How to Run Meta Ads For Music Promotion On Spotify (2025)

Transcript (auto-generated, may have mistakes):
00:00 Welcome to the ultimate guide to learn how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify and other streaming services.
00:05 If you want to learn how to pull numbers like this with the 9 million streams, 3.6 million streams here, 300,000 streams here, and then 50,000 streams in the first month and a half using Facebook ads.
00:18 This is the video for you. So just in case you have no idea how any of this works, we show people clips of our song They see our ad, they click listen now, we're taking to a landing page in which they click one of these buttons to jump over to the streaming platform.
00:30 And that's when Facebook counts it as a successful conversion. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to make a landing page just like this using a freely available platform that anyone can use.
00:39 I'm going to show you how to put your pixel on this page so that you can track conversions in your actual ad campaign and actually get results and cost per result here.
00:47 I'm going to show you how to build this campaign from scratch. I'm going to show you how to pick the audiences for it.
00:52 And I'm also going to show you how to set up your ad creatives, what types of ad credits you can use, and then how you can make this campaign a little more advanced further than the basic level I'm going to show you first for all of you newbies who are doing this for the first time.
01:04 Alright, so let's get into it. I'm going to share my screen here, and I'm starting from regular Facebook so that you know how to get into Facebook ads or meta ads.
01:12 You go to Facebook, you click these dots in the upper corner, and you scroll down and look for ads manager.
01:18 Click on that, it's going to take you to Adds a manager. Now, there's a lot of different intricacies. You might have a business account.
01:23 You might have a personal account. I'm going to gloss over that for now because most of you are just going to be good to go.
01:28 But here, you should have probably an empty add account unless you've been in here before. What we're going to be doing first is building our landing page just like this using a platform called SubmitHub links.
01:38 It's owned by SubmitHub, but it's a completely for free thing you can use in their site to make links that were super great for running ads for this exact purpose we're doing conversion campaigns.
01:49 It allows you to create a page that loads super fast and it can track pixel events to know when certain things are occurring on our page.
01:55 This is ads manager, but if you click this menu on the corner, all tools, you want to go to events manager.
02:02 The reason why we're going to events manager is the first thing we're doing is we're building this page. And we need to know when people actually take action on this page.
02:10 Facebook or meta doesn't own SubmitHub links, so they have no way of knowing what actions are occurring on the page.
02:16 By us installing our pixel, On our SubmitHub page, it allows Meta to see when people actually click this button and when they don't click that button.
02:26 So now we're an events manager. We're ready to start building our page. So go to SubmitHub links or go to SubmitHub.com.
02:32 I'll have a link down below and make a free account. Go to links here and then you'll be in this area.
02:38 So I'm going to go to links and you're going to want to click add a link. No, this is new.
02:43 One thing you'll learn about Facebook ads and all these platforms is they're changing constantly. This is a new interface. That's cool.
02:49 I'm going to do start with a Spotify URL. In this case, we're promoting a track. Alright, so here I am on one of my band's pages, and I'm just going to pick a song.
02:57 Let's say we're going to do claustrophobic. I'm going to click these three dots. I'm going to click share, copy, song link.
03:04 Now, keep in mind, you can do this exact same thing for a playlist, but for most of you is going to make sense to do this with a track.
03:12 But if you want to see the differences in that, you can watch this video here. Alright, so now we have a link created.
03:17 We're going to click edit so we can go into the settings. Make sure all of this correct. Make sure the links are fine.
03:21 You know, just double check. Things can go wrong here. Customize it to your heart's desire. Well, the important thing we're going to do right off the bat is we're going to go down to this pixel section.
03:29 We're going to do include a meta pixel. And then this is where we need to go grab that pixel. This is why I had you open up events manager.
03:37 Now if Your events manager glitches out like mine does and doesn't load if you go back to overview and then click on the pixel name, sometimes that works for whatever reason in the past month.
