Retargeting Meta Ads for Music Artists

Did you know that you can show ads to people who have previously interacted with your music on Facebook, Instagram, your website, or any of the videos posted on your account? You can even upload your own mailing list to the platform to show ads to those people. It's something called retargeting, and it's something that you could actually do for years on Meta, like for a long time. You could do it, but a lot of people don't know about it. There's certain circumstances where it's really powerful, and there's other situations where you won't use it at all. But, uh, in this video, I want to walk you through how it works, how you can set it up, and when it makes sense to do so. So, that being said, let's jump inside of Meta Ads and I'll show you how to get started. I'm in a place called audience manager or audiences inside of Meta. If you go to your regular ads manager, which is called campaigns now, but it's also ads manager, you can then jump to audiences. And this is the place where you can create your audiences. Now, in this area, there are a few different categories of audiences that that we're going to briefly cover before we go into what the retargeting is. If I zoom in, you'll see there's this blue create button. If I do create audience, you'll see we can create a custom audience, a lookalike audience, or a saved audience. A custom audience is is your actual retargeting audience. So, this is like when you want to show ads to people who have previously interacted with you on Facebook, Instagram, your email list, etc. This is really what this video is about is custom audiences. But real briefly, you can turn a custom audience into a lookalike is you're basically giving Meta your custom audience data and they're finding your people that look like those people but that aren't those people. So let's say you you have 5,000 people who have interacted with you in your music. You're basically telling Meta like, "Hey, here's 5,000 people that did what I want them to do. Find me like 5 million more who are similar to them." And that's what a lookike audience is. And then saved audiences are essentially just a time-saving measure. I essentially never use them because I in my opinion they waste more time than they save. But if you find you're constantly reusing the same audiences over and over and over again, you can save them as a preset essentially. So this is not retargeting. It's not a lookike. This is if you want to target people that, you know, they're between 18 and 44. They live in these countries and they like pop music, but they also like R&B. You could save that as a preset. I essentially never use these anymore. So, what we're actually doing this video is we're looking at custom audiences. So, I'm going to click on custom and we're going to get a billion options here. We get 13 options for how we can create our custom audiences. This is essentially the different sources of data that we have to work with. We have uh website which is this would be if you have a pixel installed on your page, which if you don't know what a pixel is, essentially it's a way to track activity on your website. I have a whole dedicated video you can click on to check out on the pixel because it's kind of a deep topic. But let's say you want to track anyone that's visited any page on your website or to have taken specific actions on your website like purchased something, added something to their cart or done whatever on your website. Then we have customer list. This is when you can actually upload your email list to Facebook. Um, so if I go in here, you can actually like either import from Mailchimp or upload a CSV file and it will match those emails and or phone numbers and other information like you can actually match addresses and cities and stuff like that additionally and even value information. So, if you have information about how much they've purchased from you, all of that data can be uploaded and the meta will categorize them and find them and match them to profiles of Facebook and Instagram um to retarget those people uh at your whip. Um app activity we're not going to deal with. Offline activity not going to deal with and catalog. Um well actually catalog is is it you can actually sync like if you have a Shopify store you can sync your catalog to your your Meta account uh your meta business account and then you can retarget people based on how they've interact with your your products just like the the website thing. Um those are like the sources that you control right this is like your data that you're kind of like syncing to the platform and that's why these are bundled up here into your sources. Then after that, we have eight meta sources. And these are also and we're going to we're going to dive into some of these things in in some detail as well. We're going to make a few audiences here. Um but I want to kind of go through them all for you. The the video one, this is where you can actually like retarget people by how they've interacted with videos on your accounts. Similarly, we have how they've interacted with you on Instagram and then how they've interacted with your Facebook page. So these are well we will be diving into those in a bit. Uh lead form that you can actually like instead of if you don't have like a website to collect email addresses you can do it on Facebook ads and you can retarget people by how they interact with that. You can make events on Facebook and retarget people by that. Instant experiences is kind of like the lead form thing and we're not going to cover that but essentially it's a way to retarget people by how they've interacted with your ads and instant experiences. Shopping. You may not know this, but there is actually a way for people to buy products directly on Facebook and Instagram from you. You can sync your catalog to your Facebook and Instagram accounts and people can purchase directly on the platform. And then similarly, if you have a meta or what is it called meta or marketplace or whatever, you can retarget people by how they've interacted with like the listings you have on Facebook. Not necessarily your store, but what you've actually sold directly through Facebook by listing those products on Facebook. And these are the categories you have to work with, right? Which is pretty extensive. So it's kind of like any way that someone's interacted with you in the meta ecosystem or in these different ways you can track your own data. You can show those exact people ads when it makes sense. So for example, if I click on the website one, we're going to go through a few different use cases. If I click on the website one, the first thing it's going to ask me is what is your data source? This will be your pixel, which is whatever data source you have installed in your website. You can segment them by what have they actually done on your website. Are we