1. When is the best time to run a campaign for a single? 2. What’s the minimum amount of money to minimum amount of time an ad can run and it would still make sense and give some substantial feedback in terms of conversions? 3. What platform do You prefer? ToneDen, Hypeddit of FeatureFM? 4. You the GOAT♥️ Thank you for all this priceless advice and crystal clear info 🙌🏻
1. Ideally as SOON as your single releases. You wanna have your campaign completely mapped out and drafted beforehand so that once your song drops, you just gotta update your landing page with the streaming links and start bringing traffic to the song
1. The moment your song releases. 2. I would say $300-$500 over a 4 week period. You can spend less and get good results, but the chances of anything big happening are almost zero. You can also spend more, but for your first campaign i'd recommend starting in this range. 3. Right now FeatureFM but Hypeddit is also awesome, and its much cheaper. Toneden is great to start with though on their free plan. Most people start with ToneDen, then go to Hypeddit or FeatureFM. 4. Thanks so much! Glad you found this helpful.
Very nice info, thank you. It is ninth video I've watched on your channel and I want to thank you for showing me that I used to promote my music in such outdated way))
if you dive into all the analytics, you'll see Meta is spending the majority of the money in Tier 2 countries. It'd just be better to just target them off the bat
And if you do that.. then Andrew would not be able to have titles like “20K streams in a week”, because the truth is that you can only get those numbers from “cheap” countries like Brazil and Mexico. If you are interested in US or European countries.. then the cost rises significantly if you want this amount of streams
@@theblackwallarthouse6349 I've gotten my ads to hit below 30cents a conversion in the US alone before. But that requires you to fin the perfect audience paired with a great song. Without great music, your ads are gonna be expensive
Great video and thank you for all the knowledge. I never thought about testing different parts of the song to see what hits and sticks best with the target audience. Super smart and will 100% do. Thanks so much!
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Have been following your instructions and and went well! Just would like a piece of advice regarding budget and duration. How much money you usually spend and for how long for a single release? Also, is it better to set a daily budget, or a lifetime budget with a deadline? 😊
It is always better to set a daily budget. Also, you can manage your spendings on a daily basis and what is more important, algorithm won't burn your money. When you tell him "spend 10$ a day" it will manage it better than "spend 1k $ for a whole month" cause you give him power to manage this 1k whatever he wants to. And it doesn't mean he/ll spend same amounts every day for whole month
Hey Andrew. Another great video, thanks! Question: what would you say is the max number of Ad creatives per campaign if this is not your first time? I've been running ads since 2020, e.g. Thanks again!
I would say the maximum number of ads should be (DailyBudget)*0.90 or less. So if you have $20/day, you should have 18 or less ads. This means if you have 4 ads you can do 4 ad sets, if you have 5 ads you can do 3 ad sets etc.
Thanks Andrew! I always find your videos helpful. Still in the process of learning. I'm still figuring out the best audience for Spanish music (reggaeton), it seems that some countries will click the ad but won't stream the song. Thanks!
Thanks! Overall IG has higher quality traffic than FB. When you have a new ad account / pixel it seems like the lower quality FB traffic can cause issues, but when you have a seasoned account trained on getting high quality conversions it's able to work around the issue. In general i'd say 80% of people are fine using FB from day 1. But I just tell everyone to start with IG to prevent anyone from becoming that 20% that has issues on their first campaigns. After a few hundred conversions of higher quality IG traffic usually people are safe to introduce FB placements.
@@AndrewSouthworth Oh wow, I didn't know that ad accounts got trained in a permanent way like this, this is interesting. To your point, my very first ad campaign included Facebook (despite having heard your IG only recommendation before), and my band page started getting tons of likes from bot accounts, so I switched to IG only since then. But I see plenty of seemingly successful ads on FB so your explanation makes a lot of sense.
Hey Andrew, great content as per usual! I was wondering what percentage of your clicks on your landing page actually convert into listeners on Spotify? I ran a campaign for a new single got around 6,000 clicks on the Toneden landing page but only had around 600 listeners in total which would also include playlist adds etc. So it was a really bad conversion rate in terms of actual listeners, so I just wanted to find out if you had a general figure that you have found that to be, because I feel like you have mentioned this in a previous video but I can't find it anywhere! Would appreciate the feedback as always!