03:47 I haven't been able to just click data. Facebook's a glitchy platform, moral of the story. But either way, once you're here, you're going to see the name of your pixel, just up here in the corner, and then your ID.
03:57 This is your pixel ID. So all you have to do is copy that number, jump over back to Submit Hub links and paste it in.
04:06 Bam, now we have our pixel in there. And this explains how it works. So when people visit our SubmitHub page, just gonna fire page view.
04:14 When people convert on their page or click a button, like the Spotify play button here, it's gonna fire a view content event.
04:24 So I'm gonna click save. We're gonna open up this page, I'm gonna copy it. And this is more of an educational exercise, but if I go to test events, And I paste this link into the test events area.
04:37 If I go back here, we're going to see a page view. And if I click on a platform, we should see a view content and we do.
04:45 So this is what we want to use in the campaign. We don't care about how many link clicks we get in our ad.
04:50 We don't care how many page views we get in the landing page. We only care about how many people go through the landing page to a music streaming platform.
04:58 Now, if you want to learn more, About the Facebook pixel stuff. This is confusing and you want to understand better.
05:03 Check out this video right here where I cover everything musicians need to know about the Facebook pixel. It goes way deeper than this, but this is really all you need to understand going forward.
05:12 But if you want more info, go check out that video. So at this point we have our page. We can go back to ads manager and we can start constructing our campaign.
05:20 Take a deep breath. It'll all be over soon. And by the way, if you're already feeling overwhelmed and you would much rather have a one-in-one conversation with some about this stuff, I do have consultation links down below with either me or someone from my team, or if you prefer to have a course that
05:34 walks through this entire thing from start to finish, I have a link for that below, or if you'd rather just hire someone else to do it for you as well, I also have that link down below.
05:42 But for those of you who are feeling good so far and want to keep on chugging, let's keep on chugging.
05:47 So here we are in ads manager again. Again, we just went all tools ads manager. And then here we're going to click this green create button and do create.
05:55 We're going to choose engagement. We don't want their automatic stuff. So we're going to do a manual engagement campaign and now we're cooking.
06:02 So the structure of a campaign is that we have a campaign level. We have an ad set level and we have an ad level.
06:10 We can have multiple ad sets in a campaign and we can have multiple ads in an ad set. In fact, we, you're going to want multiple ads in an ad set.
06:18 So Let's keep chugging. You'll see what these different layers represent. So I'm going to call this streaming. This is how I would normally name such a thing.
06:27 The only other thing you're going to want to mess around with on this campaign page is the advantage campaign budget.
06:31 Turn that on and set it to $10 a day. That's the minimum I would recommend launching a campaign at. After it's running and optimized, you can pull it down to a dollar a day if you want, but when you publish it for the first time, I don't recommend going less than 10 a day unless you really, really have
06:48 to. And of course, the sky is the limit. Um, I don't like launching higher than $50 a day, but I will start like, let's say at 40 and if I have a bigger budget for whatever I'm working on, I might scale it.
06:59 I've had campaigns running at $300 a day, $400 a day. So the sky is the limit. There's just some care that goes into that.
07:06 So what I do is I click next down at the bottom. That's going to take us into the ad set level.
07:10 The first thing is our conversion location. We are not doing this on a messaging app. Our conversion location is on a website, namely our landing page, right?
07:21 That's a website. So we're choosing website. Leave the maximized number of conversions, whatever pixel you installed on the page, choose that pixel if you have more than one.
07:30 But if you recall, submit hub fires of view content event. So in this conversion event, the only thing submit hub is going to fire is view content for the action we care about.
07:41 So we need to choose view content. If you're using hyped it, It's not going to be this, it's going to be a hyped smart link click.
07:47 If you're using a feature FM, it's going to be a feature FM click. If you're using smart nor as it could be view content, or it could be essence smart link click.
07:54 Check out that pixel video I linked up above for more information on that, because I cover all those platforms in that video, including submit hub links.
