Frakture’s 2022 Data Debrief Part 2: Online Advertising

Note: If you want to read about our full findings for both email and ads check out our initial post about the debrief.

In 2022, Democratic candidates performed better than expected in the most competitive districts up and down the ballot across the country. Biden is the first President since FDR in 1934 to see every Senator in his party re-elected (who was seeking re-election).

Despite dire predictions of pending losses, Democrats also consistently outraised their opponents throughout the cycle in many of the most competitive races across the country.

As part of a new experiment at Frakture, we put together our first ever Election Data Debrief Report for 2022. For this project, we assembled email and ads message data from 74 client accounts for candidates running in the 2022 general election. Our goal is to showcase our reporting as well as demonstrate the power of standardized data and reporting using our toolset.

And today, we want to share with you our findings from our digital advertising analysis from the 2022 cycle data. So what did we find?

• $10.4 M raised with $8.5 M spent

• More than 240k contributions, with an average contribution amount of $43.22

• 123% Return on Ad Spend across FB and Google

One of our more interesting findings was the significant difference in performance this cycle between Google and FB. Return on ad spend was almost double on Google, and average contribution was more than 3 times as high.

If you look at ads spending early in the cycle you can see high investment in FB vs Google, which could account for the disparity between early cycle performance and Q3 performance. Later in the cycle you can see a correction in the investment. As a follow up, we may want to analyze data from previous cycles to look for a similar trend. Was FB underperformance a problem in the 2020 cycle too? Can we make any predictions about platform performance going forward?

This is a new and exciting analysis for us at Frakture, and we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface on how aggregated, anonymized cross-client data can help inform supporter and donor behavior across the industry. So stay tuned for the release of more of our findings! As always, if you have feedback, questions, or comments feel free to drop a note to info@frakture.com.