Inside a $730 music streaming ad campaign
A $730 USD ad campaign in July 2024 promoted a song that reached 22,000 Spotify streams, 1,636 saves, and 1,796 playlist adds within a month, showing steady growth and algorithmic playlist traction.
By Andrew Southworth
Happy Monday!
Today we’re going to talk about a song I promoted with ads in July 2024.
This might seem random, but people are always asking me for examples of music streaming ad campaigns i’ve run recently. And for examples that are exceptionally amazing or have exceptionally high budgets.
To me this represents an average type of campaign with a solid but average budget, that got solid results.
Overall for this campaign we spent $1,000 CAD, which is about $730 USD. So far the song on Spotify has 22k streams, was saved to 1,636 people’s libraries and was added to 1,796 playlists. The song has a 4.4 streams per listen rate, which is quite awesome for about a 1 month period of time.
Even though the ad campaign is over, I would expect in about 6 months the song will have ~44k streams, and in about 12 months about 66k streams on Spotify - even if the algorithm doesn’t kick off strong.
Speaking of the algorithm, we did actually hit all the usual algorithmic playlists already.
If any of these maintain or grow over that period the song could have double, triple, 5X or more than those projections. The reason why the song grows even if we don’t hit a strong algorithmic push is because of recurring fans, look at the source of streams:
That ‘listeners own playlists and library’ section is just fans re-listening to the song after that first save / playlist add.
One thing to note about ad campaigns, is that they should always make sense and be trackable. In this case we had an issue with the ad account where it shut down near the end for a few days, and look at these screenshots:
Dollars in CAD, CPA is $0.37 USD per conversion
You can see that if we look at saves, the graph aligns perfectly during that period of time the ads weren’t running. Since saves can only be done once by a new listener, saves are directly proportional to new listeners coming in. When ads stop, saves stop, but streams and listeners do not stop.
Additionally if you’re having trouble interpreting your data with just streams or saves, you can break down data by country. In this case the exact same countries we used in our ad campaign align with what we see on Spotify for Artists.
Was this campaign worth it? To me the answer is yes. This was the best performing new song by the artist in a year on streaming and it’s on a great path to grow going forward. Remember that it’s not only about streams on this song, we also have:
Spillover streams to other songs in the artist’s catalog
Spotify followers increased by ~200
5,000 additional streams on Apple Music / YouTube Music
Instagram followers grew by ~150
Campaigns can do much better than this, but they can also do much worse. Overall i’d consider this a ‘solid’ or a ‘good’ campaign. But how good a campaign is often subjective and is relative to other songs an individual artist has run campaigns for.
If you want to learn how to run campaigns like this using Meta ads yourself, check out my course Spotify Growth Machine here or book a call with us if you need 1-on-1 help here. If you have a larger budget we can run your campaign for you here.
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