Trump better at Facebook, company says
SAN FRANCISCO — 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.”
The paper, obtained by Bloomberg and discussed here for the first time, describes in granular detail the difference between Trump’s campaign, which was focused on finding new donors, and Clinton’s campaign, which concentrated on ensuring Clinton had broad appeal. The data scientist says 84 percent of Trump’s budget asked people on Facebook to take an action, like donating, compared with 56 percent of Clinton’s.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of ads during the presidential campaign and rapidly tested them to spread those that generated the most Facebook engagement, according to the paper. Clinton ran 66,000 different kinds of ads in the same period.
As is typical at Facebook, employees had access to the white paper, according to a person familiar with the matter. Employees routinely publish papers so colleagues can dig into issues facing the company and learn how certain products work.
A former Facebook employee cited the information from the white paper in a memo to Rep. Adam Schiff ’s office in early March, saying it could help Congress ask the right questions about whether the campaign coordinated with Russia.
Republicans shut down the House of Representatives’ investigation into Russia and Trump days later.
But Congress is still focusing on the use of third-party information on Facebook for another reason: the company’s ensuing crisis over data on 50 million users obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a political advertising company that helped Trump’s campaign.
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is set to make his first congressional testimony on the issue in a matter of days.