How To Launch A Music Marketing Ad Campaign in 3 Clicks (Aura Music Review)

In this video, we're going to be checking out the new platform called Aura by SmartNoise. And Aura is essentially an automated ads platform. So, if you've ever heard of anything like Hyped it or SmartNoise actually, uh or SubmitHub actually has an automated ads platform, and there's also SoundLink. So, there's all these platforms that can do ads for you in an automated way, and they they all operate differently. So, some of them run through your ad account, and they require a little bit of setup in the back end, and you have to make visuals, uh or as part of this kind of like newer class of automated ads where you you you quite literally just give it a song and money, and then you just don't do anything. Uh let me show you what I mean. So, if we were to go and do a new campaign, and I pull up Spotify real quick, and let me grab I'm just going to grab the first song I have open. It's not even going to be my song cuz this is just going to be a demo. So, I'm going to grab So, I just grabbed a Periphery song just cuz that's what I'm currently listening to, and I can go in here, and I can search for the genre. I'll type in metal, and then I'll click continue. It's analyzing the track data, building a fan targeting profile, detecting track mood and energy. Spotify has all these audio analysis features, um which I'm guessing is what Aura is pulling from. And it's looking at basically any information it can get from the Spotify API to try and figure out like what might be a good targeting option. And then it's using that data And again, I I I didn't make the site, um but I I know Geo, and I'm kind of just assuming from what's possible. Um they're probably using a they have a batch of ad creatives for different genres. So, it's looking at the genre that you selected, paired with what it has from Spotify's API, and then they have all these videos that are kind of pre-programmed for certain genres. And so, here it's giving us a list of visuals, right? We have perfect match, POV concert crowd shots, super high energy, this song got me like, um hype gaming edits, that kind of characters, metal is way too loud and angry to listen to, me listening to metal, the song got me like wait for it. So, these are just ideas it's matching for videos, um and you can open them up, and you can see a little bit more description of them. And then click continue, and uh you get another option of do you want to maximize it's basically just a country selector. Uh this middle one is like tier one tier two, what I would call tier one tier two. A- and then you have tier one only, and then you have just like worldwide essentially. So, most people are going to do balanced uh outcome. And then you get to pick your budget. So, you get everything down from 100 bucks up to 329 bucks. So, this this right off the bat, I'm just going to say like this isn't a service you would use for a larger budget essentially. Um because they it's an automated platform, right? Like it's We didn't even upload our audio file, and I'll show you that when we look at the previews that we actually got. They're they're using the Spotify sample audio to to use as the ad creative. So, we're only testing one part of the song. It's a very simple setup, but like if you only have 250 bucks, you're not going to hire my agency. Like we we can't we can't work for a $250 campaign. There's just not enough budget there to have ad spend and hire a team of humans to actually go and build ad creatives for you and run a campaign. So, but this is a this is a solid option, and you'll see the results in a moment for if you have a a smaller budget, and you want something you want to be able to run ads. So, anyways, this is where I think platforms like this fit, and this this this kind of statement goes the same as uh Hyped it and also regular SmartNoise as well that run ads in your own ad account. Um they're like ads on easy mode, and I think of these as great gateway drugs to to get into ads for lack of a better term. And then after this, you just pay. So, you select package, start campaign, and then you go, and you just pay it, and then it goes, right? So, I'm going to cancel that out, and then we're going to see how did this campaign actually do. I won't review it yet. Um used 100% of the budget, which I think was 150? Spoiler alert, SmartNoise did comp this campaign. This video is not sponsored, and they're they're they're not seeing it before it goes live. Although, I'm sure the link I have below is going to be an affiliate link just, you know, in full transparency. Um but let's let's just walk through this report. I believe it was $150. So, it wasn't like a crazy budget. It was kind of right in that that range of what you would typically use something like Aura for. So, I used my band Claustrophobic Sorry, I used my song Claustrophobic by my band Every Moment. Uh and I >> [laughter] >> This is probably a hard example for them because this is an alternative metal band. So, uh you know, not the easiest genre to use for an automated thing. We got 47 cents per conversion, which they're calling good. Typically, for tier one tier two, I would call uh 30 to 40 cents a conversion good, 40 to 50 like meh, over 50 bad, 20 to 30 great, under 20 awesome. Um but they're calling this good, which I think given the constraints you'll see down below, I I can say this is a reasonable result for the $150. I I believe actually we can do some quick math here. If I do $0.47 * 245, uh it was $115. I think there might have been some ad spend in another uh campaign. I can't remember. At some point we had to we had to relaunch this thing for some reason, but that's besides the point. You can see the countries that it ran in, uh mostly Brazil, but second was actually US and then Mexico. So, like a mostly tier two, but a a reasonable chunk of tier one. We we don't have zero stuff from the US, and we do have some UK, and we have