Usually I want a 50% click through rate on the landing page. Then if I had 1000 conversions (click throughs) I’d expect 1000-1500 streams, 500 listeners, 250 saves. If the numbers are work than then something is wrong, either conversions setup, countries or placements probably.
@@AndrewSouthworth Thanks for the reply Andrew, really appreciate it. But yes we were getting a 69% click through rate showing 3323 through to Spotify. From that we have only just hit 5,000 streams on that release 2 months later, which included my own playlists I have grown etc so something clearly wasn't right. I had it set to automatic placements and targeted all Spotify countries, so maybe for my next release I will test just tier 1 and tier 2 countries and see if I can still maintain a low cost per conversion and hopefully that helps? I am pretty sure the conversion events are set up correctly as I am actually a media buyer myself and so I was perplexed at these results! Am using Toneden and the view content conversation event currently so I may also try a different landing page provider perhaps. Many thanks for your help as always!
@@LowerLoveday you never want to do automatic placements and you never want to do all Spotify countries. Next time just copy Andrew's target countries here and do IG placements only like in this video
@@the_Distortionist thanks for your message appreciate the help. But yes I have realised that was a mistake, I was following outdated advice and also advice from other channels. This release I have kept it to Instagram placements and kept the countries to the ones here. I was still having to then cross analyse from my Spotify data to remove some countries as they were sucking up the budget, getting plenty of conversions but not actually converting into listeners. It’s a learning curve each release I guess!
Hey Andrew, been a while since I’ve done fb ads but luckily I found this video to refresh my memory. Thanks so much! Was just curious what you think a good number of streams to have for the first week or two? An answer would be appreciated so I know if I should up the budget . Thanks again man :)
Great share Andrew thanks! 1 - how do you track conversions from landing page to click-through (streams) - are you looking at the graphs and manually estimating? 2 - could you not create your own landing page using a different software? Cheers :)
Ran some quick-ish math out of curiosity. 7100 clicks x $0.25 cpc = ~$1775 total campaign cost (I think). $1775/41k streams = $0.04/stream. 3270 saves/$1775 = $2.72/save. Seems expensive IMO. I would love to see if your cost/save/fan engagement over time goes down, assuming you are building an organic base.
The real value is what happens after the campaign. In every case, the vast majority of streams happen after the campaign is over. A song that hits 50k during the campaign will generally have at least 200k a year later. In some cases it can be much better than this with algorithmic action.
Thanks Andrew, will follow this advice. I want to create some IG ads for a single i had out a few years ago but which wasn't marketed as well as it could be. But if I follow your advice in this vid, does it mean that my IG followers will all see these adverts or is it targeted at new people? To be honest, i'd prefer the latter because it will be a bit confusing to my fanbase why I'm suddenly marketing a track that's a few years old...
Hi, what's the advantage of using a list of like 43 countries for targeting instead of using 'Europe', 'North-America' etc? Wouldn't you reach a larger audience by using continents instead of having to define seperate countries? Just learning here, thanks for the great vids :)
Hey Andrew, appreciate your work. I'm curious, if I only plan on promoting on Spotify right now, am I better off just giving the direct song link to spotify on facebook ads or is there an advantage to giving a landing page that has the Spotify link there? thanks
You definitely want to use the landing page. You can't track conversions on Spotify directly, the landing page allows you to install a Facebook pixel and track conversion events. Without the pixel the campaign very likely will not work.
Hi Andrew, instead of linking the ad to a linktree-syle landing page, why not just use a direct Spotify song link so the song starts playing and you get the stream? Why link people to a linktree-style page and make them click again? I feel like you could lose the listener right there and then when they hit the landing page, instead of the song. I understand these type of landing pages provide analytics, but if you're only running ads on Facebook to get Spotify streams, what analytics do you need? You know they're coming from Facebook, there were no buttons to track and you get the stream.
