Methodology

In collaboration with Who Targets Me, we monitored 23 political advertisers in United State during the 2024 US Presidential Primaries 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 โ€˜Audienceโ€™ 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 (Sep 6th - Sep 12th 2024)
  2. Advertised in the last 30 days (Aug 14th - Sep 12th 2024)
Note

Meta only provides 7, 30 and 90 days windows for the targeting data in their Ad Library. Metaโ€™s data also lags by a few days. Report will be updated as soon as new data is available.

Disclaimer

The data shown in this dashboard is based on the platformโ€™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 Ph.D. candidate in Political Communication 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: