Why Meta Ignores Some of Your Ads (and Other Questions You Asked)

Hey everyone, this video I'm going to be answering your music marketing questions or essentially your comments on this channel. I thought it'd be fun just to kind of go through comments because a lot of the comments I get are kind of hard to answer in writing just because they're harder to explain. So, I thought I would give this a spin and if people like this format, then we'll turn it into a series where people comment and I sometimes answer them in video form. But anyways, let's dive right in. >> [music and singing] >> I'm just going to start right at the top here and the first question we got is from Tina Ross on my how to sell tickets to your tour/concert with Meta Ads full guide. That's a mouthful. You run a conversion ad even if you can't put a Meta Pixel on the ticket site, why wouldn't you run a traffic ad then? And what Tina's referring to is in the video I show how if you have a ticket link, like let's say it's Ticketmaster just to make it easy, you can't put a Meta tracking pixel on that Ticketmaster page. So, what you do is you you essentially make what I call a tour link which I'll see if I can pull one up real quick. Essentially, you use a page like this. This is a feature from Tourlink and all you do is you either enter your Bandsintown or you manually create all these dates. I really wish I could go to this show, but I'm I'm going to be traveling at the exact same time the show is happening. And you make a page like this which you can put a pixel on, right? This is a page you can. If I were to click on this, it's going to take us to some ticket platform Tixr which Periphery undoubtedly doesn't have control over this. This is probably either owned by the Palladium or the promoter or like whatever, right? It's It's something the artist has no control over. So, they can't put a pixel on this and track anything. So, essentially what you do is instead of that, you make a page like this and you put a pixel on this just like the streaming ads. If you have a streaming ad, you put a pixel on that landing page because you can't put one on Spotify. This is the same thought. It's not as good as being able to put a pixel on a sales page, but it's something and it it ends up working pretty good. So, what you do is you run a conversion campaign to that page and you're tracking people converting to the ticket platform and that's about as good as you can get most of the time and fortunately that good enough case is actually pretty good. Now, this question under isn't a music marketing question, but I it's super easy for me to to answer and I get this question a lot actually. I film all my videos well, actually the question is random question. What software do you use to create your tutorial / screen capture? Love your work always. I use this thing called OBS, which is free. Um it's usually used for live streaming, but you can use it for recording too. So, I I record like I have a camera plugged into my computer. It's a Canon EOS R with a with a Cam Link, so it goes right into USB and then that gets routed into OBS along with my screen share and then I have a Elgato Stream Deck and I also have their keyboard, so I can just click these buttons and animate into um into these different views that I have set up. So, like over here I have these different things saved, which are different kind of views, basically, that get triggered and then I have a plugin called move, I think it is, that allows it to animate. And the reason why I do this is it just saves a ton of video editing. Instead of editing a screen tr- animation, I just click a button. So, basically, I'm performing the screen animation changes, which it takes a little bit of while to get used to, but it saves a ton of time and and therefore money with editing. Well, it saved me time when I was editing my videos cuz it turned like 2 hours of editing into like 20 minutes. But now it's saving me money because it saves my video editor a ton of time. So, it's super worthwhile getting that infrastructure set up if you can. All right, here's another good question here. Hey there, just taking another opportunity to ask, what are some good strategies and tips to market a collab tune by two independent artists of the same relative level of followers and recognition. What are some things we should keep in mind when our our fandoms overlap and meet each other? Um and in a nutshell, like the easiest thing you could do is both of you market the song fully. Because if you have two people promoting the same song, you're doubling up your effort. So that could mean you have twice as much ad budget. That could mean you have twice as much social media content uh because you're each filming your own stuff. And what you could do is for a lot of your posts, you can do collab posts on social media. So like leave on Instagram, you can you can actually have like two people partnered up on a post. You like invite the second person to be a partner or something on the post. On TikTok, it's different, I believe. I believe on there, you might want to like stitch or duet the post. So one person does it first and the second person like duets it. But basically it's like you want to try to figure all these scenarios in which each person can make content so you're doubling the volume, but then also each person is like tagging the other person or making them a partner so that you're both benefiting from each other's stuff just as much. Not just the song, but like the social stuff as well. And um on the the streaming side, you know, you're both driving people to the song. Since you're both in the