More than $3.7B spent on political ads on Facebook since 2018
Every election cycle, political candidates and campaigns spend billions of dollars to get their message in front of voters.
The legacy ways of advertising — TV commercials, mailers and door-hangers — continue to be among the top methods, but there has been a digital shift over the last decade to reach different demographics through different methods.
A few years ago, campaigns dived into the deep end to advertise on social media.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Snapchat were all options to broadcast political content a few years ago, but the options have since dwindled.
Twitter banned political ads in 2019. (Note: Twitter on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2023, announced it was relaxing its ad policy for cause-based ads in the United States. Read more here.)
Around the same time, Facebook (which is now a platform under parent company Meta) said it would not ban political ads.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, said during a speech at Georgetown University that the company once considered banning political ads. The ads, Zuckerberg said, don't make up a significant portion of Facebook's business.
"When it's not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of greater expression," Zuckerberg said when speaking about the difficulty in drawing a line in advertising policies.
Facebook did eventually institute new policies, including a more rigorous process to get Pages approved to run political ads, disclaimers and transparency tools to show who is paying for the ads and even putting in place a blackout period for any new ads during the week surrounding Election Day.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that came out of the political ads discussion was Facebook creating its Ad Library.
The total number of ads related to "Issues, elections or politics" as described by Facebook stands at 14,761,185 as of Dec. 28, 2022. The total amount spent on those ads since May 2018 is $3,751,009,351.
Facebook's Ad Library provides transparency for voters, candidates and the general public. Someone can go to the Ad Library — click here to go directly to the tool — and see how much candidates are spending on political ads even without a Facebook account. You can search by keyword (candidate/campaign) or advertiser.
The financial data is plentiful. We pulled out the 2022 Florida Governor's race between incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis and challenger Charlie Crist as an example.
DeSantis spent about $228,300 in political ads on his official public official page. Crist spent about half of that — $118,300. Of course, there are ways to advertise candidates/campaigns through political committees and other pages.
In the heat of election season, you can also see spending by advertiser and location. Facebook has also created various widgets so people can track spending in real time during election season.
Don't take our word for it. Dive into the Ad Library and see how much campaigns are spending on Facebook.