Traffic campaigns are very susceptible to bot clicks, so the conversion campaigns filter this out. But to run a conversion campaign you can't use the Spotify link because you can't put a pixel on Spotify, so you use a landing page. Using the landing page / pixel also allows you to collect data and eventually build retargeting / lookalike audiences for people that convert - something you couldn't do with a traffic campaign direct to Spotify.
@@AndrewSouthworth Right. I forgot about the benefits of using the pixel for retargeting and lookalike audiences. True! Well, I tried an engagement conversion campaign to a website and I was able to use the direct Spotify link so I'll give it a try for a day or two and see how the streaming numbers do but for the sake of the retargeting and lookalike audiences I think I'll eventually switch it to a landing page as you suggest. I know my distributor DistroKid offers a linktree style landing page they call "HyperFollow" that can be tracked with a Facebook pixel and has analytics. Have you tried it?
Do you think it’s better to build an audience with VV that you can later retarget at any time with conversions or go straight to conversions from the start
Generally the vast majority of my conversions to Spotify are from cold traffic. I retarget my conversions and my video view audiences in other ways, such as warming them up with more content, driving them to an email list or showing them a product.
Currently it has 87k on Spotify, 25k on YT and 5k on Apple. The song didn’t do great algorithmically long term, but it’s still going to get around 40k streams in the next year at the current pace. All without any additional promotion or algorithmic activity. Some songs do much better than this and profit, others do much worse. But profit isn’t the goal of this anyways. Streaming growth in most cases is top of funnel audience growth. The followers across multiple platforms have real value long term.
@@AndrewSouthworth "But profit isn’t the goal of this anyways" Okay, thanks for clearing that up. For me that's the only goal. Then again I run a label so.. Have you tried buying Instagram story ads from influencers and content pages? That's similar to what I'm doing and I've grown my playlists to a total of 15k followers. Most of the songs in the playlists are mine and this currently pays my rent.
Thanks for the video!! I have one question though: After you've figured out that one ad works better than the other, should you turn off the less lucrative ad or does facebook automatically display the worse ad less?
i tend to puy my tier 1 countries as JUST - Australia, NZ, UK, USA.... all those other countries it's not really worth including because they'll eat up all the budget since every country is cheaper than the four i just mentioned. I put those other countries (germany, france, canada, italy, spain etc.) in tier 2, and then if I feel like it (which i usually don't) i put countries like south africa and mexico in tier 3 cause they just eat ALL the budget since they are soo cheap
I find sometimes France, Italy and Spain can do that, but Germany and Canada don't eat up the budget. It might be a genre difference though. Most of the time I don't even split up my tiers, and just let Facebook allocate budget. Sometimes i'll do a USA only campaign but generally I promote in the USA with different types of ads. Tonight on a consultation call I actually saw someone that had Tier 1 plus Mexico, and most of his budget went to United States. For some reason he was getting by far the most conversions in the US, and it worked quite well. Moral of the story, do whatever works for you haha.
@@AndrewSouthworth USA cpm is insanely high even with high CTR. It's funny how a horrible CTR but low cpm country ends up being much cheaper. FB says add relevancy effects cpm, but also recommend broad open targeting now.
Hey Andrew, thanks so much for this video, incredibly helpful as always! I got a question: I'm about to set up ads for a friend who's a musician as well. I find it super complicated how I can run ads from his account using his payment methods. do you have any advice on how this works? big thanks in advance! Simon
Yeah that’s a good point. In reality marketing data as a whole doesn’t show the quality of the song itself, just the marketability of the song. Sometimes the best music is hard to get people to check out.
I am seeing decent results with my FB ad campaigns but I'd like to see if there are further optimizations I can do which brings me to my question. Is it necessary to run though a landing page? It seems like not everyone who clicks the facebook ad and gets redirected to the landing page actually ends up clicking the smart link. There are two clicks for someone to get from facebook to actually streaming on spotify. It would be really nice to hear something about this, or if there is a video you made that talks about it, I'd love to know how to find it. As an independent artist i really want to maximize the value i get for my ad spend. Thanks! I love your videos and your teaching style.
Hi Andrew. Wondering how long you keep the multiple assets running while you test their effectiveness (i.e. verse, chorus etc)? Several days, a week? How long should it take for you to have a good idea which ones to keep and cull?
