Frakture’s Data Debrief from the 2022 Election

At Frakture, we’re always looking for ways to leverage data to help the progressive digital ecosystem thrive.

In that spirit, as part of a new experiment for the post-2022 election cycle, we’re releasing our first ever Election Data Debrief Report. We assembled email and ads message data from 74 client accounts for candidates running in the 2022 general election, and we’re releasing it publicly to help improve Democratic campaigns’ digital efforts across the board. We hope that by providing this benchmarking data with some key insights from such a broad sample size, we can help evaluate the strategies and tactics Dem digital staff are using across channels and platforms.

For anyone new to Frakture, our platform allows you to automate your digital fundraising and marketing operations. We use bots - automated scripts - to bring data from your various platforms into a central warehouse, where it’s cleaned, standardized, and aggregated. Once the data is in your warehouse, our attribution algorithm matches donations to outgoing messages and campaigns based on source codes, ensuring you know how much money was raised from every email, ad, and text message you send out into the world. Once all your cleaned and attributed data is there, you can connect it to your data viz software of choice or use our Frakture native reports to see the results.

Our unique position in the Democratic digital communications space lets us answer some interesting questions. For example, we were interested in how the SCOTUS Dobbs v. Jackson decision leak and announcement in Q2 impacted online fundraising for our candidates. We also were hearing anecdotally from a lot of our clients on some big changes in the performance of their digital ads on Facebook and we were curious what the data would show. Turns out, there were some interesting insights there which we’re excited to share.

Here are some of the key findings:

The Dobbs Effect

One of the most striking toplines was around the SCOTUS Dobbs decision: candidates in our analysis saw a significant bump in online revenue (email and ads) during the immediate aftermath of the decision leak on May 2nd, and a sustained (8-day) bump in revenue following the release of the decision itself on June 24th. The net impact was that the 74 candidates we tracked raised approximately $960k over what we established as baseline performance in Q2.

Email Fundraising

Open and click rates for the year peaked in July and August, but revenue from email continued to increase in both September and October, likely attributable to increased overall send frequency.

We did find a strong correlation between send frequency and unsubscribe rate, with top performers (<.2% USR) sending less than half as frequently as the poorest performers (>.5% USR), suggesting that sending too often continues to contribute to overall list churn.

Digital Ads

Across all clients, Facebook ads were a net loser in 2022, with only a 90% return on ad spend, while Google was a net winner, with an overall return on ad spend of 158%. This trend held true at both the beginning and end of the year, with Google ads producing positive returns and Facebook returning negative/neutral results almost every month in 2022. Another noteworthy stat: average donation size for Google was more than 3x that of Facebook.

Want to dig deeper into what we found this cycle? You can view the full report here, or follow up with us to schedule a demo and get into the details at info@frakture.com