The Pew Research Center recently analyzed "candidate communications on their websites and social media channels" and confirmed that Obama's social media presence is much stronger than Romney.
But what about online advertising?
Today, for example, Obama is up with a banner ad at the Tampa Bay Times website.
If a reader scrolls over the top banner, there's an animation, which leads to an Obama website (click on the below image for the Obama website):
According to the FEC disclosures, Obama campaign spent $8.8 million on online advertising in July. It's unclear how much Romney is spending because they reported $15.5 million in "placed advertising" with no separate line-items (although there was a line-item for $4.7 million in direct mail consulting). Probably nobody (besides the Obama campaign) will go through Romney's "disbursements by payee" and tabulate their spending on online ads.
Anyways, according to a company called comScore, Obama's online ads made 921 million impressions in July versus 350 million impressions by Romney's online ads.
And over at Moat.com, there's a nifty compilation of online ads. Some of the ads actually become animated when scrolling over them, which is a cool feature of their website. Most of Obama's ads involve animation, whereas Romney's generally do not. Also, Moat.com found many more Obama ads than Romney ads.
Here's a capture of Romney's online ads:
And here's a capture of Obama's online ads. Note: the ad about gun control (with yellow text) is obviously not an Obama ad.
Perhaps these are the type of ads that could be most effective at microtargeting based on location, language and the user's website and likely characteristics. Thoughts? (Here's a previous diary by LennyGrover on potential micro-targeting strategies). Obama's web ads on medicare, reproductive rights and voter registration appear to be likely examples of micro-targeting.
In addition, there's Google AdWords (pay-per-click advertising featured on Google's search engine). According to SEOProfiler.com, Obama has 60 ads and Romney has 20 ads on the google. I could not find a list of these different key word combinations. Some bloggers that assess web advertising have conducted compilations of the ads for specific key words [e.g. here and here], and in general Obama seems to be outpacing Romney, with missed opportunities on both sides. This type of advertising is apparently also occurring on other search engines such as Yahoo.