song, it's it's helpful. But I think a lot of it's going to end up happening by the by the interaction on on social specifically. And I don't know the exact intricacies of both you and the collaborator here, but I would try to find some way where you can you can purposefully like start something on someone's account and then push them to another person. So for example, maybe you're doing some like behind the scenes thing where you're showing like how the song was made, for example. And you do it where like like person A has a bigger following or artist A has a bigger following on Instagram, person B has a bigger following on YouTube, for example. So maybe on Instagram you do an Instagram live where you're talking about the song there, maybe you're performing it, like whatever it is. You're doing something on that Instagram live and you wrote there, but it's like dominantly being promoted by person A's account and maybe it's like mainly live streamed to their account. Um but then you So, what you do is you start it there or you and then you finish it on on platform B, which is the YouTube in this case. Or maybe you don't start and finish it there, but you do like part one there and part two there because that way it's like person A is stronger on platform A and now they're helping person B or artist B, but then person B is bigger on platform B, so they're helping artist A get bigger on >> [music] >> platform B. So, it's a little confusing to say that out loud. Um but but hopefully that made sense. So, Wise Words Management says, "What do I do if my ad keeps getting disapproved for shocking content?" And this is talking about YouTube ads for music marketing 2026. Um basically what happens is if you have video with shocking content, which is very a very vague thing that YouTube classifies ads are. Um there's not really anything you can do about it, unfortunately. Um because this actually happened has happened to me several times because I I'm in a few different like metal projects and one of them is like decently heavy and we ran ads on it and like the video was just a visualizer, but the song is like pretty heavy and they kept rejecting it for shocking content, which I was a little I was annoyed by, but I was a little like, "Wow, our song is so heavy that it's shocking content." Which I guess is kind of funny. But unfortunately there's nothing you can do, right? Because the only way to Like well, what happens is if they reject it for shocking content, you can appeal it. But if they reject the appeal which they probably will, there's really nothing you can do after that. And the only alternative there is to change the video. And typically by the time you're doing this, the video is already done and it's out. So, really you're kind of just stuck. Uh at that at that point your only other option is either one do a campaign where you're promoting like a YouTube short that then people click on and then go to the YouTube, but that'll be 10 times more expensive per view, or do a campaign where you're running a a meta conversion ad that's driving people to YouTube, but again, it'll be 10 times more expensive per view. The quality will be quite good for both of those scenarios, especially the meta one driving to YouTube, but again, it's just like if you're running a YouTube ad, it's going to be between 1 and 5 cents per view. You're not going to get that on either of those other two. It's going to be, you know, 10 to 50 cents per conversion. So, it's literally 10 times more getting people there, but the quality's better. So, it's a trade-off. That's really the best you can do in that situation, unfortunately. Yaki Raw, I don't know if I'm saying that right, asked, "I don't have the option feature if I'm click in Hypeddit smart view." I'm guessing they mean Hypeddit smart link click. "How do you add those?" So, this is my video, "How to set up Facebook conversion API for your music ads easily." Wow, that's a very technical title. I'm >> [laughter] >> I'm I'm glad I'm surprised that that this video I actually think actually did pretty well. Although, I I'm actually pretty proud of the thumbnail in this case. Um So, if you don't have a conversion event in your in your ad account or your pixel, basically, what this means is when you go to run an ad, um for for depending on the landing page platform you're using, you're going to have a certain event that you are tracking. And I'm trying to go and see if I have an ad account open that I can show you. All right, so I found an ad account I can show you. Um In here, where you have to choose a conversion event, right? So, if you're using Feature.fm, it's going to be Feature.fm click. If you're using Hypeddit, it'll be Hypeddit smart link click. Um and then other platforms might have their own different events. And essentially, it used to be there was this like event verification thing. That's long gone. You The way it works now is is you first like put your pixel on the page, click on the event to trigger it, or click on the button on the landing page, and that'll trigger the event firing. And then after that, um the you wait like an hour, and then at some point you're going to go in Events Manager, you're going to see that the event is actually in in your in your Events Manager, and it might also show up in your ad account at the same time. And at that point you're done, you can just use it. What's been happening recently, um and I mean like the last month, is these events never Sometimes they never show up here. And then what you have to do is make a custom conversion. So, uh if you'd never done this before, you might be like, "What is