08:02 Here we have audience and advantage plus audience. I don't like Facebook's new advantage plus audience stuff I find it just ruins most of the campaigns that use it so we want to switch to original audience options at least for campaigns like this if you're doing a purchase campaign or a lead generation
08:17 campaign trying to get email addresses trying to sell products you can use advantage plus audiences but for these streaming campaigns you want to use original original audiences don't trust Facebook their advantage plus audiences suck for this type of campaign So now we have a regular old school audience
08:33 setup. And we want to go down to our locations. We're going to click edits. And I have a preset here.
08:40 I'm going to go browse. And I'm going to add Tier 1, 2 May 2023. I don't think I've changed my country since then.
08:47 And I'll scroll through this here so you can see what countries I'm targeting. Tier 1 is essentially the most expensive countries on earth.
08:55 But they're also more valuable for a lot of people and they actually pay significantly better on streaming. Tier 2 is countries that stream really, really well.
09:03 For example, Brazil and Mexico stream very, very well, but they also pay very, very well, but they're way cheaper to advertise too.
09:10 So this is the tier 1 tier 2 list here. I do include a spreadsheet in my course that's down below that I update whenever my country list changes.
09:19 So if you always want my updated a country list, you can grab my course down below and that has it in there, but that's my current one for you.
09:25 Ages, this is going to highly depend on your music. As a broad rule, if you have no idea, just do like 18 to 50 and let Facebook store it about.
09:33 If you have an older demographic, maybe 18 to 55. But, uh, don't do 65 plus ever as your first campaign.
09:41 If you really think 65 plus makes sense, at the very last resort, capital at 64. But most of you, it'll be like 18 to 50 probably makes sense.
09:49 Now, this is where we start getting into fun stuff. So if your eyes have been glossing over this whole time, this is where things get a little more exciting.
09:55 So, first we're going to do is I'm going to type in Spotify. The purpose of this is we're trying to just get people that like music streaming, or have a higher probability of being interested in Spotify.
10:04 Now, this is super important. Don't miss this. You want to click Define Further here. See? I'm going to zoom in just to make it more important.
10:11 Define Further. So it's Spotify and Muscle also Match. This AND section, they have to like the Spotify and whatever you put in here.
10:20 So, what we're going to do is we're just going to put some bands who either you sound like or bands whose fans you think have a high probability of enjoying your music.
10:32 This can be not every band's in here. If you're doing like some new genre, it's probably not going to be in here.
10:39 So you have to get creative in some circumstances. For example, every waking moment, I might put in, like, Benjamin. I might put in, stained.
10:51 I might put in, I prevail. I might put, oh, actually, there's two I prevails. Oh, whatever. I might put in, uh, North Lane.
11:02 I might put in, Tool. And then once I have a couple in there, I can click Suggestions. And I'm just kind of going down the list of grabbing bands that I think fans of these bands.
11:12 Well, like my band, because I like a lot of these bands, I know that my music has a good overlap with all of them.
11:20 Um, they're not perfect fits, they're just reasonably close. Like, looking at this list, tools sounds nothing like Dodd's Mac. Architect sounds nothing like Bermina Horizon.
11:29 But they're all in the ballpark. And I would say in terms of where you're going, um, As a starting point, there's no magic audience size.
11:36 Like it's the audience size that works best for one person might not work best for the next. So as a broad rule, have more than a million people here and have less than, let's say, 40 million just to give you a starting point.
11:49 And the next thing we need to do with our last thing on the ad set is we need to define our placements.
11:53 And just start with Instagram only, just to keep it simple. Instagram I found is a higher traffic quality. So I'm gonna choose Instagram only, but specifically, the Instagram placements I want are feed, explore, stories, and reels, and that's it.
12:08 Those four Instagram placements are it. Those are the most reliable. They're places where people go to kill time, and they're vertically formatted videos for the most part.
12:19 So the way I would name this, I'm gonna call this tier one slash two for the countries. IG, for the fact it's running Instagram only, I'm gonna call this artist.
