Display ads become ever more expensive in battleground states
President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney zeroed in on just a few battleground states during the final weeks of the election, as the electoral college arithmetic once more pointed up places like Ohio and Florida as must-wins. Online, swing state spending has meant CPMs have been pushed higher and higher in a few states, with prices continuing to rise dramatically right up to Election Day.
Real-time targeting solutions provider Netmining examined eCPMs across swing states and compared them with ad prices for Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning states based on 2.76 billion impressions served. In mid-June, eCPMs were 0.68% higher in swing states than in blue states, and 1.75% higher in swing states than in red states. Swing state eCPMs were 1.05% higher than prices in the rest of the country as a whole.
Four months later, the differentials had increased significantly. eCPMs for display ads in swing states were 3.17% higher than for the rest of the country—tripling the difference from June—and compared to ads in Republican states, swing state eCPMs were a whopping 6.34% higher. By the following week, swing states had also pulled dramatically farther ahead of Democratic-leaning states and had increased the differential with the country as a whole to over 5%.
Swing states included Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Price differentials continued to rise on nearly a daily basis in the final days of the contest, according to Netmining data. Swing state eCPMs rose from 3.47% higher than other states on October 26 to 5.67% higher on November 1.
Differentials continued to be higher for swing states as compared with Republican-leaning states, meaning that prices in Democratic-leaning states have been higher than those in red states. This has held steady since at least June.
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Check out today’s other articles, “Consumers Expect Effectiveness From In-Store Mobile Offerings” and “In China, Online Content Drives Smart TV Adoption.”