As political interests looked for new ways to tap digital media to canvas for potential supporters in 2016, the unique capabilities of social media drove widespread adoption of two ad types, lead ads and video ads, representing a two times to four times greater share of budget versus non-political social advertisers.
With the 2016 election cycle drawing to a close, now is the perfect time to examine the effects and effectiveness of political ads.
Examining Kenshoo social advertiser data through September, advertisers had already spent more than $28 million on social ads for political causes with another month remaining. After a spike in March, monthly spend dropped off until the general election really started to heat up in July (no pun intended).
Kenshoo estimates that 60 percent of this ad spend focused on the presidential race, with another 26 percent from advocacy groups targeting specific issues and the remainder on races for other offices, political parties or specific regions.
Facebook page posts make up the majority of the ads utilized for political advertisers, but lead ads garnered as much as 6 percent of total social monthly spend for the politics category during time period examined, considerably higher than the 1 percent to 2 percent share of spend for lead ads across all social campaigns.

Since lead ads are specifically designed for capturing information about the Facebook user, it?s no wonder political advertisers have adopted it at more than twice the ...