Labour and Conservatives poured money into last-minute online adverts

Labour and the Tories both staged last-minute advertising blitzes on Facebook and Instagram, outspending the Liberal Democrats on the social media platforms in the final days of the election campaign.

Between midnight on Tuesday and the start of polling day on Thursday morning, Labour spent at least £46,100 on adverts on the two platforms, with the ads garnering at least 4.9m impressions between them, according to Facebook data. The Tories, who had a 10-point lead over Labour before election day according to the FT’s poll of polls, spent at least £41,800, and got at least 2.7m impressions.

The precise spending and impression numbers are not yet available as the totals available from Facebook’s Ad Library report are subject to a lag of several days. But according to more up-to-date data available directly from the Ad Library, Labour could have spent as much as £215,000 against up to £89,000 by the Tories in the 36 hours to Thursday morning.

All the big parties now recognise the online world as a key battleground when it comes to fighting an election and have spent well over £2m combined on ads on Facebook and Instagram since early November.

The Tories were criticised for failing to match the successful online campaigns run during the 2017 election by Labour and its influential activist group Momentum despite spending £2m, or four times as much, on Facebook ads.

As a result, analysts had expected the Conservatives to mount a late-stage ad spending splurge, using a similar strategy to the one successfully deployed by the Vote Leave campaign in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.

But the latest spending figures suggest that, despite raising an estimated £12m from big donors so far during the campaign, the Conservatives are not close to matching the online ad spending from the 2017 election.

“In 2017, they spent over £2m on the platform, and though the data for the last few days hasn’t been published, it looks as if they won’t even reach half that figure, despite the much-briefed ‘late surge’,” said Sam Jeffers, co-founder of Who Targets Me, an organisation that tracks online political advertising.

The latest numbers show the Tories spent £396,932 between November 10 and December 9, while the Lib Dems spent almost double that at £722,819. Labour spent £657,102.

Among the adverts being run by the Tories on election day was one that read: “Labour supports the RMT strikes that will cause chaos for you over Christmas. A vote for anyone but the Conservatives risks Corbyn in charge and more misery for commuters.” It had got almost a quarter of a million impressions.

Earlier this week First Draft, a non-profit set up to fight online misinformation and fake news, found that 88 per cent of the Facebook ads placed by the Tories in the first four days of December were promoting claims had been labelled as misleading by Full Fact, another non-profit that acts as an independent fact-checking organisation.

The same survey could not find any misleading ads run by Labour over the same period, though it did identify some in later days.

One of the largest spenders in the closing days of the campaign was the satirical anti-Brexit campaign group Led By Donkeys. The group specialises in staging large-scale stunts in the real world, filming them, and sharing them on the internet, but had until recent days allowed its content to spread organically rather than via ads.

“There are several ways to win an election but you can’t, now, ignore Facebook,” said Ben Stewart, one of the founding members of the group, which raised more than £250,000 in the space of 24 hours through a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the ads.

“We think, though, that Facebook should ban political advertising altogether.”