12:30 So the first thing is set your Facebook and Instagram pages. If they're not showing up, you may have to link them and they'll be a button here to link them together.
12:37 But I already have mine. We're creating an ad, manual upload, single image or video. If you remember, turn off multi advertiser ad, but it's not a big deal if you leave it on and then go down to add creative ad media ad video.
12:54 Now I already have videos uploaded. If you need to upload them, click the upload button. I'm gonna click CL, and we'll see the different types of videos I've used for this band.
13:03 So, one style of video that we've tried is lyric videos. We were making lyric videos for a lot of our stuff, and so we had lyric video ads made.
13:17 So, just a lyric video, and these can actually work really well. They might not work best for you, but they also might, so it might be worth trying them if you already have lyric videos.
13:25 One thing that I tend to do most often is using Just vocal performance clips. You can see I'm literally in the same room that I'm in this video in front of the same, same everything except for a different shirt on.
13:36 It's just me singing in this room. And that's the style it's in the go towards. You can have like stock footage ads.
13:43 You can have visualizer ads. You can use music videos as your ads. You can use live footage as your ads.
13:48 But you want your videos to be engaging and you want there to be movement. It has to be a video.
13:53 It can't just be a static image. That does not work in my experience. It's boring as hell and it just doesn't work.
13:59 The videos that you're using your ads are the most important thing about the campaign aside from the song itself. So don't skimp on the videos.
14:09 Um, I tend to turn off these advantage plus creative enhancements because I don't trust meta to change my ads on my behalf without telling me.
14:15 And the next thing we need to do, you could put in primary text. I found this actually is not that important.
14:20 So I might do something like For fans of alternative metal, or I might do a call out lyric line, like a really captivating lyric line or a single sentence description of who might like this song.
14:31 But if you go to website URL, this is where we're going to put in our link down here, website URL.
14:37 And lastly, our call to action. This is the button that shows up on the ad is listen now. And at this point, we actually have a publishable campaign.
14:45 I'm going to name this here, and I'm just going to call this verse one, but we could publish this and get going, but we don't want to publish it yet.
14:51 And the reason is, We want multiple ads. We have no way of knowing which videos are going to perform best, so we're gonna want multiple.
14:58 And the way we do that, is if I click these three dots, so I'm gonna click duplicate, and I'm gonna make two more copies.
15:06 And if you're doing this, I'm gonna say, do at least three videos. You can do it with one, but you're not gonna wanna ever do it with one.
15:15 Because you just don't know what ads are gonna work best. And no matter what, don't just try one part of the song.
15:20 So I would say, Try a course, yes, but also try verse, and also try a pre-course or build up. Whatever different parts of the song you have, you want to try them.
15:28 So basically in each of these ads, you just go to them, and you just delete the video, and add a new video.
15:35 So you go on, add video, choose whatever other video you're going to add, I'm just going to click a random one, because I don't, I don't, this is just an example for you, and add it, and then go to the next one, and add it, et cetera, right?
15:47 And so you have all your three ads. If you're getting errors like this, it could mean That there's actually a problem with your video, but it could also mean that meta is just kind of a nightmare sometimes.
15:58 Meta has a bunch of mistakes. But I'm gonna try just choosing a different one. See if the error grows away.
16:03 In this case, the error one away. But you look into those because sometimes the errors are nonsense and sometimes they actually are very important.
16:09 So that's the ads side. And this, once you have the three ads in here, this is a publishable campaign that I feel pretty confident having you try as your first attempt.
16:21 Now, before we get into how we can make this campaign a little more sophisticated, a little more advanced, I do want to encourage you to try this approach as your first campaign.
16:28 Basically, having one audience, which is a whole bunch of stuff in it as your first run, just because there's a lot to learn here.
16:35 I don't want you getting so overwhelmed dealing with so many moving parts that you have a really bad experience and don't do this again.
