Methodology

In collaboration with Who Targets Me, we monitored 584 political advertisers in Bayern during the 2023 Bayern Landtwagswahl to better understand how campaigns use different targeting methods made available by Meta. To do this, we used data from the Meta Ad Library, using the new ‘Audience’ data which gives some detail on how pages target their ads.

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

  1. Advertised in the last 7 days (Oct 3rd - Oct 9th 2023)
  2. Advertised in the last 30 days (Sep 10th - Oct 9th 2023)
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. Report will be updated as soon as new data is available.

For Google platforms, data accessed via the Google Transparency Report provides spending on how much money was spent by parties. In order to fit the Meta ranges, we also show the last seven and 30 days.

Disclaimer

The data shown in this dashboard is based on the platform’s respective ad libraries which are known to be sometimes incomplete (Edelson et al. 2020; Silva et al. 2020). For this reason the data shown here might not reflect the full picture nor all political ads that were targeted at voters.

About the Creator of the Dashboard

Fabio Votta is a Postdoc at the University of Amsterdam who studies (online) political microtargeting and its usage around the world.

Want to see how political parties target you? Sign up at Who Targets Me and download the gratis browser plugin to see how parties on Facebook use your data:

https://whotargets.me/

Want to retrieve targeting data from the Facebook Ad Library yourself? This dashboard is powered by the R package: metatargetr. Check it out here:

https://github.com/favstats/metatargetr

Election Targeting Dashboards

A list of election dashboards: