Reaching the voters : parties use of Google Ads in the 2021 German federal election

Based on the public data provided via Google's Ads Library, we constructed a subset consisting of political ads displayed during the final eight weeks leading up to the 2021 Bundestag election (the main campaign period). The subset contains 5131 observations, from 27 July to 26 September 2021, focusing only on ads from political parties and their chapters. We grouped the advertisers by party (15 in total) and created a variable indicating the organizational level (federal, state, local, or youth organizations). The data was processed using RStudio 2024.04.2 (R version 4.4.1)