Greetings I been watching ur videos awhile and getting your ads now too... Question... What is the monetary benefit of "streams"? I see a tally of streams but do you make a profit above Facebook ad spend? And since it appears you barely do if at all what is the goal of this strategy? In other words why not create a followers system that has at least the promise of lower future ad spend? Appreciated
I made a video a month or two ago talking about the money side of streams, showing a campaign that actually had a 3X return on ad spend. However most campaigns will generally lose money. The goal isn't, and shouldn't be to make a profit with this. It's just not going to happen most of the time. The real value of these campaigns is in audience growth, both on and off Spotify. From running these campaigns i've gotten 13k Spotify followers, thousands of IG followers and thousands of YT subs on my music channel. I get DM's from people from the ads and see a certain percentage joining my mailing list. My recurring streams go up and my release radar gets bigger every release. Thats the real value of this. The money comes from how you monetize that attention and those followers. Whether it be merch, shows, a membership platform or whatever. Its definitely a long term game. There are different campaigns you can run to grow your email list and thats also a very useful thing to do because you can reach out to them at any time for free, assuming they stay on your list. However its the same problem as Spotify promotion - you don't make any money on that in the short term unless you have a sales funnel set up to throw those emails into right away.
probably a question that has been answered so many times before but do you still need your own website and domain to add a pixel to, or does a landing page work. i know it didn’t in the past but this video got me confused
So you don't need a domain name or website anymore. However if you don't use a custom domain name in your conversion ads you can't target most iPhone users. Therefore its highly recommended to set up a custom domain, but its fine to skip it for your first campaign if you're having trouble. You don't need a website at all for this though, the domain by itself is enough to set it up for iOS14.
Good video, but I'm curious if you're using Conversion APIs? With the onset of IOS restrictions, pixels don't really cover them right? Many people use Apple, isn't conversion APIs the new thing for better analytics as the event is tracked from server and not the web, so we may be hitting more audience?
So actually if Facebook sees the user is using an iPhone, they’ll still respect the data privacy even if it’s with conversion api. CAPI does help capture more conversions from as blockers and stuff, but it doesn’t get around ios14. With CAPI I’ve noticed maybe 5-10% more captures. So it’s quite small that’s because CAPI is most effective when you’re capturing emails, names, phone numbers and more from your site, like on sales campaigns.
@@AndrewSouthworth hello! Thank you for very helpful content. I’m curious about Vishal’s follow-up question - is there any benefit in 2023 to run conversion- instead of traffic (link click) campaigns? Or is there a clear downside to traffic campaigns?
Hey Andrew, or other viewers, Have you ever had an issue where where a campaign is not showing engagement notifications at all? My main ad I'm always getting notified on IG that ppl are liking the video or comment etc. The last few I get nothing even tho it shows its converting (verified on toneden). Am I not being notified? Are the conversions not real people??
So even when you created those 3 ads for Post Malone, Electronic etc to reach a further audience, Was it all just spending $10 a day still? Or more since you added more Ads?
You only spend as much as you want to spend. If you tell it $10/day at the campaign level, it will only spend $10/day across the entire campaign. The budget is split across all ads and ad sets contained within.
Hey Andrew, little conflicted about the part where you say “ if it’s your first time only run the ads on IG” - is IG generally better and I should turn my FB placements off? Or is this advice only for the beginners? Thanks Andrew S.
Generally this advice is for people just starting. IG seems to have higher quality traffic which is important when you're starting to train the pixel / campaign, but FB can often lower the cost per conversion depending on the genre. If you're seeing a loss in streams / listeners / saves from your landing page then switching to IG only would likely help.
Hey Andrew, What's your recommended breakdown of how much to spend in the first week vs the second week and so on? Like say we have 1000 to spend, should we evenly split that over 3 weeks, a month, 2 weeks, etc? What's the best strategy in your opinion?
