How Meta's Andromeda Update Has Changed Music Marketing

A lot of people have been asking me my thoughts on Meta's new Andromeda update and how it applies to musicians running ads promoting their music. And it's been a lot. Andromeda update changes everything. The way you're running your campaigns here is no longer correct. I think meta ads could be dead due to the Andromeda update. Been struggling a lot since the Andromeda update. This person says their cost per conversion get five times better. It looks scary when you look it up. And you know, if you know me, you know that I do consulting. And so when I'm talking to people one-on-one, they're asking me like, "What am I doing differently from the Andromeda phase?" So in this video, I'm going to show you what my numbers have been like and talk a little bit about what I've been doing differently over the last few months. But I want to start off by showing you a poll that I ran in my community section on YouTube. Have you seen any difference in performance since the Andromeda update on Meta? 20% said yes. So not that it's better or worse, just that have you seen a difference? 15% said no. And 65% said what update. So, uh, for essentially the people who are aware of the Andromeda update, it's kind of split on if they're seeing any difference at all. And then the vast majority of people just haven't even noticed that there's an update at all or any difference essentially. This here is one of my ad agency's ad accounts. Um, depending on how working with people, we either run stuff through their ad account or if they don't have anything set up and or they have a lower budget, we run it through our ad account. So, this is one of those ad accounts that we use. These are all campaigns that have been launched in the last month. Okay. Okay, so all these campaigns have been launched in the last month and their this is like their performance in the last month up to November 16. So all of this is post Andromeda update and you know you're going to see a big spread of performance here. Let me zoom in. 16 cents 344. Uh by the way, if you're brand let me let me give you a little 5 seconds of context here. On my channel I have a bunch of videos talking about running ads support your music and streaming platforms. I will link to one of those video tutorials here. So if you're new to this, you can check it out. There are a million different types of ads you can run. I might do future videos about different types of campaigns. Maybe I'll talk about some of that here. But in this case, I want to focus on the like streaming campaigns, artists promoting their music and streaming platforms because that's what most of you are running. That's the reality. Most artists are running that type of campaign. There are other campaigns like lead generation campaigns, tour promotion campaigns, sales campaigns to sell your merch or Patreon subscriptions or whatever. This is the most common campaign that artists run. So that's what we're focusing on for now. So check that video. I'll link I'll link that video at the end screen as well. Um, let's get into this. So, this is all performance and and typically a what I consider a great performance is 20 to 30 cents a conversion. There's a little nuance here depending on what countries are being targeted and all that, but if it's my normal country spread, um, 20 to 30 cents is great. 30 to 40 is good. 40 to 50 is like meh. Over 50 is different levels of of bad depending on the countries. Again, under 20 is phenomenal. And that's kind of always been the case. It was the case a few years ago. What's the case now? So, these are all new campaigns. Uh 19, we have 34, 39, 51, 23, 29, uh 51, 23. So, like we have we have a bunch of good ones. We have a bunch of great ones. We have a bunch of not so great ones, right? This isn't unusual. Uh like we even have a dollar10 one here. We have a 26-cent one here. I'm not scrolling up all the way just because when stuff gets too new, like we start getting into it's just bad because it's like been launched in the last few days. So, all of these, as I said, have been launched in the last month, but I'm skipping ones that have been launched in the last week because those ones just take some time, right? I'll give you a little preview here. These ones are This one's only spent $70. Uh, typically by the time it spends like 150 like this one, it should be better. So, like this one is suffering and we're we're we're trying to fix that, right? Anyways, uh some campaigns do better, some campaigns do worse. Some campaigns you run all the way to their planned budget, and some campaigns you end early because they're doing so bad. Like this dollar 10 one, the client that this campaign's for, unless we can pull a magic trick and really turn things around, we're probably going to tell them that we should turn this off and pivot to a different song, right? That's the reality of it. This one, they're adding more money. That's why we're spending $200 a day because it's doing so crazy good. And this is actually only tier one countries, so it's actually even more phenomenal. And I won't get into the weeds and all of this. Um, but like if if you you've been around running meta ads for any period of time, you'll notice that this is pretty much the same spread of performance that you would have seen like a while ago, like 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. This is like normal. You get you get some winners, you get some losers, you get some mid. And usually the way I normally kind of assume it is if an artist releases 10 songs, they're going to have two winners, two absolute losers, and six on some bell curve in the middle. Right? So if you ever seen a a bell curve, right? You have a couple winners, a couple losers, and a bunch that are somewhere spread in the middle just because that's life, right? Some stuff wins, some stuff loses. even if it's the same artist making the same quality music in the same genre. It's just some songs are more marketable, some songs are not, and some artists will do better and some artists will do worse. But that's what I assume going in. And that's kind of my handy guide that like, hey, if if we just got a stellar performing song, we're probably not