How has political ad spend changed since 2018?
A comparison of the Top 100 political advertisers on Google shows much has changed, but a lot has stayed the same.
It’s no secret that COVID-19 has turned the world on its head — and political campaigns are no exception. We always do an in-depth look back at what happened on the digital and technology front post election. But given COVID and another cycle of political ads data, we wanted to look at how political ad spend has changed between 2018 and 2020 (data wasn’t available for 2016) so far and whether or not COVID is having an impact on digital spend — given that it’s the main way to campaign right now. To do this we compared Google political ads data for the top 100 Advertisers (90% of spend) from May 27 — July 15, 2018 to May 24 — July 12, 2020 and found a 10.8x increase in dollars spent. In 2018 the total was $3.4M and in 2020 $36.8M. That is a whopping increase, but a large portion can be fairly directly attributed to presidential politics.
What would the increase be without Presidential spend?
Biden, Trump and their respective JVs account for about 64% of the $36.8M spend (or $23.6M). The sum of the spend of all of the other groups who are (fairly) directly advertising for Trump or Biden (Priorities USA, America First Action, etc) in the top 100 is an additional $3.9M — for a total of $27.6M directly on presidential politics. That is 75% of 2020 spend. The fact that it is a Presidential election likely is the cause for the biggest increase. But there is still about a 3x increase in spend when you remove these campaigns and organizations. Is this increase due to COVID? Are additional dollars from the Presidential campaigns and organizations going to digital because of COVID? The answer is likely, yes but more work needs to be done to understand the exact cause.
What about Democrats v. Republicans overall?
If you’re following along at home you know that Dems have gotten beaten badly on the digital front in the last few years. And Trump’s spend is still dwarfing everyone in this arena. He spent nearly twice as much as Biden on Google during the same period ($15m v. $8.6m).
Examining average spend per advertiser shows major increases in both parties, but Republicans still lead $526k/advertiser v. $284k/advertiser respectively.
Where is the spending happening?
Google does us the favor of detailing which types of ads are being bought— text, image, video. While growth in spend is seen across all channels, but image and video are the main drivers — increasing by 21.3x and 12.3x respectively. Interestingly, 82% of the growth in image spend can be attributed to Republicans, whereas 61% of the growth in video spend can be attributed to Democrats. Growth in spend on text is similar between Dems and Republicans. Why? You tell us.
One thing is for certain, TV still rules the roost when it comes to where political dollars are spent. But things are starting to change on the digital front. How can you make a difference? If you are giving to campaigns ask about their digital strategy and remember that your dollar will go further on smaller campaigns.
Special thanks to Anela Chan, Stephanie Mactas and Greg Dale for their work on this analysis.