tracking every website visitor? Are we tracking just specific web pages? How long they spent? Are we tracking certain events they've taken on our website? In this case, I have feature FM click page view content. These are like music conversions. Do they convert to go to a Spotify from our landing page? or if it's a different pixel, if it's a pixel installed in like a Shopify store, did they look at a product? Did they add it to their cart? Did they initiate checkout? Did they add payment info? Did they search? Did they buy something? Right? So, we can retarget people by how they interact with our products or how they interact with our website and pretty much any way as long as the website is firing that data. And then once we choose that, we can specify a time frame. The max for a website is 180 days. And then we can just name this thing. We could call this all website visitors Southworth Media Pixel. By the way, Southwork Media, I have an ad agency. So, if you're looking for people to to run ads to promote your music, whether it's your streaming promotion, uh, email list generation, purchase campaigns, or whatever, we can help you out. Link in the description below. But then you can save this audience and then you'll have it. Now, if I click back and we go back to the list, we already talked about customer list. I'm not gonna I'm gonna skip catalog because I think a lot of you probably are got to mess with that. Well, actually, let's just click on it real quick. I don't think I have a catalog that's valid for this. But it's the same thing that we just kind of went through, right? Like you choose a catalog. You choose what category of products you want to sync. And then you can actually specify people who viewed products from your product set, people who've added products to the car, people who have purchased products in a certain time frame. Right? So just like the website one except this is like specific actions for specific products in specific categories in a different way. Right? So it's just a different way to kind of accomplish that same goal. If we do create custom audience again, a few ones I want to cover are video, Instagram, and Facebook because these are three very common ones. If I go to video, this one's actually kind of magical because you can use this to filter out people by quality in a unique way. As you might know, watch time on the internet is kind of like the currency of the internet. Like watch time is kind of everything. And so we can actually segment people by watch time. 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds or percentages, which is very powerful, right? Because if someone watches 95% of a three-minute video, that's like an eternity on Instagram reels, right? So that's a powerful audience. Similarly, in Instagram, we can segment people by certain categories. We can say anyone that engaged with us, people who followed us, people who visited the profile, engaged with any ad, sent a message, saved any post or ad. And if you have multiple uh Instagram accounts here, you can do it for any of them. And you can do it by up to a year in the past. And we have those exact same options for Facebook pages as well. If I click next, we get our page. We choose these exact same options here. And we can save it and and add this. And and these are probably the most common situations. We have website, customer list, video, Instagram, Facebook. And of course, there's the other ones, but those are by far the most common ones. For example, let's say you want to retarget anyone that's interacted with you on Facebook, Instagram, and your videos, and your email list, and your website. You could add all of those audiences to a campaign and show them uh an ad for your upcoming show. So, you can say, I only I only want to retarget people who live 50 miles around this show. Anyone that's interacted with me, and they're all that I can track on the internet using all my audiences. That's a fairly common use case. Another one might be, let's say you want to run campaign ahead of time, one campaign ahead of time, showing people like a a song or performance clip or whatever, and then you retarget only people that have watched, let's say, over 50% of this whole performance that's like 3 minutes long to try to get them to get a freebie or some type of asset that you're giving away for a download to and join your mailing list essentially. So instead of just hitting up strangers to join your mailing list, you're hitting up people, showing them an ad, retargeting only the people that watched a long percentage of it to offer them something that they might want. And what this will do, it might end up being more expensive than hitting up strangers right off the bat. But it's going to get you typically a higher quality of person, right? Because you you've hit them up a second time and you know that they're interested. They're not just interested in the free thing, but you know they like your music, too. So then you're getting into different qualities of audiences. Like sometimes it makes sense to have more people. Sometimes it makes sense to pay more for less people that may be more valuable long term. And another common use case for retargeting is is let's say you know you have people that have gone to your website um and they maybe looked at products or they added them to their cart but they didn't purchase them. You could retarget people that have not purchased something. Like you can exclude people to do negatives here. You can say, "I want to exclude people that have purchased products, but I want to include people that have visited my website, and I want to show an ad to them to get them to come back and buy." Right? So, this is people who have visited this website who have not purchased, and I could run an ad to them. Right? So, hopefully your head's spinning a little bit and you're thinking about all the different ways you can use these tools. Um, I will just mention that sometimes the best answer is just to run ads to strangers. For example, if you're promoting a new song on streaming services, you you can I often will do retargeting, but most of your results are going to come from new people just because it's a numbers game. There's way more new people than there are existing people unless you're a really big artist. But the bigger you get and the more retargeting audience you build, the more valuable this retargeting stuff gets. So, it's good to start making some audiences, seeing the numbers, testing out some of these ideas you might have and use cases you might have because it just gets better over time. So, anyways, hope you found that helpful. Uh, leave a comment if you have any questions below. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss another video. Check out this video to see how to run even more types of ads to promote your music. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.