After dominating social networking site Facebook in political ads, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also emerged as the leading political advertiser on Google.
According to latest search engine behemoth Political Advertising Transparency Report, BJP spent around Rs 1.2 crore in advertising since February 19, 2019, across 554 ads, followed by Yuvajana Sramika Rythu (YSR) Congress Party that spent around Rs 1.04 crore across 107 ads.
They were followed by Digital Consulting and Ethinos Digital Marketing with ad spend of Rs 63 lakh and Rs 1 lakh respectively.
Congress party, during the same period spent around Rs 54K across 14 ads.
In terms of geographies, Andhra Pradesh was the largest ads spender with an expenditure of Rs 1.73 crore. Bihar and Delhi followed it with Rs 1.05 crore and Rs 9.96 lakh ads expenditure.
The total political ad spends in the same period on Google is Rs 3.76 crores.
The report measures ad spend since February 19. The total ads posted on Google were around 831.
In February, the search engine implemented its election ads policy for India. It made mandatory policy for advertisers running election ads in India to provide a pre-certificate issued by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
It’s worth noting that Election Commission had announced the general election scheduled on April 11.
At present, the search giant supports languages such as English, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and Telugu.
As the Lok Sabha election is due to take place from next week, Google and Facebook have made the ads data public as part of their efforts to bring more transparency.
Last month, Facebook’s Ad Library report revealed that BJP and pro-PM Narendra Modi pages were dominant ads providers on the platform.
