Georgia Run-Off 2022

How Do Political Campaigns Target Voters?

Methodology

We coded over 3,000 US political advertisers during the 2022 midterm campaigns to better understand how campaigns use different targeting methods made available by Meta. To do this, we used data from the Meta Ad Library, most often the new ‘Audience’ data which gives some detail on how pages target their ads.

To better understand the Georgia runoff election, we kept only advertisers who:

Advertised in the last 7 days (Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022)
Advertised in the last 30 days (Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022)

before election day.

Note: Meta only provides 7, 30 and 90 days windows for the targeting data in their Ad Library. Meta’s data also lags by a few days. We will update this report as soon as new data is available.

Topline statistics

First, Democrat (Warnock)-supporting pages are clearly and consistently outspending Replubican (Walker)-supporting pages. Democrat-supporting pages have also run many more ads.

Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 7 Days)

	All Democrat-supporting pages	All Republican-supporting pages
Total Number of Advertisers	143	175
Top Advertiser	1. Reverend Raphael Warnock ($309,270) 2. Sandy Hook Promise ($144,007) 3. Georgia Honor ($123,350)	1. AFP Action ($85,776) 2. NRA Institute for Legislative Action ($50,715) 3. Judicial Watch ($45,166)
Total Number of Ads	4,618	2,907
Total Spend ($)	1,629,764	669,042

Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 30 Days)

	All Democrat-supporting pages	All Republican-supporting pages
Total Number of Advertisers	746	683
Top Advertiser	1. Reverend Raphael Warnock ($3,004,439) 2. Defend the Senate ($558,658) 3. Georgia Honor ($390,454)	1. AFP Action ($410,314) 2. Americans for Prosperity ($364,373) 3. Herschel Walker ($308,425)
Total Number of Ads	29,674	14,385
Total Spend	10,886,136	5,788,119

Spending, broken down by targeting method

How much did campaigns spend on different targeting methods?

Note that most advertisers spend the vast majority of their budget (~65%+) on Meta’s Custom Audiences.

Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 7 Days)

Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 30 Days)

Top Contested (Interest) Audiences

Here, we show the top most contested interest audiences, i.e. where both Democrats and Republicans have spent considerable amounts of money competing to reach voters with the same interests.

Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 7 Days)

Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 30 Days)

Top Excluded Interests

On Meta, advertisers can also choose to exclude certain audiences from seeing their ads. The graph below shows which audiences are being excluded and how much pages are paying for ads that exclude them. Interestingly, Democrat-supporting pages seem to both include and exclude likely conservative leaning audiences (NASCAR, Hunting). Pro-Republican pages exclude people interested in Veganism and Toyota Prius.

Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 7 Days)

Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 30 Days)

ZIP Code Targeting

Both Democrat-supporting and Republican-supporting pages target voters in and around cities, most notably Atlanta.

Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 7 Days)

Democrat-supporting pages

Republican-supporting pages

Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 30 Days)

Democrat-supporting pages

Republican-supporting pages

How the parties use gender to target ads

In the final days of the election campaign, Republican-supporting pages spend more money than Democrat-supporting pages. However, this trend reverses when looking at the 30-days window before the election: democrat-supporting pages spend more money targeting ads at women versus Republican-supporting pages, even factoring in their lower budget.

Nov 30th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 7 Days)

Nov 7th - Dec 6th 2022 (Last 30 Days)

Language Targeting

Both Democrat and Republican ads spent most money on ads targeted at English-speakers. Democratic pages targeted spanish-speaking voters at a much higher rate.