16:41 I'd rather you start here and then make it more complicated as you get comfortable. For example, The way we're going to complicate it here and make it more sophisticated, um, is I'm just going to go to this audience and I'm going to click these three dots again and quickly duplicate it.
16:55 And effectively what we've done, you can see we now have two audiences. If I close this out, you have artist group one, that's when we already had, and then we have artist group one dash copy and that's our new one here.
17:07 So all we have to do to further complicate this campaign is, uh, come down to the targeting and delete all this stuff.
17:15 I'm gonna do to find further again, so now we have an empty Spotify AND. And I'm gonna try alternative metal.
17:22 The genre. They don't have every genre in here, but just for perspective, they have alt metal, new metal, prog metal, metal core, alt rock, heavy metal, rock, thrash metal, hard rock, black metal, post-hard core, death metal, gothic rock, right?
17:33 So they have a lot of stuff. You're not gonna find email hip-hop. It's just too new. So you have to get a little creative in certain certain circumstances.
17:41 Uh, you won't find like shoe gaze, I don't think. Uh, it's just for whatever reason, it's like too niche or too new, so you got to get creative in situations like that.
17:51 But remember, you don't have to be accurate, you don't have to be perfect at least. You need to just be in the general realm.
17:57 Uh, if you get a warning like this, this is just kind of a side tangent, ignore it. Uh, you will get this the first time you're running a campaign with a certain event.
18:06 So I don't use, in this ad account, I don't use Submit Hublinks, I use Feature FM. So I've never actually used view content, and then I can't paint before.
18:15 So it's telling me like, hey, we don't know what this is going to do. You might get zero. If I switch this to feature, if I'm click, it's not going away, but I feel like if I refresh the page of my might prove me wrong, make me look like an idiot.
18:30 But either way, I know for a fact, yeah, it's make me look like an idiot. Either way, I know for a fact that this would run and be reasonably accurate.
18:37 So ignore the messages like that. Um, meta, You know, as you might have gotten across from my tone about meta, they're, they have a kind of a buggy platform.
18:46 And they don't make the best recommendations. So the way I would title this is alt metal. And then we can further complicate it again.
18:53 Duplicate. Now, actually, you want to typically, I'll click on quickly duplicate, just because it allows you to copy faster. That's why it's called quickly duplicate.
19:01 And then we just literally do that again. Come down here, maybe I'll try metal core. Sure. You know, obviously put more thought into this, what you'd want to do.
19:09 Um, try to keep your audience sizes roughly similar. This is 15 million. This one's 12 million. This is 16. So all, to me, those are all basically the same.
19:20 Anything like 10 to 30 is the same. Anything 5 to 15 or 1 to 15 is the same. You don't want to have a 5 million on a 50 million.
19:27 It's, it's too big of a difference. Um, you can do it in a pinch, but ideally you would try to keep them somewhat similar.
19:34 So the purpose of doing this Now we have these three audiences, and if I close this out, if we look at this graph here, you're going to see, we get all these data points on a per campaign basis, meaning if I go to one of these other campaigns, I have, let's say, fear, I guess, I'll look at maximum data
19:51 here. So we see fear, I spent about $1,000, where I have $1,042. And you can see, for each of these audiences, alt metal, 22 cents.
20:02 Metal hardcore bands, 38 cents, right? Way more expensive. Why? Who knows? Doesn't mean it was more accurate. It just means for whatever reason it did better.
20:12 And that's why it can be good to try multiple things. You can just throw everything in one. But if you do that, you don't know what actually worked.
20:21 And what I mean by that is, let's say this one, uh, was the winner. If I look in here, you're gonna see that I don't have just one target in here.
20:31 I have all these bands, so I don't actually know which one of these bands did the trick. And that's fine.
20:36 You don't have to know exactly what did the best. But it's nice, right? Like, it's nice that I know that alt metal was one of the best winners here.
