Should Politicians Be Buying Facebook Ads? [STUDY]

With Election Day right around the corner, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and other politicians are blitzing the web and social media with advertisements. But are online ads worth the money for politicians? That’s the question raised by a study released this week attempting to show the efficacy of Facebook ads for politicians.

The study’s organizers worked with a candidate for state legislature, who bought enough ads that the study claims 15,000 Facebook users in his district saw the ads over the course of a week. The campaign budgeted $150 a day for the Facebook ads. However, Facebook only allowed it to buy $40 worth of advertising each day for the week, or $280, because of “the finite supply of Facebook users from the targeted constituency,” according to the study.

At the end of the week, independent polling of constituents in the pol’s turf showed that 85% of respondents hadn’t heard of the candidate while only 11% had heard of him and had a positive impression, and 46% reported they used Facebook.

The numbers led the researches to conclude that “voters randomly assigned to view a candidate’s online ads a number of times did not have significantly differing opinions of him and indeed did not recall seeing his ads at all.”

Does that mean online ads, and those on Facebook in particular, are poor ad buys for a political campaign? Hardly â€" the study is not without its flaws.

Their methodology leaves much to be desired: First, $280 is pocket change and a week is a blip in the world of political advertising. Neither is likely enough to see an effect.

Second, the Facebook ads purchased by the campaign were Marketplace ads â€" the smallest size and simplest variety Facebook has to offer. No experimentation was done with Sponsored Stories or Facebook’s other more complex ad products.

“My biggest issue is that I feel they didn’t use the right type of Facebook advertising,” said Keegan Goudiss of Revolution Media, a social media firm for progressive political campaigns. Instead, Goudiss argued, the study should have looked at Promoted Posts and engagement levels after an ad click. “That’s the more important point.”

Third, the study completely ignores the most powerful aspect of Facebook as an advertising platform: the “Like” button, which connects Facebook users to a campaign or other brand’s updates on a constant basis, as digital strategist Bradley Portnoy has already pointed out (Portnoy also argues that Facebook’s ad algorithm prevents the same ads from being shown over and over again in an effort the keep the page looking fresh for visitors, something not addressed in the study).

Finally, the study didn’t include people under the age of 30, even though they’re the most active users of the platform.

SEE ALSO: Can Targeted Ads Save Millions of Campaign Dollars?

If online advertising wasn’t working for politicians, than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney probably wouldn’t be using approximately 25% of their advertising budget for online ads, a figure cited within the study itself. To their credit, the researchers do admit they “are in no position to claim that online advertising is a poor use of funds per se” and their conclusion leaves the door open to further research in the field.

The study can be accessed right here. Are Facebook ads effective? What does a politician need to do in order to be effective on Facebook? Share your ideas in the comments.

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