Meta Ads For Music - $3k Album Campaign
This Meta ad campaign promoted an album across all DSPs with a $3,000 budget, achieving a $0.21 cost per conversion and strong Spotify engagement. Testing multiple ad sets and creatives helped identify a clear winner driving the best results.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today I want to walk you through a Meta ad campaign we’re running to promote an artist’s album. It’s got a great cost per conversion, awesome engagement data on Spotify and a decently big budget.
Specifically this is what some call a ‘Spotify conversion campaign’, but in reality the campaign is for promoting all DSPs - just like how my course Spotify Growth Machine is for much more than just Spotify (and it shows you everything you need to know to run campaigns like this).
First, let’s look at the Meta ad results:
$0.21 per conversion is a great result. Here are my standards for costs per conversion, at least when we’re considering Tier ½ countries:
Under $0.20 - Amazing!!!!
$0.20-$0.30 - Great
$0.30-$0.30 - Good
$0.40-$0.50 - Meh
Not every song can hit the ‘great’ range. In this case we had an album so we could test multiple songs if we needed to.
And here’s the ad set testing. We ended up with one ad set dominating by a mile. Usually I don’t turn off every ad set except one, but in this case that one ad set was smashing everything else.
The naming structure we use in our ad sets represents the country selection, placement selection, targeting option and style of ad creatives. You can see we had 6 different styles of ad creatives, each of which would have 4 videos typically. Why 24 total ads? Because ad testing is typically the biggest area you can improve your campaigns.
Unfortunately I can’t show the ad creatives because it gives away the artist name. But they’re not any different than the usual ad creatives I run. You’ll find example ad creatives in my course Spotify Growth Machine, and you can hire my team at Southworth Media to make ad creatives for you here.
Here’s a taste of the targeting setup in the winning ad set:
Now let’s take a look at the Spotify stats for the album, over the same time period.
Keep in mind the vast majority of streams you get from an ad campaign happen after the campaign is over. Due to fans re-listening and/or algorithmic traction. If we turned off this campaign right now, and spent no more money, 12 months from now this album would have at least 180,000 streams in my experience.
On average each person is listening to 5 songs from the album, and we actually have more saves than listeners so far. The reason for this is that some people save the album, therefore every single track, and some people save just several individual songs. Either way, each person can save more than 1 track.
There are also more factors, these are the profile level stats:
But perhaps more importantly, look at how we’re living up the radio algorithm. It went form zero algorithmic to nearly 1/3rd of these streams being algorithmic.
Now is this campaign successful? That ultimately comes down to your goals as an artist. It isn’t popping off algorithmically like other songs that perform this well on ads do, however the engagement data is awesome and we see a very high percentage of fans relistening to the songs by this artist.
This campaign is losing money. While it could profit over the next several years as fans continue to engage and algorithms keep happening, there is a good chance it won’t profit. However the fan growth has value. You can’t tour without fans, you can’t sell merch without fans, you can’t sell Patreon memberships without fans.
This is a campaign to gain fans, not necessarily make money (although you can technically do that too). The artist is super happy, which ultimately means it was a success.
If you’re looking to learn how to run campaigns like this yourself, check out this video:
And if you’re more of a fan of organized courses, with a bunch more context, access to my country list and a community where you can ask questions, check out Spotify Growth Machine.
New Content
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Let's talk about the side effects of running Meta ad campaigns for music promotion. Meaning, even if you're driving people to Spotify what happens to Apple Music and YouTube music?
Ryan Shuck is a platinum selling musician and co-founder of Orgy, Julien-K and Dead by Sunrise. He was the lead singer of Adema and has writing credits with Korn. In this interview he talks about his journey and how being a major label artist compares to being an independent artist.
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My ad agency specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
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Turn Meta ads into real streaming growth
Learn the campaign structure Andrew uses to promote songs without guessing at every step.