Visualizing Google Political Ads Spend by using BigQuery data and Tableau

While playing around with Google BigQuery public datasets which I think are fantastic, I found one database which shows an archive of political ads run on Google platform.

More details about the dataset can be found here.

The dataset includes 6 tables like below:

1. Advertiser Stats (which includes information about advertiser name, id, public_id, total spend and total number of creatives)
2. Advertiser Weekly Spend (weekly spend information by advertisers)
3. Campaign targeting (targeting options chosen by advertisers)
4. Creative stats (information related to the ads)
5. Geo Spend (spend information by Geo locations)
6. Top Keywords history (top keywords and how much each campaign paid for these keywords)

In overall, it is a great database to play around with so this is what I did 😀

I want to see which are biggest spenders during 2018 US Election Cycle (starting from 1-Jan-2018 till 6-Nov-2018) and after that period (after 6-Nov-2018 till July-2019). Also, I want to see the spending trend on a weekly basis by major advertisers (advertisers with more than 1 mil spend)

I extracted the data from BigQuery by using Tableau and visualized the rest from there.

The public Tableau dashboard can found here:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/zin.ko.hlaing#!/vizhome/GoogleUSPoliticalCampaignsAdsSpend/PoliticalAdsSpend

You can play around with dashboard viz to find out who spends how much during these two periods. As for next steps, I will probably play around with the data from the rest of the tables.