Political Money Is Taxing your CPMs
Taylor Armstrong · 2026-10-07
Something I've noticed as a performance marketer in the USA, is that political ad money can really sway what it costs for you to be seen. On media platforms where you're primarily targeting audiences rather than intent, all of a sudden you find yourself fighting with political ad money for the same eyeballs. Now that we're approaching midterms, it's crazy to see the stats coming out of AdImpact. They expect political ad spend to go up $400 million compared to the 2024 presidential election cycle (total spend projected to be $11.6 billion).
I think we're all feeling it as consumers already.
We're seeing these ads flood our connected TV stream, our social media feeds, and as an advertiser, it's something that's important to keep a pulse on because it can impact your CPMs and what it costs to be seen by your audience.
Why does search mostly get a pass?
Search gets somewhat of a pass because political advertisers generally aren't competing in the same keyword auctions as most commercial advertisers. If I'm bidding on B2B SaaS or product-specific terms, political campaigns aren't suddenly entering those auctions just because they're spending billions of dollars. Obviously, if your keywords overlap with political issues or election-related searches, that's a different story.
Where I tend to see the impact most is on the paid social side. In my experience, CPMs (particularly on broader audience and engagement campaigns) can start climbing as political campaigns pour money into reaching many of the same audiences.
Is pulling back on social actually the right call?
The standard advice misses something, though: people are incredibly engaged with content during election season. They're reading news, following commentary and scrolling through conversations about what's happening. So even if impressions get more expensive, that doesn't necessarily mean they're less valuable.
That's why I wouldn't pull back on social just because CPMs are climbing. The real question is whether those higher CPMs are actually flowing through to worse CPA, ROAS or whatever downstream metric you're optimizing toward.
Do this
- Watch your CPMs, but don't optimize against them in isolation. If CPMs start climbing, check whether that increase is actually flowing through to CPA, ROAS or your primary conversion metric before changing spend.
- Treat search and social differently. I'm watching paid social more closely for election-related auction pressure. I'm largely leaving search alone unless I see an actual performance change or I'm bidding on terms that overlap with political issues.
I didn't know I'd ever have to compete with political ad money as a SaaS marketer when I got into performance marketing. I saw it happen during the last presidential election, and I'm watching it happen again now. It's just one more external variable to monitor and optimize around.