happening?" >> [laughter] >> But But what that means is either it's going to show up in your ad account or it's not at that point. And if it doesn't, you come up back to Events Manager, go to custom conversions, and at this point you go create, and this list will have your custom conversion. So, in here I can say that I want to choose Feature FM click. And I did my thing was not showing. I can choose Feature FM click here. I can do anywhere where for the rule, cuz it's required, where the URL contains a period. And you might realize this, but every URL ever contains a period, right? It's always something Andrew Southworth.com or southworth.media. Um there's always a dot. There's always a period. So, you do a URL contains period, Feature FM click, and then name that's like FFM all or something is usually what I do, or Hypeddit conversion or something if it's a Hypeddit event, and then save that. And then you'll be able to use that custom conversion in your ad account, in your campaign. So, this next comment is from Solar Cycles. Uh hey Andrew, first of all, thanks for all the helpful videos. I have a question about the ad level. I've noticed that Meta sometimes spends almost nothing on certain ads while spending much more on others. For example, with a $10 a day budget, one ad might spend only 1 cent while another spends $8.96 after a few days. Is there anything I should do about this? It feels difficult to judge which creative has performed best. Should I just let Meta decide? Keep the campaign running? And this is on my one of my beefy tutorial videos, how to promote your music on Spotify with Facebook ads, 2026 edition. And um this is a good question and I get this a lot on my consulting calls. Which by the way, if anyone wants to book a consulting call or hire my agency, both those links are down in the description. But on these consulting calls, a lot of people bring the the same question. Like I have like eight ads I'm using and only like two of them are getting any spend, the rest are like almost entirely ignored. Most of the time, I just let Meta decide and keep the campaign running, assuming things are going well. But sometimes you're looking at a campaign and and you'll notice that like it seems like maybe Meta is making the wrong decision. So what I mean by that is maybe they did try a couple dollars on that and it looked really promising and then they completely ignored it going forward. Um but you just have an you just have like an intuition that that ad would have had legs if it got if it had the chance to actually shine. And I'm trying to find an example of this here and I I think I may have found one, we'll see. Um I'm using the the multiple creative thing. We can upload multiple creatives in one ad. So I have to come in here and do filter by image video slideshow. But um here, and this is an older campaign, so it's not showing the the results for this breakdown view, unfortunately, the cost per result. But you can see that they're very much like ignoring certain ads here. So this is very normal. And the the thing is like you want to look at multiple ad sets to see because sometimes what happens is actually all the time is Meta looks at the previous usage of a video. So like if you've in another ad set or another campaign, if you've previously used the exact same video and one did really good, one did really bad, it's just going to immediately be like, well, this video's bad and this video's good. So we're just going to ignore the bad one. Um they do that all the time. So if that's the case, either it's another ad set or previous campaign, keep in mind that maybe they did test it, they just they're not testing it in this ad set. But it's it is very normal for them also to just ignore them. So in this case like if I found that they really did actually spend almost nothing in these two ads, and the cost per conversion was maybe really good, what I might do, and this is something I don't do often, is something I do maybe like one out of 10 times, or something. I don't know. Just Just to give you a number. I will I will clone the ad set and only keep the ads that were ignored, and then force a budget into that either through ad set budget optimization, um or through putting like a minimum daily spend in it. But in in other words, like, I'm making like another thing that only has the ads that were ignored and forcing a small budget through it for 3, 4 days. Um and even a dollar a day, $2 $2 a day is enough, right? You're just trying to get enough data where you're trying to see like was Meta right? And most of the time, nine times out of 10, you realize Meta was right. But uh every so often, you realize they're wrong. So, that's why it's still good like if you really really believe in certain ad or you're you are seeing evidence that one could be good. There are times when you will override Meta in that way. Just make sure you don't do anything drastic and accidentally ruin your campaign in the in the process. Like, for example, just turning off every ad but the ones that they're ignoring. That's probably going to mess up the campaign in in the process. So, if you want to learn how you can promote your ads just like I show in this video here, um then click on the video right here cuz I'm going to lead you to it right here. Uh make sure you subscribe and ring that bell so you get notified the next time I do one of these videos. Uh and, you know, keep leaving comments in the videos, and I'll keep try my best to reply. But if this people like this format, then I'll keep doing more of these comment reply videos in the future. Anyways, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.