What is a "Good" Cost Per Conversion for Spotify Ads?

One of the most common questions I get is what is a good cost per conversion when it comes to promoting your music on streaming platforms using a meta conversion campaign as they call it. And specifically, it's the type of campaign where you're running an ad on meta like Instagram, Facebook, and they click on the ad, they go to a landing page like this and then we're tracking how many people convert to a DSP or even to Band Camp or website in this case, but to a streaming platform is often the most case. So, what is a good cost per conversion for that? true [singing] self [music] worth. >> And I want to preface this by saying that the cost per conversion can vary a lot depending on the countries that you're targeting and also the setup of your campaign. For example, if you set up your campaign incorrectly and you have like all 65 plus ages or audience network placements, you might have a cost that looks really good, but it's not translating to the streaming platform, which means that the campaign is meaningless, right? Um, and if you're if you're having that happen to you, I did do a video recently called like seven seven things to ruin your music marketing ad campaigns or something like that. So, if that's happening to you, uh, check out that video because that will help save you a lot of pain. But, um, assuming your campaign's working and assuming a tier one, tier 2 country distribution, uh, what is a good result? And when I say tier one, tier two, what I mean is tier one is kind of like US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, and then tier two is like Brazil, Mexico, Turkey. It's just a classification of countries by how expensive they are to run advertising to is how I group countries. So kind of assuming like all of those countries, but we're not including the cheapest countries. For example, India, Indonesia, Philippines. Um, so it's kind of like the the first in the middle, but not the cheapest countries in the world. Um, and I'm going to just give you some benchmarks right off the rip and then we're going to go into an ad account that I have so I can show you a spread of of like what is like kind of realistic to see. So, right off the bat, under 20 cents a conversion, phenomenal. 20 to 30 cents, great. 30 to 40 cents, good. 40 to 50 cents, meh. Over 50 cents, different levels of bad. And if you're sitting here listening to this and you're like, I'm getting 60 cents a conversion and I was happy with that. Don't let my metrics take that away from you because it is a comparative thing. I know people who are very, very excited to get 50 cents a conversion and they're super happy with that and they actually get really good engagement and trigger algorithmic play. That's great and they grow their audience. I know other people who if their campaign's not under under 30 cents, they turn it off because they will only take campaigns that are under 30 cents. Anything higher than that, they stop. There can be genre to genre differences and I can't really say what that means because it it's not necessarily that like this genre is always more expensive than that genre because there can also be subgenre things. But to to put it lightly, I I will or to put it simply, I will say that hip-hop tends to be one of the hardest genres to work. If it's like standard hip-hop, if it falls into like a clear niche, it can actually be fantastic. But if it's like kind of standard, it's hard. Uh, and the same goes for like indie rock. If it's like indie rock, but it feels like kind of just like indie rock that's out there, it doesn't feel like it falls into like a very unique tight subculture of indie rock, then it can be really hard. But if it's niche, then it's it's actually really good. So, as a broad rule of thumb, I'd say something that's like tight in a bucket. It can be categorized very particularly, but that bucket's not so small where there's not enough people there. And I know that's not an exact number, but just keep that in mind. If you're like, I make mainstream pop, you might have a bad time. Uh, a harder time than someone who's like, I make indie pop love songs that have a shoe gauge spin to them. Right? that person generally is going to have a better time because it's going to speak to that kind of subculture a little bit better and targeting wise there's more interesting things you can do with it. But it's not always the case. I I I've had plenty of people where they do like the most kind of like mainstream commercial kind of standard thing and it goes phenomenally well. It just means you have to fight through that competition. So I want to just bring that up right off the bat. Let's say for example you have a campaign that's getting 40 cents per conversion. You might have a campaign that's 40 cents per conversion. That might be dramatically better than another campaign with 20 cents per conversion because for for example, let's say you have 40 cents a conversion, but you have really low engagement metrics. So you're getting like even though it's 40 cents a conversion, you're getting 2500 conversions, right? Which which if you're getting 20 cents a conversion, you will be getting 5,000. So let's say in this case, um you're getting really good engagement. So that 2500 conversions is getting you 12,000 streams, right? Which is like five streams per listener. Don't know if that come I think that comes out to exactly what it is. Five streams per listener and really good engagement stats for saves and for followers, etc. So you're getting 12,000 streams in this case. Now in this other case, we're getting twice as good cost per conversion, but we're only getting 7500 streams because we're only getting like 1.5 streams per listener. So it's not just about the cost per conversion, right? I just showed you two cases or I showed you a case where you can have a cost per conversion that's twice as high and you can get more streams than than one that's half the price because it all comes down to that Spotify engagement. Um, by the way, if you want to play around with this calculator and their calculator, um, I'll put a link in the description, but it's it's one of the many tools