2018 political digital spend as a percentage of overall budgets was modest

Political digital budgets are increasing but still small: only 2.7-5.1% of total campaign and PAC budgets went to digital ads, while closer to 50% went to television and direct mail. When looking at media budget allocation, it's a similar story with stark contrasts.

U.S. Senate campaigns spent only 4%-7% of their massive media budgets on digital media, while Trump spent 44% and commercial companies spend 54%

The top campaign spenders tended to be large, contested statewide races, or now-Presidential candidates

Top Super PACs and political committees, like Priorities USA, Americans for Prosperity, and the Senate Leadership Fund (charged with electing Republicans to the U.S. Senate) also spent tens of millions on Facebook and Google, outweighing the vast majority of campaigns. In fact, of the top 15 largest spenders, only two were campaigns: Beto O'Rourke and Donald Trump.

Party differences don't stop at politics: Republicans favor Google versus Facebook

For federal races, Republicans spent 48% of their budget on Google, whereas Democrats only spent 25%.

A much higher proportion of Republicans' digital spend went through PACs and political committees – 73% of their total Facebook and Google spend. At 64%, campaigns represented the majority of Democratic spend.

56% of Google political spend happened within a month of the election

This leaves little to no time to take advantage of digital ads' test-and-iterate model to evolve campaign messaging in a cost-efficient and data-driven way. While some of this trend is surely due to last minute donor dollars, 42% of political advertisers on Google only started spending seriously in the final four weeks.

Our campaigns experienced the strong effect of this late rush: CPMs rose 25% in the eight weeks before Election Day. (See more in the full report.) The last weeks of the election were not the only area where dollars competed for limited supply: some states experienced seriously disproportionate spending patterns.

With highly contested U.S. Senate elections and small populations, Montana, North Dakota, and Nevada led per capita Google spend

Per Capita Spend by State - Google Only

Interactive - hover over the states - darkest color states represent highest per capita spending.

While we believe in a 50 state strategy, in 2018, TFC was active in 20 states, where we ran 57 digital advertising projects for Democratic campaigns. Following these efforts, we conducted an exhaustive post-mortem analysis of our work and compiled the top lessons learned.