Online political advertising has become a central component of modern election campaigns. For students and researchers interested in politics, media, or data science, understanding how these ads are used and who sees them is essential for analysing contemporary campaign and democratic praactices.
Trends provides structured access to large-scale datasets of online political advertising. It enables systematic investigation into campaign strategies, targeting practices and messaging across many countries, parties and election cycles.
What data does Trends offer?
Trends aggregates data primarily from the Meta Ad Library (Facebook and Instagram), and (depending on the country) Google’s advertising transparency sources (including display, search and YouTube advertising). It currently covers over 150,000 political advertisers.
Key variables available for analysis include:
- Advertiser identity and affiliations
Enables classification of actors (e.g. parties, candidates, advocacy groups) and comparative analysis across political systems. - Spending data
Supports quantitative analysis of campaign investment and resource allocation. - Targeting information
Includes demographic (e.g. age, gender) and geographic data where available, enabling research into microtargeting and segmentation. - Temporal data (ad activity over time)
Allows longitudinal analysis of campaign dynamics, including spikes in activity around key political events. - Automated content summaries
Uses computational methods to extract themes, tone, and topics, supporting large-scale content analysis.
Together, these variables enable both quantitative and mixed-method research designs, from descriptive statistics to causal inference and discourse analysis.
Research uses
Trends can be used across a wide range of academic and student projects:
1. Analysing campaign strategies
Examining how different political actors allocate resources over time, compare spending patterns, and identify shifts in strategy during an election cycle.
2. Studying messaging and themes
Trends helps with systematic analysis of campaign narratives, including:
- Issue framing
- Negative vs positive campaigning
- The evolution of political messaging over time
3. Investigating targeting
Trends helps explain how campaigns segment audiences, addressing questions such as:
- Which demographic groups are prioritised?
- Are certain regions disproportionately targeted?
- How does targeting vary between parties or countries?
4. Contextualising digital campaigning
Trends data can be integrated with:
- Election results
- Public opinion data
- News coverage
This supports research into the relationship between digital campaigning and political outcomes.
Methodological value
For academic work, Trends offers:
- Scale: Large datasets enable cross-national and longitudinal studies.
- Comparability: Standardised variables allow comparisons across parties, countries, and elections.
- Transparency: Data derived from platform ad libraries improves reproducibility and accountability.
- Interdisciplinary use: Suitable for political science, communication studies, sociology, and computational social science.
It is particularly useful for:
- Undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations
- Quantitative methods training
- Computational text analysis projects
- Policy and regulation research
Getting started
Students and researchers should begin by creating a free account on the Trends platform. From there, you can explore dashboards, download data (where available) and begin formulating research questions grounded in real-world political advertising activity.
Why this matters
The rise of targeted digital advertising has introduced new challenges for democratic transparency, including opaque funding, personalised messaging and the potential for misinformation.
By enabling systematic analysis of these practices, Trends enables:
- Evidence-based research
- Critical media literacy
- Improved policy and regulation
This represents an opportunity to contribute to a rapidly evolving and socially significant field of study.