How the engine works

For each goal, we map and audit every touchpoint in the journey, from the first moment someone sees an ad through to the completed action: a donation made, a video watched, an app downloaded.

We measure each stage against industry benchmarks and our own data from comparable clients. This tells us not just how things are performing, but where the single biggest constraint is sitting in the funnel at any given time.

We then direct our collective resource across strategy, media buying, conversion optimisation, creative and data at that constraint. Fix it, find the next one, repeat.

This is the fundamental difference between the engine model and traditional service buying. If GOD TV had simply purchased a paid media retainer, our scope would have begun and ended with the ads. The conversion problem we discovered would never have been within our remit to find, let alone fix. With the engine model, the entire funnel is our responsibility.

Fixing the constraint: turning a 2% conversion rate into 10%

With donor acquisition campaigns live, our audit quickly revealed that conversion rate was the critical weak point. Using benchmarks from similar clients, it was clear performance was significantly below where it should be. We dug into why.

The donation widget, powered by a third-party platform, was taking over 15 seconds to load. For users arriving from a paid ad ready to give, that delay was quietly killing the campaign.

We ran an A/B test that made the scale of the problem undeniable: a GOD TV page with an instant-open donation modal converted at 10.58%. The standard third-party campaign page converted at 2.17%. We rebuilt the experience so the modal loaded immediately.

No amount of media buying optimisation could have delivered that kind of step-change. The lever wasn’t in the ads. It was in the journey, and the engine is what put it in our hands to fix.

Changing the frame: from views to genuine attention

For the VOD stream, Arkyard’s recommendation from day one was to stop optimising for views and start optimising for minutes viewed. This is a good example of the engine model prompting us to challenge the brief, not just execute it.

Paid media algorithms are extraordinarily good at doing precisely what you tell them to do. Optimise for views and the algorithm finds the cheapest people in the world who will trigger a view event, even if they watch for one second. GOD TV was effectively building an audience of disengaged users with no real connection to the content or the mission.

We built granular video tracking to capture actual watch time, then fed that data back to Meta and instructed the algorithm to find people who would watch for the longest. A one-hour view is substantially more valuable than a one-second view, not just as a metric, but because it represents a real person genuinely engaging with GOD TV’s message.

That depth of connection is what converts a viewer into a donor and a donor into a long-term supporter. By changing what we optimised for, we changed the quality of the audience GOD TV was building, and that compounds over time across every goal.

The results

The numbers tell a compelling story. In Q1 2026:

• Paid social donations are up 250% year-on-year, built entirely from scratch. There was no prior donor acquisition activity and no baseline, which makes this not an improvement on what existed, but the creation of a new revenue stream.
• VOD viewers in the last 30 days are also up 250% year-on-year, driven by an audience that is meaningfully more engaged, not just larger.

But the results go deeper than the percentages. What the engine model has delivered is a permanent new capability for GOD TV – a conversion-optimised donor journey that works harder for every pound of media spend, a VOD strategy that builds genuine audience depth rather than just high view counts, and a data and measurement foundation that means every future decision is evidence-based rather than instinct-based.