Not Andrew, but I can tell you and anyone else with the same question that you will get worse results spreading your budget out evenly compared to front-loading the first week or two. The threshold that Spotify has for measuring a song's popularity is pro-rated, so 700 listeners in a week indicate more popularity than 700 in a month. Ultimately, your budget is not about a dollar amount, but results on Spotify. We aim for 100, minimum, Facebook conversions a day the first week, which usually turns into around 50 to 70 Spotify listeners a day for us (the cost and the results depend a lot on the countries you target - some countries are cheap, but the conversions never show up as listeners - we have fine-tuned our country list over time). How much 100 to 150 conversions cost depends on the CPR (cost per result - conversions). For us, our CPR is usually very high the first day and takes a few days or a full week to come down. If it takes over $100 to get 100 conversions the first day, it's worth it in the long run. If we can get to 150 conversions under $100 the first day, then we lower the budget in real time. From there, we adjust (lower) the budget every day with a goal to get to 700 to 800 listeners in the first two weeks. We did get to 700 listeners on Spotify for one track in the first week, but it cost us a lot more than waiting until the CPR comes down. Once the algorithm starts pushing your song out, you can lower your daily budget even more, which usually lowers the CPR even more. We've seen our CPR get as low as $0.15 and some days, even lower. Then you just keep your ads running at a lower daily amount, even $1, $2, or $5 a day. The CPR can get pretty low at that point so you can get a lot of conversions for less money. The lower rate has to do with Facebook having more data and the social proof on the ad, so don't edit your ad once you start promoting.
Thanks Andrew, this is really helpful content. Question: do you have any insight into why a campaign might perform well in terms of clicks but not in terms of conversions? For example: the link in my ad goes directly to my album on Spotify. I have currently about 700 clicks, but when I check the data in Spotify for artists it only shows 3 new listeners since setting the ad live. Do you have any tips for what the key things to troubleshoot would be? Thanks, Ethan
You'll want to switch from a traffic campaign to a conversion campaign, and instead of sending people directly to Spotify take them to a landing page (Hypeddit, FeatureFM, ToneDen) with your Facebook pixel on it. Traffic campaigns directly to Spotify don't work most of the time.
Ethan, you hate change your campaigns for conversions optimised for landing page views. But lika Andrew said you need to have a landing page where people can convert and you can see and gather data with you pixel
When you create these 9 individual duplications, are they each running as $10/day ads (essentially $90 a day) or do they all run within $10 and the total does not exceed $10/day?
I followed your instructions and created a campaign. It's been running for weeks, and the clicks are getting cheaper. Is it okay if, for my next release with a similar style, I just copy the campaign, adjust the Hypeddit Smartlink, and update the video trailer for the new song? Can I use what the Meta AI learned from the last campaign for new release? Or is it better to start the next campaign from scratch?"
Any tips on how to target religious interest like christian music fans. Since facebook removed religious interest and demographics its become difficult to do so
Hey Andrew! Is the difference between Facebook conversions and smart link service clicks caused by ad blockers preventing smart link from sending events to Facebook pixel? I have a good 30% difference between those(in favor of smart links obviously)
I have set up my custom domain via FeatureFM and have the domain verified - also set up FeatureFM custom conversions for ads But when I go to create an ad, for some reason in the ad set my custom conversions aren't showing up in the conversion event section even though my custom conversions are active Any way to resolve this? Love your work Andrew 😊
I tried Facebook ads it didn't perform or increase my streams. Got lots of likes and page followers but then facebook wants you to pay to reach them after they ve followed your page .
hi i have been following all your instruction but i get 0 conversation after almost a day and this message appears. Campaign's ad set may get zero Conversions Based on how you set up this ad set, we recommend trying the following to avoid getting zero conversions for your campaign can someone help me with that ?
How do you deal with audience overlapping on your fb ads? I want to run multiple campaigns with the same audiences. The audience size is over 100 million
It's a solid platform but I wouldn't use it for ads long-term because of the lack of custom domain support. I'd start with something like ToneDen and then eventually graduate to something like Hypeddit or FeatureFM.
We usually do both, sending ad traffic from a previous successful ad to a playlist with the new song at the top and then ads for the new song directly to the song. You get more saves, follows, and playlist adds if you send people directly to the song. But, it's nice to have cheap conversions the first day with an ad campaign that already has a low CRP going to a playlist. Also, the ratio of listeners for the new song to conversions is much lower when sending to a playlist.
