Within the lead as much as the 2024 US presidential election on Nov. 5, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ marketing campaign talked about the phrase “Donald Trump” greater than they did “Kamala Harris” in ads that ran on Fb and Instagram. In the meantime, adverts sponsored by the official marketing campaign for her Republican rival Trump relied closely on the slogan “Make America Nice Once more,” popularised throughout his 2016 presidential marketing campaign, of their messaging on the identical platforms.
This information outlines how we used Meta’s free-to-use Advert Library to extract and analyse knowledge about each candidates’ political advert spending on Fb and Instagram to get a way of how they have been approaching digital promoting on these platforms.
These strategies may be helpful for different elections and political occasions, as advert spending knowledge from tech platforms can present researchers and journalists with insights into developments that always align with a marketing campaign’s offline methods.
The info we extracted from Meta’s Advert Library exhibiting adverts run by Trump and Harris’ campaigns on Fb and Instagram from July 21 – when Harris succeeded incumbent president Joe Biden because the Democratic Occasion’s nominee – to Oct. 30, 2024 might be discovered right here. The code we used to analyse the info might be discovered right here.
Getting Began With Meta’s Advert Library
The Meta Advert Library is a useful resource that gives particulars of advert spending throughout Meta’s platforms – together with Fb, Instagram, the Meta Viewers Community and Messenger – in a selected time interval.
Anybody can view and search the Advert Library, however it’s essential be logged right into a Fb account to obtain knowledge from it.
Step one for looking out via the Advert Library is to fill within the nation focused, advert class and both key phrases that seem within the advert, or the identify of the web page posting the advert, known as “advertisers”.
Observe that by default, the outcomes solely present adverts that folks can at the moment see, or “lively adverts”. In lots of circumstances, chances are you’ll need to change this to incorporate all adverts, together with people who ran prior to now however are now not lively. You are able to do this by clicking the “X” on the tab that claims “Energetic standing: Energetic adverts”, or click on on “Filters” to alter the “Energetic standing” to “Energetic and inactive”.
Within the “Filters” view you can too slender the outcomes by the platform that the adverts seem on, the date vary that they have been proven to audiences and different variables.
For the entire advertisers included in our evaluation, we checked out each lively and inactive adverts with impressions within the US from July 21 to Oct. 30, 2024. We didn’t filter for language, platform, media kind or viewers dimension.
When you may have the specified outcomes, you possibly can click on on “Export CSV” to obtain them. Nevertheless, a limitation of the Meta Advert Library is that every Fb account can solely obtain three of such recordsdata a day.
Increasing the Search
When knowledge for the Democratic and Republican candidates, Harris and Trump’s official accounts have been an apparent place to begin. Nevertheless, their campaigns’ spending was not restricted to adverts operating from these accounts. CNN reported final month, as an illustration, that the Harris marketing campaign had spent US$11 million on an obscure web page known as “The Every day Scroll”.
Meta insurance policies state that every one adverts about social points, elections or politics have to be labelled with a disclaimer that displays the organisation or particular person paying for the adverts.
You possibly can filter the preliminary outcomes out of your search by the names talked about in these disclaimers (i.e. the advert sponsor). Nevertheless, in case you are seeking to discover all adverts paid for by the identical sponsors – which might give a fuller image of the adverts sponsored by every candidate’s marketing campaign throughout totally different pages – it turns into extra difficult.
Within the instance above, “Harris For President” – Harris’ official marketing campaign committee – is listed within the disclaimer because the sponsor for an advert posted by Harris’ official account. Nevertheless, trying to find its identify as a key phrase returns not solely adverts paid for by the committee, but additionally these the place the phrase “Harris For President” seems within the physique of the advert – as an illustration, a message that claims “Vote Kamala Harris for President!” in an advert sponsored by one other organisation.
A extra dependable strategy to determine adverts sponsored by the candidates’ official sponsors is to go to the “About” part on their official accounts, which gives details about all of the sponsors related to that web page, in addition to different pages that share these sponsors.
Bellingcat downloaded all adverts printed by pages that share an advert sponsor with the official pages of Harris and Trump.
We then eliminated adverts with sponsors not listed on the candidates’ pages, to restrict the outcomes to these related to the candidates’ official campaigns.
