Paid online political advertising is a significant line item in any modern campaign’s budget. Trends helps people better understand the campaign landscape, to make make better, more data-informed strategic and tactical decisions about what to do next. Trends covers political social media advertising spending, targeting and messaging for over 120,000 advertisers worldwide.
1. What does Trends cover?
- Platforms: Primarily Facebook and Instagram, drawn from the Meta Ad Library. For some countries, data from Google (display and search) and YouTube is available. Note that both Meta and Google recently discontinued political advertising in the EU.
- Scope: Ads from political parties, candidates, advocacy groups, and other political advertisers.
- Countries: Trends shows data for over 60 countries. If a country you’re interested in isn’t currently in our data, get in touch and we can add it.
- Data included:
- Advertiser identity
- Party/group affiliation
- Link to ad library page
- Targeting info (age, gender, location breakdowns, where available)
- Ad spending
- Reach/impressions (coming soon)
- Dates active
- Automated summaries of ad content, themes, tone and topic areas
2. Key uses for campaigns
- Data at every level: We track the picture nationally, at the state or regional level, by party or group and (coming soon) for each advertising account.
- Track social media ad spending: Get a comprehensive picture of advertising activity over time across party, candidate and other affiliated pages.
- Strategy monitoring: Learn what are other relevant campaigns are doing at the moment. Are they fundraising, mobilising or persuading?
- Narrative monitoring: Track recurring themes, slogans, or attacks across different demographics and regions.
- Identify the key audiences: Discover who (and where) is being targeted by campaigns.
- Put data in context: Is an ad or campaign significant? Is it reaching large numbers of people nationwide? Or a narrow group only in one area?
- Detect sudden surges in activity: See how campaigns change, from day-to-day, week-to-week.
- Custom dashboards: If there’s something specific you want to track (e.g. what’s happening in your district or state), get in touch.
3. Current coverage
Here’s a sample of the countries we cover and the number of political advertising accounts we track in each:
| Country | Accounts tracked | Services |
| USA | 45,000+ | Meta, Google |
| UK | 10,000+ | Meta, Google |
| Australia | 4,000+ | Meta, Google |
| Canada | 2,300+ | Meta |
| Brazil | 500+ | Meta, Google |
| India | 3,500+ | Meta, Google |
| And many more… |
4. Services
Alongside access to the automated dashboards, we offer a number of complementary services:
- Research and build of custom dashboards
- Regular strategy briefings on the data most relevant data
- APIs
- Training and support