going to get another one with the next song, right? So, let's milk this one. Or if we're getting a bad one, hey, let's pivot to a different song, we're probably not going to get another awful one. We we're either going to get a great one or we're going to get somewhere in the middle, assuming the music's great, right? If the music sucks, then it's going to be bad most of the time. So, you see my performance and and really my answer is like I'm seeing the same performance now as I was before. Uh the only reason that I noticed that the Andromeda update existed is because of everyone messaging me panicking about the Andromeda update, which I understand. But then when they started messaging me, I started looking into it and then I started realizing like, oh, this is kind of weird that I'm not seeing any difference. Now, as I said, I do talk I do consulting and every time that I've hopped in a call with someone like, "Hey, my ads haven't been working since the Andromeda update." What we do, we look at an old campaign pre- Andromeda updates, which I think was October, I think, was the official global rollout of the Andromeda update, and we look at, let's say, like 6 months ago, right? So, we look at like May or June, look at their best campaign running then, and we just basically relaunch it. Same ads, close as we can possibly get with the targeting. might have removed a lot of targeting options or consolidated them and everything else exactly the same that we possibly can control and then you just compare them, right? Because that's like a perfect apples to apples comparison every single time. Every like this isn't like a nine out of 10 I'm rounding up. Every single time I've talked to someone about the Andromeda update and we've set up an old campaign to see what the difference is. It did exactly the same. We're within like a margin of error of the previous one. And it it ended up being the conclusion. And I don't have follow-ups with everyone, so I don't like I there' be people we set this up and then I I I haven't talked to them yet to see how it went. But all the people that I have seen follow-ups with, it ended up just being that the recent campaigns they ran just weren't hitting. Meaning like the song just wasn't hitting and they just needed to pivot to different tracks. I've I've seen people who said the Andromeda update was messing their ads and they launched a new song. the new one did great. Uh, and then also the people that have tried launching an old one and launched it, they learned that, okay, it was it's actually just these songs. These other songs were perfectly fine. It's just this new song. Now, that all being said, I want to show you some things that that I have changed over the past few months, not because of the Andromeda update, just because it's been kind of the way things have been going, and also talk about some reasons why maybe I in particular, my agency hasn't seen difference in per differences in performance since the Andromeda update. It seems to be that if you're if you're running certain types of campaigns, the Andromeda update may be more of a thing or not. But anyway, let's get into it. I have a new empty campaign here. I want to show you some some tricks. I guess typically use advantage campaign budget. This is something that I do sometime most of the time and sometimes I don't turn this on. And and by the way, some of these features I I think are going to be inconsequential and some of them are going to be important. This is one that I don't actually think matters when it comes to the Andromeda update as much. What this feature does, it allows Meta to optimize the spend across different audiences. And I use this most of the time. And I think this could be one thing that actually helps because you're the whole point of Meta's Andromeda update is that they're they have this new machine learning algorithm that can match ads to people more accurately. And so essentially they're saying like their AI has gotten really good at matching the right ad to the right person in that audience. So, if you give metamorph flexibility to bounce between your audiences, this should be an improvement versus what you're doing before, not a a problem. And so, if you've been trying to manually control the differences between your adsets, that's one possible theory as to why maybe you're seeing worse results, if you are in fact seeing worse results. But, I've always been doing this for years. I've I've been using advantage campaign budget. It used to be called campaign budget optimization. So, that's one small thing. I'm not 100% positive on that, but that's one theory. The next thing that's quite new in meta is this advantage plus audience thing. This can look different depending on what version of meta ads you're on. Sometimes it'll say advance plus audience audience controls. There'll be two different sections. Sometimes it looks like this and there's one section. Sometimes it'll say switch to original audience options down here and sometimes it says further limit the reach of your ads over here. Uh that that just depends on what version of Facebook you're on. You can't manually switch and it's not a new old thing. It's just they're always beta testing features. I don't like the Advantage Plus audience thing. I find it completely ruins campaigns. And I suspect that some of the people that say they're getting better results for these type of campaigns are using Advantage Plus. And the problem with Advantage Plus audiences is it looks better on Facebook, but it's significantly worse on the actual Spotify, Apple Music streaming number side. Let me know in the comments if you're if you're different, but I've seen people get like, "Wow, I'm getting like really good results." And it's actually the opposite problem. They're using some of this Advantage Plus stuff that actually kills your campaign and they're not getting any results in streaming. They think they're getting great results because their ads. Let me look at the streaming numbers. Like, oh yeah, I thought that was weird. Make sure you're turning Advantage Plus off. The way you do that is you do further limit the reach of your ads. Further limit the reach of your ads. Meta really doesn't want you to do