Facebook and political advertising may have a new future together.
In the campaigns of Michelle Nunn in Georgia and Mark Udall in Colorado, Facebook found via experiment that sending advertisements to the site’s users who had already given the campaigns their email addresses resulted in more donations.
However, because online fundraising is unmeasurably influenced by outside sources, there are still questions to be answered about the future of that type of advertising.
“The key finding here is that, though Facebook ads don’t directly generate a lot of revenue, they can have a spillover effect in other fund-raising channels,” David Karpf, an assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University who studies Internet campaigns, told the New York Times’ The Upshot.
In both candidates’ campaigns, the advertising was credited with providing at least a 200 percent return on the cost of the Facebook ads.
People who saw the Facebook ads gave $47.87 on average to Udall’s campaign, compared with $42.70 on average for those who did not see them, the data showed.
Nunn’s campaign saw similar results, Trilogy Interactive, a digital consulting firm that worked for her, confirmed.