some Japan, and it's a good diverse mix, Italy and Germany and Spain and all that stuff. Uh mostly Android users were converting, but pretty close between Android and iPhone. All right. So, unfortunately, a bunch of these ad creatives aren't uh aren't currently working, um but I can show you a couple of them at least. So, driven to the chorus like the track owes me, um and I'll play the audio too. Just brace >> [music] [music] >> Now, this is one fundamental problem I think with both Aura and SoundLink, and I forget if SubmitHub SubmitHub's thing does the same thing. It's pulling the audio from the the the sample, right? The Spotify sample 30-second preview, which is a very low resolution. So, depending on what you're listening on, you might have been able to hear that it's kind of like brittle, the sound. And I'm not saying this lightly. Like I can't hear the difference between waves and MP3s, and I can hear there's a pretty bad degradation of audio quality there. It almost sounds like there's a like a bit crusher turning down the sample rate. So, I'm going to go on this one, and and this is another style of video. >> [music] >> One thing worth mentioning though is these ads are running on social media where like audio quality is definitely not a priority. So, this didn't do that bad of result. Like this is a fine result in my opinion. Um the campaign I ran for the song I'm pretty sure was 30 cents, but like that's the difference of having a human run the ad versus you run the ad. And that's why I said services like these are great. Like if you have like a 100 bucks, and you're like I want to promote my song get something because you can't do it yourself yet, you don't have a big enough budget to outsource this, that's where ad platforms can like this can come in the mix. I wish I could show you the rest of these, but apparently there's there's a glitch. But we can see individual cost per result for for each of these. So, we do like this ad was 10 cents a conversion. It only got three results though. Um and so, it's probably a fluke. The best overall ad was this 213 results 43 cents. And if this ran for longer, it probably would have come down into the lower 40s, which which again, pretty good considering it's all automated, and everything was figured out without me lifting a finger. Now, one thing I thought was very clever about this platform is the way they presented the data here. So, they have this thing here on the left on the bottom. They they're able to estimate, I saw this from day one when I set up the campaign, pre-campaign daily streams. Apparently, they have some integration that allows them to get streaming data for songs without having any back end access in an automated manner. So, they were able to see like the before even ran the campaign, and this graph here is brilliant, right? You get a graph of daily streams, and you get a campaign start and a campaign end. This campaign actually was pretty good at boosting the song a little bit. Like this is not crazy, right? We only spent like $150 or something, but like we got the biggest algorithmic push in months, and I'll take you over to Spotify for artists here, and we'll go into the song itself. I'll do last 12 months, um and then if I go to Aura, the campaign started on January 4th, it ended on January 18th. If I come up here, January 4th is here. January 18th is here, right? So, we got the biggest 2 weeks of algorithm we've gotten essentially all for like almost a year, 2 weeks in a row, and even the third week after, it still got a lift. So, that $150, even though it wasn't like a fantastic result in terms of cost per result, it actually was a pretty fantastic result in terms of what happened to the music. When we look at the saves, we see there's a lift between the 4th and 18th and like daily average saves, that's just the additional ad spend of that Aura campaign. Playlist ads went up a little bit during that, that's to be expected anytime you run ads, whether it's platform like Aura or a human run ad like what my agency does. So, I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this. Like I I'm trying to be very realistic in here, right? Like there's a very specific use case for service like this, and it's got its limitations, but the reality is it just kind of worked. For for 150 bucks, this this was like a a neat result. Um but I really like how the data is presented, how you can clearly see the start point and the end point and the impact your daily streams pre-campaign, during campaign, post-campaign, and even after it's been it's been 2 weeks since the campaign ended and we still have this lift of about 100 additional streams a day on average which which is epic given this result or given the cost and the amount of money that we spent. So overall my opinion, if you have like 100 or 200 bucks, you're in this position where unless you already know how to run ads yourself, you might spend more than that just trying to learn how to run ads just in the in the trial and error and the failures of all that stuff. Um and then you don't have enough budget to hire someone else. So I think that's where that's kind of the hole that a platform like Aura is filling here. It's that gap between I have some budget to promote it. I want it to be useful. I don't want to spend money in something that's not going to do anything long-term but I don't have the budget to outsource it and I don't have the time to learn how to do all this stuff myself like I've shown in this channel. Now if you're like I do have the time and I do want to learn how to do this then check out this video right here which shows you the entire process of running campaigns like this yourself inside of your own ad account which will get you better results. Um or if you'd rather just outsource it to an agency, I have my links down below. But anyways, thanks for watching. Check out Aura, that's also linked down below and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.