Trump’s Campaign Said It Was Better at Facebook. Facebook Agrees

  • The president’s ad campaign was ‘more complex than Clinton’s’
  • Trump focused on new donors; Clinton on ensuring broad appeal
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has boasted often that it made better use of Facebook Inc.’s advertising tools than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. An internal Facebook white paper, published days after the election, shows the company’s data scientists agree.

“Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016,” the author of the internal paper writes, citing revenue of $44 million for Trump and $28 million for Clinton in that period. “But Trump’s FB campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes.”