Advertisers, mark your calendars; election season is here. That means it’s time to brace for the impact of increased auction presence leading up to election cycles, conflicting user focus, and overall fluctuations in performance. This is especially true on platforms like Meta, one of the few major social media platforms that allows political advertising.
Let’s dive into what to expect on Meta specifically and how you can make the most of performance during election cycles.
Ways To View Political Spend
Since 2019, as part of Meta’s effort to increase transparency, advertisers have been required to declare themselves as affiliated with social issues, elections, or politics. As a result, politically associated spending is accessible to the public through the Meta Ad Library Report.
It’s there so you can see just how much is being spent and how many ads are being introduced into the auction, broken out by advertisers. Each tool within the Ad Library Report gives you a slightly different view into political advertising activity:
- Ad Library totals: View the total number of ads and amount spent under the social issues, elections, or politics category since October 2019.
- Top searches from the past week: See the keyword phrases people searched for most frequently in the Ad Library.
- Spending Tracker: Filter and compare how much specific advertisers are spending on ads about social issues, elections, or politics across Meta technologies.
- Advertising data by date range: See totals delivered for specific date ranges.
- Spending by location: See total spend by region based on the date range selected.
- Download a full report: Export specific breakdowns to review internally or share.
How Political Spending Impacts the Auction
Now, you might be thinking: I’m not advertising anything political, so we aren’t competitors in the auction. Think again.
Political advertisers have very little targeting available to them, meaning they’re often using broader targeting strategies. That means political advertisers can reach a high volume of users, often with significant budgets behind them, ultimately taking up a larger portion of the available auction.
So where your customer may normally see one of your ads, they may now be seeing a political ad instead. That not only takes away a potential winning bid for you, but it can also change the overall mindset a user is in while scrolling.
That leads into another important factor: how political advertising can distract users from their usual behaviors.
The Impact of Distracted Meta Users During an Election Cycle
Imagine your feed. Now imagine how it changes when election season hits. Political ads become harder to avoid, no matter how much you may or may not try to tune them out.
The same is happening to your target audience. Their normally curated feeds and preferences can become increasingly filled with ads related to social issues, elections, or politics.
For some users, this might not cause much disruption to their normal behavior. For others, it absolutely can. As a result, advertisers may see an impact on purchase intent, engagement, or how users interact with advertising in general.
What To Monitor Around Election Time
So we’ve discussed how the election cycle can impact performance, but what exactly does that mean?
It of course depends on your setup and what you’re optimizing for, but as a general rule of thumb, I recommend keeping an eye on three cost metrics: Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM).
These metrics can be influenced by more than just the election cycle. Stale creative, shifts in demand, seasonality, and other factors can all play a role. But generally, these three metrics can serve as helpful baselines for monitoring changes in auction competition and overall efficiency.
CPM can be especially helpful in these situations because it gives you a sense of how much it’s costing simply to get in front of users. When auction competition increases, CPM is often one of the first places advertisers may notice that shift.
All that said, it’s not guaranteed that every advertiser on Meta will experience increased costs or weaker performance during an election cycle. Ultimately, the most important thing is to monitor your own results.
If performance does drop, react accordingly, but don’t panic. Understand that the election cycle may be one factor contributing to the change and that the impact is temporary.
Which leads into our last section: how to respond to performance fluctuations during election cycles.
How To Respond to Performance Fluctuations
Many advertisers might be tempted to pull back on spend until the election cycle ends. It’s certainly an option, but it’s also one that could end up costing more than it saves in the long run.
For example, as of writing this blog, we’re heading into an election cycle, but we’re also heading into a key sales period during Q4. For many advertisers, this is an important period for volume and revenue. Pulling back on budget may not be an option, and even if it is, it could hurt performance once demand increases.
Reducing spend leading into a competitive period can limit learnings and put campaigns in a weaker position during a time when having a competitive edge matters.
Overall, the goal is to stay proactive, but not overly reactive. Monitor drops to determine whether they’re sustained, whether they’re part of a longer-term trend, or whether they’re simply the product of temporary factors outside of your control.
What Now?
The impacts of an election cycle are not forever, but for some advertisers, even a temporary impact can feel discouraging.
The most important thing is to keep the broader context in mind. A short-term increase in costs or shift in user behavior doesn’t necessarily mean your paid social ads strategy suddenly stopped working. Continue monitoring performance, pay attention to what’s changing in the auction, and make adjustments based on your own data rather than reacting to election season alone.
Election cycles are another variable advertisers have to account for, but they don’t have to completely derail performance. While they can introduce additional competition and fluctuations in costs, knowing what to watch for, understanding why those changes may be happening, and staying measured in your response can make the period much easier to navigate.