that I have added onto my uh website for you to play with and kind of get a feel for what your campaign might deliver for you. But yeah, that's why it's not all about the cost per conversion. Now, if I share my screen again, um this is one of the ad accounts that I run a lot of campaigns for our agency in. And it's looking at specifically the last 30 days, which is from now recording this, June 14th to July 13th, 2026. Um campaigns that have spent at least $200 in the last 30 days, and they've run in the last 30 days. So, if it's spent less than 200, it's it's not going to show up in here. And the reason why I did that is because new campaigns um typically do way worse because they're new. So I wanted to filter anything that hasn't spent at least 200 bucks because it's it's like, you know, it's probably just getting early grown pains. And the the cost here is 38 cents overall. This is averaging out all these ones in here. Um which that 30 to 40 cents range is like good, right? So you can imagine this is very much like an average number, which makes sense because this represents 50 something campaigns. I don't know the exact number, but if I scroll up and down, you're going to see it's a lot of campaigns. I believe it's like 50 50 something. I might be wrong. It might be actually be more or less, but um so you know, this this is kind of like what I would consider to be an average distribution. You have some stuff that's doing poorly. You have some stuff that's doing great. And scrolling through this list here, I'll I'll zoom in and maybe let's just like scroll first. Look at this cost per result column. Um, you see a pretty wide spread, right? 44, 34, 68, 32. Um, let's see. We get some some 20s. We also have a 70 here, which is pretty rough. We have a bunch of like high 20s. But anyways, going up, we have a bunch in the 20s, which is the great range, but most of the campaigns, the biggest number is from 30 to 40. And so, these are real numbers, right? These are real numbers you can expect. What you shouldn't expect is for you to have like $5 a conversion, right? If you have $5 a conversion, there's there's probably something wrong. Or like for example, the the pixel on your landing page is messed up, the ad isn't rendering properly, or like I don't know, like the song is glitching in the in the video file or something crazy like that. I don't really see songs that actually perform that bad when they're set up properly. I mean, maybe if you were to say, I only want to target people who live in LA who are between the ages of 18 and 25, you might get like a couple dollars of conversion because you're targeting like the most expensive city in the most expensive demographic with a song. And then if it's not doing well, it's going to compound on top of that. But you shouldn't expect results that high. And if they are like $5, something's probably wrong. if it's if it's like, you know, a dollar, it it might actually just be that you need to keep testing more videos and whatever. But also, you probably shouldn't see any campaigns that are like five cents. I have had campaigns that were genuinely running at 5 cents, but they are so rare, right? If if you have that happen, it's more likely that something's gone horribly wrong in your campaign and you're getting bots clicking on your ad somehow and it's not translating to streams. And like for example, I showed you that tool on my website that lets you kind of guesstimate how many streams you should expect from a certain number of conversions. It shouldn't be wildly radically differently from that. Right? If you're getting a thousand conversions, you're only getting 200 streams. There's something wrong there. Even if the meta number is good, if the streaming number is bad and the whole point of your campaign is it's a streaming campaign, the campaign not so good. One thing I want to mention is how do these these cost per conversion benchmarks change when you change the country distribution. So for example the 20 the under 20 phenomenal 20 to 30 great 30 to 40 good 40 to 50 meh over 50 bad is for like a tier one two distribution. But what if you were to do only tier one which is only the expensive markets generally just kind of nudge everything up a bracket. So for example, 20 to 30 phenomenal, 30 to 40 great, 40 to 50 oh good, 50 to 60 fine, and over 60 bad. But it it can depend. Sometimes the tier one will be double the cost of tier one, tier two. So if you have a tier one, tier two audience at 20 and then you do tier one only, it might be 40, but ideally it'll only end up being 30. So it either goes up one bracket or goes up like a doubling of of cost per conversion. If you were to go like US only for example, then you might have a tripling where a 20 cent cost per conversion turns into a uh 60cent cost per conversion for US only. And sometimes it's way better than that. Sometimes you have US only equal your tier one, tier two. So there are very much cases where expensive countries do just as good or better than tier one, tier two, which is why we kind of default to starting off with tier one just to see if we can get anything working because then we can deliver a campaign that is going to be even better because of that that fact at the end of the day. And if you were to go to only like a city approach, you're like, I want to target like just LA or just New York City or something, uh it might again might be tripling again or it might actually be a quadrupling. I I've I saw someone earlier today. Their cost per conversion for tier one tier 2 was 20 cents. Their cost per conversion in New York City was like 58 cents. So it was nearly triple the cost. And we were actually excited with that result because that audience would be most beneficial for them touring. And under 60 cents in New York City, pretty good pretty good cost per conversion in my book. Now, if you want to see how you can actually run the campaigns that I talked about in this video, then check out this playlist right here, so you can see the entire process from start to finish. And if you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, then check out this video right here. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.