In whole, we discovered 17 totally different advertisers with adverts sponsored by Harris’ marketing campaign, and 6 with adverts sponsored by Trump’s official marketing campaign.
Making Sense of the Information
The recordsdata downloaded from the Meta Advert Library consists of particulars on the adverts such because the pages and platforms they appeared on, the dates they have been created, which states they focused, a variety for the quantity spent and the textual content and hyperlinks that appeared with every advert.
They’re obtainable in CSV file format, which might be considered and edited with frequent spreadsheet software program like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Nevertheless, we discovered it extra environment friendly to do additional processing of the info with Python, a programming language identified for its simplicity.
As an example, the column “delivery_by_region” accommodates knowledge on the place individuals who noticed the advert have been positioned, as a share of the full. Within the case of the US election knowledge we downloaded, these areas consisted of the 50 US states.
This knowledge could be helpful to see the place the campaigns may need been focusing on their ads, however the percentages for every advert seem in a single cell in a spreadsheet, making it onerous to check advert supply in particular states.
With some Python code, we have been in a position to separate the rows into particular person columns by state, which made it simpler, for instance, to calculate the approximate amount of cash every marketing campaign spent on adverts proven in every state.
The column with demographic info, exhibiting what share of an advert was geared toward a selected gender inside totally different age teams, might be dealt with in an analogous approach.
The info from Meta’s Advert Library doesn’t present a certain amount of spending for every advert, however slightly offers a variety with an “higher restrict” and “decrease restrict” reflecting the utmost and minimal quantities spent on the advert respectively. For the needs of this evaluation, we used the common of those two figures for all of our calculations to present an estimate of the spending by each campaigns.
Complete Spending
By summing up the common spending for all adverts by every presidential candidate’s campaigns, we discovered that Harris’ marketing campaign has spent about US$113 million – greater than a small nation’s GDP – promoting on Fb and Instagram between July 21 and Oct. 30, whereas Trump’s marketing campaign spent about US$17 million in whole.
Each figures possible signify simply the tip of the iceberg for the candidates’ whole advert spending throughout tv and digital promoting together with on different on-line platforms akin to Google.
Nearly all (99.8 %) of the adverts sponsored by Harris’ marketing campaign ran on each Fb and Instagram, whereas virtually 26 % of these supporting Trump have been solely proven on Fb, and seven.5 % focused solely Instagram.
That is solely a fraction of each campaigns’ and their supporters’ spending on adverts. An NPR evaluation printed on November 1, discovered that over $10 billion has been spent within the 2024 election cycle, starting January 2023, on races from president, senate to county commissioner. This consists of adverts on TV, radio, satellite tv for pc, cable and different digital adverts.
Estimating Advert Spend by Area
To estimate how a lot every marketing campaign spent promoting on Meta’s platforms, we multiplied the common spending for every advert with the the proportion of advert supply for every area (the info beforehand extracted from the “delivery_by_region” column), assuming that the quantity spent in every area was proportional to the place audiences ultimately noticed the advert.
Primarily based on our calculations, the Harris marketing campaign directed extra promoting {dollars} in swing states with the very best spending in Pennsylvania – reported because the hardest swing state by election strategists – than some other state.
Pennsylvania performed a vital position within the 2020 election with Biden successful by a slender margin. The state backed Trump within the 2016 election.
The seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – are thought to be holding the key to the White Home within the 2024 election. The Trump marketing campaign has additionally targeted on the swing states, however Democrats have outspent Republicans in every of these states.
Calls to Motion
Provided that these adverts have been operating within the months instantly main as much as the presidential election, there have been a number of clearly identifiable calls to motion associated to the polls: asking folks to vote for the candidate, soliciting donations, fundraising via official merchandise and selling bodily rallies.
We wrote a Python perform tagging these calls to motion for text-based adverts utilizing URLs related to them – for instance, an advert pointing to “vote.donaldjtrump.com” is more likely to be meant to encourage folks to vote, whereas “safe.actblue.com” is the Democratic Occasion’s official fundraising platform, so all adverts pointing to that have been tagged “donate”. There have been comparable URLs we recognized for official merchandise shops and occasion web sites which have been used for rallies.
