Curious about targeting strategies in the 2025 German elections? 🗳️ favstats.github.io/de25/targeti... Updated daily, my dashboard tracks how much € German parties spend on targeted ads. For example 1M on “lookalike” audiences to reach people similar to a pre-defined audience (often supporters). 📊 - ThreadSky

favstats.eu • 14 days ago

Curious about targeting strategies in the 2025 German elections? 🗳️
https://favstats.github.io/de25/targeting.html

Updated daily, my dashboard tracks how much € German parties spend on targeted ads. For example 1M on “lookalike” audiences to reach people similar to a pre-defined audience (often supporters). 📊

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Comments

sevenyakima.bsky.social•14 days ago

The spending on cultural rather than political clusters ("Boehse Onkelz" etc.) with AfD is interesting. Reminds me - rightly or wrongly - of the GOP campaign approach of focussing on Joe Rogan type channels rather than on classic political ad strategies.

favstats.eu•14 days ago

I think they are still attempting to target political clusters. In my 2021 data I can see that is what they are doing. However, since Meta has discontinued overtly political targeting since then, they now rely on proxy audiences instead.

stefanlaser.bsky.social•13 days ago

Puh, this is oddly specific stuff. I have naive questions and hope I didn't miss the FAQ. Are people targeted because party experts (whatever that means) chose such terms or the platforms think that term x and y are statistically promising?

Put differently, what's in a strategy?

favstats.eu•13 days ago

Not a naive question at all!

These are audiences chosen by the advertisers themselves, so not what the platform thinks. It is though quite usual that when an advertiser chooses an audience the platform suggests similar ones and often advertisers just end up choosing them as well.

stefanlaser.bsky.social•12 days ago

Thanks!

maikebraun.bsky.social•14 days ago

This is absolutely fascinating! Interesting that all parties tend to target women more than men. And some of the targeting strategies are extremely specific, like the FDP targeting one specific university.

favstats.eu•14 days ago

when doing the research for my global targeting paper I also observed that women are more targeted than men, though gender targeting is somewhat rare. (https://journalqd.org/article/view/4188).

favstats.eu•14 days ago

Another important aspect to consider here it also the cost of reaching audiences.

Studies have found that reaching women on Meta is more expensive than men. So parties might be trying to overcompensate for that bias since their ads are reaching more men.

favstats.eu•14 days ago

Research from https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3093 but also my recent work with political ads (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2024.2439317#d1e888).

maikebraun.bsky.social•14 days ago

Thank you for that overview! Really awesome work! It might also be interesting in how far these algorithmic biases represent stereotypes advertisers/parties have.

drphilphil.bsky.social•14 days ago

Not sure if parties know that this is public information 🫠Thanks for your work, super interesting!

favstats.eu•14 days ago

I think some of them do follow my dashboards :D but I think it is good and bad if they know. Good: they will think twice before they do overtly problematic stuff. Bad: they will try to hide it better (e.g. if you use custom audiences we cannot see how they define those, only that one was used).

christinagahn.bsky.social•14 days ago

Don't tell them solutions!! Haha

langweiligdepri.bsky.social•13 days ago

📌targeting Strategies 2025 German elections

mkozlowska.bsky.social•14 days ago

That's super fascinating. Thanks!

From my personal anecdata, on Instagram I have been shown only ads by FDP (for weeks) and CDU (recently). I'm no potential voter of either - but at least CDU makes sense they target me, based on your findings. These are my interests. But FDP? :D

favstats.eu•14 days ago

Thanks for sharing! You should be able to click on the top right of individual ads and click "Why am I seeing this?" which tells you something about the targeting criteria used that made you see the ad. My guess is Meta classified you in one of their lookalike audience for them.

mkozlowska.bsky.social•14 days ago

I guess I now must go and scroll Instagram for as long it takes to get an FDP ad again.
For science, of course!

mkozlowska.bsky.social•14 days ago

📌

favstats.eu•14 days ago

As always this dashboard is powered by unrelenting and meticolous work done by @whotargets.me. Give them a follow if you think this kind of data is important!

They also track spending and topics during the election campaign! Check it out here:
https://trends.whotargets.me/countries/DE/explorations/ad-spending

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