this. Um, but you still can. And now we have the regular audiences. Now, it does still say advantage plus on over here. Sometimes you can go into ages and if I flip this to like 18 to 54, I get this use as a suggestion and I uncheck it and now advantage plus is off. If you don't have that toggle, I found in some cases if you clone the audience and then edit the age, you will get that toggle. So I don't know if this is another different version thing. I have like a 100 ad accounts I have access to and sometimes this doesn't pop up for me. I've noticed if I run the campaign though, then it ends up being fine and there isn't advantage plus. But if you get this option, make sure you do not check that. And that turns advantage plus off. It's infuriating that Facebook keeps trying to turn on all this crap that actually hurts your performance, but that's what they do. I have it saved as a preset in here, which I highly recommend just for timesaving sake. But targeting wise is the next kind of big change because a couple months ago, Meta removed most targeting options. So, for example, you used to be able to go in here and be like, I want to target deaf tones. They're now in heavy metal music. I want to target Lincoln Park. They're inside alternative rock. I want to target uh Drake is probably still in here because he's he's massive artist. I want to target Taylor Swift is still in there, but I want to target something like Rascal Flats, which used to be in here, and they're now in country music. So like a lot of unless you're like a huge pop star, they're not in here anymore. But you can still do genres and in some cases subg genres. New metal was taken away and alternative metal were taken away, which for me is a bummer because that's what my my band does, those kind of two genres. And even I think even progressive metal was taken away, which is kind of another angle we do. It's all in heavy metal. So on that note, like I still typically do the whole streaming service thing. So I'll throw in a streaming service or more. Sometimes I'll throw in multiple. I'll do a define further and must also match and I'll do heavy metal music and I still do multiple adsets but I'm testing big broad giant genres and in some cases we I've just done like one big adset and thrown everything in but very most of the time I'm doing multiple adsets if there's the targeting options to support that. So I might have let's say I have a couple adsets. I have one that's heavy metal. I have one that's hard rock. I think that's targetable alternative rock and then maybe one that's not based on music like maybe targeting people who like video games if it fits the song or who like certain types of movies and stuff like that. So my targeting options got much broader. Now mosing along Meta is pushing advantage plus placements even more than they used to. And this is also kind of like one of my cardinal sins of running these campaigns. You never want to use advantage plus placements. It it kind of just ruins the whole campaigns. And in fact, I really recommend, especially if you're new to this, just do Instagram. And in fact, just do like these six placements or even just the four like feed, explore, stories, and reels. And you know, this doing advantage plus placements will cause the same thing as advantage plus audiences where it looks better on Facebook, but in reality, it's much worse on the streaming number side. If you look up what Meta is saying about their Andromeda update, um, they're really talking about Advantage Plus automations, which as you've just seen, I turn off essentially every Advantage Plus optimization. So, I don't think a lot like a lot of the Andromeda update actually even applies to these ads if you're doing it right because you're turning off a lot of their Advantage Plus stuff. But they what they do focus on is that Andromeda is Meta's proprietary machine learning model system designed for retrieval and ad recommendation focused on delivering a step function improvement in value to our advertisers and people. This is really an article about the whole AI machine learning behind their system. But the focus here is on it's an ad retrieval update. And I'm not a software developer, not a machine learning expert or anything. The entire focus is on the ad creatives and they have even like a system architecture ad candidates and ad corpus user request. Essentially this is about matching ads to the right people. And what other people have been saying is instead of trying to do ads with tiny little changes like this color is different or this this has a slightly different like outro or you change the language a little bit in the middle. do ads with like a different hook with a completely different message at the top right when the video starts with a completely different in our case for this different parts of the song different visual angles different right like more different more variety and we've already been doing four parts of the song and two visual styles so we have two completely different angles and we have four different parts of the song which can be radically different too so naturally the way I've been running ads selectively using like the letting meta control the spend between the adsets and but then not using their advantage plus audiences and advantage plus placements and then using a diversity of creatives and broad targeting. I think if there is anything to this Andromeda update that actually applies to these types of ads, I think I kind of automatically just skirted by these changes. It's been a longer video than I expected, but I hope that this helps if you've been having problems since the update. Maybe you've been running your ads differently. you've been you've been doing certain settings differently than I do and that's actually caused you to have problems. That's what I've been doing and it's been working fine for me. So, if you want to see how I run these campaigns from start to finish, check out this playlist right here and I'm going to pin whatever my newest video is on this type of campaign to the top of it. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this one. And also make sure you subscribe for future videos. Thanks for watching and I'll see you there. Bye.