Please stop running music ads like this
Hey friends! I saw a large music industry content creator post a video talking about how artists could run Meta ads to promote their music. Given that this is very much my area of expertise, I was expecting to nitpick...
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
I saw a large music industry content creator post a video talking about how artists could run Meta ads to promote their music.
Given that this is very much my area of expertise, I was expecting to nitpick some details but was overall stoked to see someone giving artists good advice. But I wasn’t expecting her advice to be wrong in almost every way.
So wrong, that if any artist were to run a campaign like this it would waste 99% of their money, and probably lead to them concluding running ads just doesn’t work.
What did they do wrong? Well i’ll tell you…
Meta Business Suite Ads
The first thing this creator did was build her campaign in Meta Business Suite, sometimes this is called ‘Ads Center’.
Don’t do this.
You want Meta Ads Manager.
The reason this is bad, is it doesn’t give you full control of your campaign. You can’t choose every campaign objective, setup a structure of ads and ad sets, setup pixel tracking etc. It’s incredibly limited in what you can accomplish.
In my opinion there is no reason to ever run ads from here when you could just use Meta Ads Manager.
Traffic Campaigns
You may have noticed in Meta Business Suite one of the objectives was ‘Get more website visitors’. This will setup what is known as a ‘traffic campaign’ that optimizes for ‘link clicks’. Basically, it tries to find people to click on the link in your ad.
This creator was sending people to a Spotify link, so she clicked on this option.
On the surface, this sounds like it makes sense.
But it doesn’t. It will burn all your money on bot clicks that don’t translate to streams. I’ve literally seen 1,000 link clicks cause less than 50 Spotify streams. Whereas 1,000 conversions on a landing apge would generally cause more than 1,000 Spotify streams.
In a nutshell, there are a lot of bots on social media. They exist for many reasons, but they sometimes click on random posts to look human, and they can click on your ads. While they’re programmed to interact with the Facebook and/or Instagram platform, they aren’t generally programmed to interact with a landing page (website).
These bots will click on anything, but they most likely aren’t going to load a website, and they very likely aren’t going to interact with that website.
So you can imagine why optimizing your campaign around link clicks could end up in bot hell. However, if you optimize for a conversion on a landing page, it filters out bots naturally because they aren’t going to interact with your page.
There can be more nuance to this but i’ll leave it at that.
Advantage+
Meta has been pushing more and more for advertisers to use ‘Advantage+’ audiences, placements and creative. These settings allow their AI to take more control over your campaign settings.
These settings can actually work pretty great for lead generation and sales campaigns, but in my experience they completely ruin campaigns that aren’t impossible for a bot to spoof. A bot isn’t going to give you their phone number, and a bot isn’t going to make a purpose on your website, so a bot can’t ruin a lead gen or sales campaign.
But when you use these settings on your streaming campaign (or most other types of campaigns) they end up putting you in bot hell again.
For example when you leave on Advantage+ audiences, even when you select an age range like 18-44, their AI will often spend most of your money on 65+.
I’ve seen cases where a modern hip-hop song ends up with almost all of its budget going to 65+, and it has no streams on Spotify. This is the type of thing a human would never do, but for some reason Meta’s AI decided to do it.
Conclusion
I’m constantly seeing people make these mistakes when I do consulting calls. So don’t feel bad if you’re also making these mistakes.
But assuming you want to run things the right way, make sure you’re using Meta ads manager, a landing page with a pixel installed, a conversion campaign, and keep advantage+ placements turned off.
In this video I show the entire process:
If you prefer a written version of this, check out this blog post on my website: https://andrewsouthworth.com/meta-ads-for-music-spotify-growth-step-by-step-tutorial/
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency Southworth Media specializes in running Meta conversion ads to promote your music on streaming platforms, email list growth, tour promotion and more.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
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