Tracking Digital Ad Spending on the 2020 Election

 Source: https://2020campaigntracker.com/

A tool created by Bully Pulpit Interactive provides a tool to help visualize digital ad spending by the Trump and Biden campaigns on the 2020 presidential election.  Not only does the tool allow users to compare the overall spending by each account on separate platforms, it even allows a visualization to see how much specific advertisers are spending on communication about specific topics (based on Facebook ad data).  For example, we can see that the Trump campaign spends almost three times as much as the Biden campaign on the topic of immigration on Facebook:

This provides us some interesting insight into the priorities of each campaign, and what messages they are seeking to get across to their base in the final weeks before the election.  Furthermore, we can see which advertisers not associated with either campaign are focused on specific topics.  For example, Lindsey Graham has spend over fourteen times the amount of the next closest advertiser, and over 40% of his budget, on political ads on the topic of Brett Kavanaugh:

It's unclear where the boundaries of a specific topic lie, and while this visualization represents an incomplete picture (since these charts specifically represent ad spending on Facebook only), these graphs at least give us at least a general sense of political advertisers' interest in these topics, and will hopefully help provide more transparency on political ad spending going forward.