Every time I start a campaign it goes on for less than a day and it restricts my ad account. I believe it’s because I’m using my music but distro kid copywriters it. How can I get arround this?
Hmm I don't think that DistroKid content ID is causing this, but if you think it is you could disable content ID in DK. It's possible that you have something in your ads that is getting rejected (swearing, FB logos, risky content), or if your ad account is quite new publishing a lot of ads at the same time can make FB suspicious.
I'm sorry man, I don't want to be disrespectful or rude to you with my comment. I hope this is fine. On this Campaign, you spent over 1700$ to get a song to 40K streams, in 3 months, where probably 85% of those are generated on Spotify itself via release radar, radio, private lists, etc, and not from the ADS. ROI (if only economic-wise) would be around 30$ and ~2 in terms of new fans. This is by far not a good campaign, at all. It's not performing well and it's not letting your music or fanbase grow. I would suggest spending the same amount of money on a few generic social campaigns pointing out your profiles and trying to get the ads seen by as many people as possible to get your socials on a buzz. People will then come over to Spotify or another DSP and will check your music, add to their playlists, save the track, etc. It's good to mention that the way how this campaign it's made is just perfect. But probably there are a few factors: the target is damn wrong, the SmartLink step is annoying for viewers (trust me, it is) cause they have to take extra steps to get to the music, or the music is not good.
I agree, just way too much money for not enough return, socially and money wise. Just paid 30 cents per person to listen to your song and then forget and move on. :( getting harder as an artist ngl
Actually the vast majority of the streams are from the ads, that I know for a fact. I disagree about the social profile ads, I’ve found they do not translate well to anything tangible off platform. Generic social campaigns are not the way to go. Additionally my click through rate on the landing page is like 90%, if it’s so annoying then why is it working so well? I’ve used these campaigns to generate millions of streams for myself and even more for hundreds of artists. I can say for a fact they work quite well. Appreciate the discussion, just disagree with your interpretation. The ROI discussion is a can of worms I cover in another video.
I would also expect this song to get to at least 250 on its own if I stopped all ads for it. Doesn’t make it profitable but that’s not really the point of these campaigns. The vast majority of the streams on a song come after the campaign is over.
So when you duplicate the adsets 3 times, and test 3 ads under each - is all of those governed by the overall campaign budget? You don't spend x9 the budget you set at campaign level, right, the system distributes the campaign budget to the ads under the adsets - is that understood correctly? Or does this come with the additional cost until you shut the worst performers off?
Did everything you did in all your videos. Got my CPC down to 18 cents. All seems well. Ad gets watched a lot yet I get close to 0 streams on my song however. So people click on the ad, click on Spotify (I got like 900 conversions) but I get almost NO streams from that, maybe like...50. So 900 conversions translate to maybe 50 streams, what am I missing? My link is set up correctly, so is my Pixel, I checked all of that, it all works, the landing Website ONLY links to Spotify, am I stupid or something or do people just get bored, click randomly on a landing page AND a spotify link and then immediately close their spoitfy??? That is completely nonsensical to me. At first I was super happy to see the low CPC, now I feel like I wasted my time...
Hard to say exactly what went wrong without seeing the campaign, but here are some common things that could cause what happened in your case: - Accidentally including Advantage+ Placements, seeing audience network burn your budget - Including countries that have a tendency to cause issues in ads, like India, Philippines, Algeria etc - Including 65+ in ages - Using Advantage +Audiences There are other things that can go wrong, but those are the most common. I'd look at breakdown data for countries, placements and ages to check for any weirdness.
@@defaulter6206 Kanye just spent $7,000,000 on a superbowl ad. If you get a record deal theyre gonna advertise you. Cocacola is worth billions becasue their advertisments. All day long you look at ads. You have the mind of a consumer. pitty pitty the poor consumer meant for a life of consuming.
Good Video, can you tell me how long you look wether the ad is good or bad ? 24 hours or More ? i run an ad 24 hours now but i have 1000 impressions but no spotify clicks ^^
In general 48 hours I wait before deciding if things are good or bad. Even after 48 hours the campaign will often still drastically improve day by day, but it's usually enough data to make a call on some ad sets at that point.