20:46 In fact, I don't know why I turned alt metal off and kept band group on. I must have had a reason or maybe, The cost just grew over time.
20:54 That also happens about the point being, this is why you split it. So you can see how different targets work for you.
20:59 And then as you're doing campaigns over time for different songs or for the same song, you start to learn a little bit about who likes your music, who doesn't like your music.
21:08 And you can maybe apply some of the stuff to feed not only future campaigns, but maybe to campaigns on other ad platforms.
21:14 So if you're going over to run some YouTube ads, You have some starting point of what to do. If you're jumping over to TikTok ad, you have some starting point of what to do.
21:21 If you're talking about your band, you kind of a better feel for, okay, fans of these bands like me and fans of these bands don't like me, it might influence your branding and your PR statements or whatever.
21:32 Um, you know, don't obsess over this data because Facebook's an auction, so it's not just about what's accurate, it's also about what's cheap.
21:41 But it is great data to know, especially on meta and optimizing, like improving your campaigns from song to song to song.
21:47 And just pulling up a different campaign here. This one had three ad sets, 22 cents, 27 and 84 cents, right?
21:53 There's a pretty clear alt metal. Now we've seen alt metal show up twice. So this is one of the reasons why I try alt metal for every single one of this band's songs, because it always works pretty well.
22:03 You can see that I have these two turned off. And so essentially what I recommend doing is as you're running this campaign, You know, let's say you run this at a bare minimum, when you publish it, let it run for two to three days without touching a damn thing.
22:15 No matter how brutal it is, commit to two to three days. But after that two to three days, maybe you turn off the worst one or two in terms of cost per result, but then replace them.
22:25 So click duplicate on the other. Let's say you turn off these two, come here and click duplicate, and then replace the two you turned off with new guesses, because you don't know which targets are going to work best if this is your first time.
22:36 So what you were trying to do is just kind of like Keep trying stuff. And as cost-effective manner as possible.
22:42 And for me, I found every two to three days is kind of a good window, turns some stuff off and adds some new stuff in.
22:47 And that's a reasonably good amount of time to have enough data. You can wait more than that. It's just what I don't want you to do is I don't want you to make a campaign and panic after 12 hours because it's expensive and then tweak a bunch of stuff and then panic again in the next day because it's 
23:02 expensive. What happens is if you keep tweaking the campaign and keeps resetting. The learning. Like it literally needs multiple days.
23:09 Those first, the first day is almost always the worst by like a mile. And the second day is also usually pretty brutal.
23:16 Sometimes you can have great results in the first day, but it's actually pretty rare. Uh, in fact, let me pull something up for you.
23:22 So take a look at this graph right here. This is a fairly typical graph. Sometimes it's more extreme than this, sometimes it's more subtle than this, but you can see the first day.
23:29 Was 43 cents, and the next day was 34, and then it kind of kept coming down in a plateaued around this kind of mid-low 20s range, and it'll kind of weave up and down over time and go up and down like if I extend this to the rest of September.
23:42 You see it eventually kind of crept back up in certain days, but this is all normal. This is normal behavior.
23:48 The first few days are pretty brutal. Usually things plateau for a while, there might have been other reasons why things have been up and down, like I don't know why this got turned off for a bit, maybe Halloween and something to do with it, maybe this was a fluke day, but overall it's kind of this kind
24:01 of like converging thing going on, where the first few days like I've had campaigns for the first day is $1.50.
24:08 The second day is 80 cents, and by the third day, everything's down to 30 cents, and everything's honky-dory, so. Now, as I said before, if you're still really confused about all this pixel stuff, check out this video right here to see everything you need to know about the Facebook pixel.
24:21 And as I said before, if you prefer an organized course with access to a community where you can ask questions, and my country list, that's always up to date, check out my course spot if it goes between right here or if you prefer one-on-one calls or just to hire someone else to do this for you, check
24:33 my links down in the description. But I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for watching, smash that like button, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.
24:38 Bye.