Political Ad Spend Tracker: Google Election Ads Spend & Surges

Political Ad Spend Tracker: Google Election Ads Spend, Trends & Surge Alerts

Political Ad Spend Tracker turns Google's official Political Advertising transparency dataset into a clean, ranked feed of who is spending on election ads, where, and how fast it's changing. Instead of scraping ad pages one at a time, it reads the complete public dataset Google publishes for researchers and journalists, so every run covers every verified election advertiser in the regions Google covers (e.g. US, UK, India, Brazil, Australia), refreshed by Google daily.

Built for campaigns and consultants, PACs and advocacy groups, political journalists and newsrooms, media buyers and ad-sales teams, researchers and prediction-market / policy analysts.

• Leaderboards: top spenders by country, by state (e.g. all advertisers spending in PA), or by name ("for Senate", "PAC").
• Trends: spend in the last N weeks vs. the N weeks before, change %, and a plain label: surging, rising, steady, falling, stopped, new-spending.
• Surge filter: return only advertisers that just doubled their spend or just started spending.
• Change mode (changesSinceLastRun): schedule it daily and get only advertisers whose lifetime spend grew since your last run, with the increase.
• Add-ons (off by default): 52 weeks of weekly spend history; spend by state / region.
• One flat row per advertiser, with the official Google Ads Transparency Center link.

No login, no API key, no cookies, no proxies and no page scraping: one documented public dataset, downloaded politely with an identifying User-Agent.

Why this one

	Political Ad Spend Tracker	Typical "Google Ads Transparency scraper"
Coverage	Every verified election advertiser in the dataset, each run	Only the advertisers/pages you feed it
Spend numbers	Lifetime, weekly, recent vs. prior window, by state	Usually none, or a single range per ad
Trend / surge detection	Built in (trend, changePct, surge filter)	None
Change alerts	Only advertisers whose spend grew since last run	Full re-scrape every time
Method	Official bulk dataset Google publishes for public download	Automated browsing of the Transparency Center UI
Speed	~15 seconds for a full country	Minutes to hours

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When
Advertiser row	$0.003 ($3 per 1,000)	Each advertiser returned
Spend alert	$0.005	Change mode only, only for an advertiser whose spend grew (replaces the row charge). The first change-mode run is a baseline billed as normal rows.
Weekly history add-on	+$0.002 per row	Only if addWeeklyHistory is on
State breakdown add-on	+$0.002 per row	Only if addStateBreakdown is on
Actor start	$0.00005	Apify's standard start event

How that compares: Google Ads Transparency scrapers on the Store charge roughly $1 to $5 per 1,000 ads, and you still have to aggregate ads into spend yourself. One of our rows already is the aggregate (lifetime + weekly + trend), so a "top 100 US political spenders this month" report costs about $0.30. In change mode you pay only for advertisers that actually moved.

Billing examples (change mode, 100 advertisers): baseline run = 100 advertiser rows = $0.30; next run with no spend changes = start event only; a run where 8 advertisers increased spend = 8 alerts = $0.04. Use Max charge per run in Apify to cap any run.

Input examples

Top 100 US spenders over the last 4 weeks:

{ "regions": ["US"], "sortBy": "recentSpend", "maxItems": 100 }

Who is surging in Pennsylvania, with state breakdown:

{ "regions": ["US"], "states": ["PA"], "trendFilter": "surging", "addStateBreakdown": true, "maxItems": 50 }

Daily alert on Senate campaigns (schedule this):

{ "regions": ["US"], "advertiserSearch": ["for Senate"], "mode": "changesSinceLastRun", "stateKey": "senate-watch", "maxItems": 500 }

Output (one row)

rowType (advertiser or spend-alert), advertiserId, advertiserName, regions, elections, totalCreatives, spendCurrency, totalSpend, totalSpendUsd, recentWeeks, recentSpend, priorPeriodSpend, changePct, trend, firstWeek, lastActiveWeek, transparencyUrl, dataUpdated (Google's dataset publication timestamp), latestIncludedWeek (newest week in the weekly-spend file), plus isNew, previousTotalSpend, spendIncreaseSinceLastRun in change mode, weeklySpend[] and topStates[] with the add-ons. A SUMMARY record shows totals and any warnings.

Notes on the numbers

• Google reports spend rounded (typically to the nearest $100) and in the advertiser's reporting currency; spendCurrency tells you which. minTotalSpendUsd applies to USD spend.
• The most recent week may still be filling in. Trend windows end at the latest week in Google's data (latestIncludedWeek); check dataUpdated for when Google last published the file.
• Currencies are never mixed. Each row is in its own spendCurrency; no cross-currency totals or conversions are made, and ranking happens within each currency (USD rows first, then other currencies grouped).
• EU: Google retired its EU Political Ads Transparency Report in September 2025 and restricted political ads in the EU, so EU data is historical, not continuous current coverage. Coverage and history vary by country.
• Coverage is Google's election ads program (Search, YouTube, Display) only: not Meta, TV or issue ads outside Google's definition.
• Filters by state use Google's own subdivision codes (e.g. TX, CA).

Data source and legal notes

• Source: Google's "Political advertising on Google" transparency report dataset, which Google publishes as a public download (storage.googleapis.com/political-csv/) for researchers, journalists and the public. We read only the files we need with standard HTTP range requests and an identifying User-Agent; no Google pages are scraped and no access controls are bypassed.
• Advertiser names are those of verified election advertisers that Google publishes for transparency. No personal contact data is collected.
• This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Google, YouTube and Google Ads are trademarks of Google LLC.

Disclaimer

This Actor reorganizes public transparency data as is. It is not legal, campaign-finance, compliance or investment advice, and it isn't an official record of campaign expenditures (for that, see the FEC or your state election authority). Google's figures are rounded, can be revised, and may lag. Verify important numbers on the linked Transparency Center page before you publish or act on them. Don't use the output to harass or target individuals.

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