How much do parties spend on social media? Google tells us with Ads Transparecy Center

Italy’s political parties have spent over €1.3 million on advertising through Google from 2019 onwards, with 2022 obviously being the year they invested the most.

The data emerges from the Center for Advertising Transparency (in English, Ads Transparency Center), which the American company has also made available for Italy: by browsing through it, a lot of interesting information is gathered.

Almost 90,000 ads in 5 years

In the last five years (also counting 2023), the parties have paid for almost 89,000 ads overall, whether they are banners, videos on YouTube, better positioning in search results and much more: according to Google data, almost half of the campaigns (49.3%) consisted of images, 37.1% of videos and the remaining 13.6% of texts.

Unsurprisingly, the political entities that by far spent the most were the Brothers of Italy, with 370,000 euros, and the League, with almost 340,000 euros. Immediately behind, but far behind, are Ilaria Cucchi (over 70 thousand euros), the Democratic Party (less than 68 thousand euros), Più Europa (62 thousand euros), Italia Viva (over 20 thousand) and Action (just under 14 thousand).

We were unable to find data and figures on Movimento 5 Stelle and Forza d’Italia because, as they say from Google, “it is possible that they do not use Google for their advertising”.

What’s Happening in the EU (and the US)

The Center for Advertising Transparency (which can be reached from here) it’s a great tool to understand a little better who advertises through the popular search engine, how much they do, how much they spend and how, also being able to review some of the campaigns of the past.

Political advertising is especially useful, the only one on which information seems available at the moment: searches can be done at the level of individual countries or macro-areas (the European Union, for example), thus discovering that in the EU those who have spent more were the German Greens, who have invested over 1.15 million euros in this activity since 2019. Which are in any case crumbs compared to what is happening in the United States: in the last 5 years, Biden’s staff has spent almost 84 million dollars on advertising on Google and Donald Trump’s has exceeded 83 million.

Advertising and what Google knows about us

Google made its Advertising Transparency Center available at the same time as the publication of the new Ads Safety Report, the report that tells every year what the company does to prevent the harmful use of its advertising platforms.

On the occasion, Big G recalled that in 2022 alone over 5.2 billion ads were blocked or removed for policy violations (more than 9 thousand ads per minute), that another 4.3 billion were limited (in visibility , evidently), that over 17 million ads related to the war in Ukraine were blocked, over 6.7 million advertiser accounts were suspended for policy violations, and ads were also removed from over 1.5 billion pages.

The Google Advertising Transparency Center is a general tool that can in some way be applied to individuals through the section My Ad Center (That’s This), the page through which anyone with a Gmail account can check everything Google knows about them. As we already explained on Italian Tech in mid-2021, it is from this page that you must go to possibly change the type, frequency and kind of ads we see while we browse online, which is what over 70 million people have done since October 2022 in the world, where over 20% have changed their advertising preferences.