Moreover, we regarded for the key phrases “vote” and “donate” in hyperlink titles and hyperlink descriptions.
This methodology was in a position to categorise virtually all adverts from the info from the Trump marketing campaign’s dataset as “vote”, “donate” or “rally”. Solely three adverts – all with the identical messaging criticising Harris’ place on fracking with out an express name to motion, have been unclassified.
The Trump marketing campaign is primarily utilizing these adverts to ask folks to vote and donate, however about one in 5 adverts we analysed have been selling his rallies.
Harris’ marketing campaign had a much less clear focus of their calls to motion. Nearly half of the adverts we analysed couldn’t be simply categorised by the classes we outlined as lots of them promoted information articles masking a variety of matters. Of these we may label utilizing the tactic described, most have been in search of donations.
The Democrats’ marketing campaign appeared to have a lot much less of an emphasis selling bodily rallies, with adverts specializing in this accounting just for 1.5 % of the full.
Most Incessantly Talked about Phrase Combos
To get a tough concept of the important thing themes in every marketing campaign’s adverts on Fb and Instagram, we used a Python device that helps break down textual content into distinctive phrase combos and rely them.
We selected to deal with two-word combos or phrases, which offer extra context than particular person phrases however are nonetheless comparatively simple to analyse. To make sure we solely received significant phrases, we excluded a identified listing of frequent phrases akin to “the” and “a” which seem regularly in any textual content however don’t carry a lot which means on their very own.
We additionally eliminated particular instances akin to “4:00PM” as they cropped up usually in rally promotion adverts however didn’t inform us a lot concerning the advert messaging.
Observe that there are various attainable approaches to processing textual knowledge akin to advert copy, and the one we selected will not be one of the best for all use circumstances. As an example, it could make extra sense to depart within the phrases we eliminated in case you are on the lookout for phrase combos akin to “within the information”, the place frequent phrases akin to “in” and “the” play an element in figuring out the phrase.
Nonetheless, the strategy we selected revealed a number of fascinating developments.
The pair of phrases that appeared most regularly within the Democratic marketing campaign’s adverts was “Donald Trump”, with their very own nominee’s identify following in second place.
Harris’ marketing campaign additionally usually talked about Challenge 2025, a proposal by conservative American suppose tank Heritage Basis that goals to “pave the best way for an efficient conservative administration”. Within the run-up to the elections, the Democratic Occasion has usually used this initiative to assault Trump, whereas the Republican candidate has tried to distance himself from it.
The Harris marketing campaign adverts in our dataset that invoked Challenge 2025 sounded alarms over its alleged penalties on reproductive rights, gun legal guidelines, schooling and taxes, and accused it of giving unchecked energy to the president.
In the meantime, the most typical such phrase talked about by the Republican camp, unsurprisingly, was “President Trump”. Trump’s marketing campaign additionally usually alluded to “MAKE AMERICA” and “AMERICA GREAT”, clearly within the context of “Make America Nice Once more”, the political slogan popularised by Trump throughout his profitable 2016 marketing campaign.
This evaluation additionally revealed a key distinction within the methods of each campaigns: whereas not one of the Trump staff’s high phrase pairs referred to particular points or insurance policies – as a substitute together with many robust action-based phrases akin to “request poll” and “get tickets” – Harris’ marketing campaign mentioned the “center class” and “reproductive freedom” in lots of their adverts.
Conclusion
The Meta Advert Library is an effective useful resource to start out from for anybody thinking about monitoring elections by wanting on the adverts candidates are posting on Fb and Instagram.
Our evaluation was restricted to solely adverts posted by teams affiliated with Trump and Harris’ official campaigns, however it could even be wanting into different advert sponsors supportive of every candidate, akin to political motion committees (PAC) and teams for each Democrats and Republicans.
The adverts on Meta’s platforms current a small window of perception into the large publicity campaigns for each candidates within the lead as much as Election Day on Nov. 5, particularly in swing states, the place voters have reported being bombarded with robocalls, texts, marketing campaign visits, billboards, flyers and different digital adverts. This may very well be mixed with evaluation of knowledge from different sources, akin to Google’s Advertisements Transparency Centre, for a fuller image.
Tristan Lee contributed analysis to this piece.
Featured picture: Reuters/Mike Segar
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