Attention to Political Advertising on Social Networking Platforms: Evidence from a Linkage Analysis Using Mobile In-App Tracking, Survey, and Content Analysis

Paid digital political advertising (DPA) on social networking platforms (SNPs) places targeted, personalized campaign messages in users’ feeds (Kruschinski & Bene, 2022). Prior research has examined its persuasive and mobilizing effectiveness conditional on exposure quantity and congruency between ad and recipients’ characteristics. However, studies rely largely on experiments and self-reports, providing limited evidence on whether users pay attention to DPA during real-world SNP use (Guldemund et al., 2026). While attention is a crucial precondition for media effects, its empirical assessment remains methodologically challenging (Neijens et al., 2024). Consequently, it remains unclear whether drivers of DPA effectiveness attract user attention that is not forced or triggered by study design. To address this gap, we introduce a methodological combination of tracking, survey and content analysis to empirically answer how exposure quantity and congruency relate to reception time as an indicator of attention to DPA. Research Questions and Hypotheses Mere exposure theory suggests that repeated exposure to DPA from the same party increases visibility and persuasive/mobilization effectiveness (Chu et al., 2024). However, whether repeated exposure stimulates attention or produces attentional wear-out effects remains unclear (RQ1). Beyond quantity, advertising effectiveness depends on message-user congruency (Hirsch et al., 2024). We examine two forms: party congruency, defined as recipients’ positive evaluations of the advertising political party, and issue congruency, the personal relevance of the advertised policy issue (Noetzel et al., 2025). Party congruency should increase attention through partisan selective exposure (H1), while issue congruency should enhance attention by stimulating involvement with personally salient topics (H2). Method We employ a linkage design combining mobile in-app tracking, survey data, and content analysis with a sample representative of German Facebook and Instagram users (N=1,509). For four weeks preceding the 2024 European Parliament election, participants’ mobile devices were tracked daily, capturing all DPA exposures on Facebook and Instagram. This yielded 3,603 ad contacts with German parties for n=445 participants. Attention was operationalized as reception time via the in-app tracking: the duration an ad remained on screen before scrolling or app closure (M=11.5s; Mdn=3.5s). Party congruency was measured via survey, where participants rated their evaluation of each German party. Issue congruency was derived by matching policy issues coded manually in a subsample of 563 unique ads (2,197 ad contacts) with participants’ self-reported issue importance. Results GLM regressions (participant-nested with controls) show that reception time increased significantly with same-day exposures to ads from the same party (RQ1; β=0.06, p=.007). Contrary to H1, ads from negatively evaluated parties received significantly longer reception times than those from positively evaluated congruent parties (β=0.19, p=.008). Both effects remain robust in the coded subsample. Consistent with H2, issue congruency had a significant positive effect on attention (β=0.18, p=.03). While our findings support mere exposure and issue-congruency arguments, they also point to unexpected party (in)congruency effects, which can be discussed in terms of motivated reasoning and counterarguing (Guldemund et al., 2025). We thus provide new empirical insights into attention dynamics in DPA and demonstrate the value of linkage designs for studying exposure and attention in personalized online environments.