Which campaign objective should you use in Meta ads for promoting your music on Spotify and other streaming platforms? In other words, when you’re running what many people call a ‘Spotify conversion campaign’ where we take someone from your ad to a smart link and then they convert to go to a streaming platform. Should you use Sales, Leads or Engagement?
We’re going to dive deeper into the ‘why’ in this post, but I recommend you use the Engagement objective. Specifically an Engagement campaign with the Conversion Location set to Website Conversions, and then choose your conversion event based on which smart link service you’re using.
Why three campaign objectives?
Why are there three options in the first place? Well, in Facebook ads / Meta ads there is pretty much always more than one way to accomplish the same task. When it comes to running a ‘conversion campaign’ where you’re optimizing for some type of pixel event on a website, there are indeed three different campaign objectives that can be used.
Look at this image:
You see that I have Engagement selected, and over on the right it lists ‘Conversions’ as an option. You’ll get the same thing if you select Leads, or Sales.
The reason for this is there are multiple configurations of campaigns you can run for any given campaign objective. You can run Engagement for video views, post engagements, page followers, messenger objectives and more – but also for website conversions.
Why you should use Engagement
Now that you understand why this question comes up in the first place, i’m going to make my argument for why you should use the Engagement objective. However first I want to mention that your campaign will actually function if you use Leads or Sales as well, but you may not get results that are as good at first.
Facebook / Meta ads makes a lot of ‘a priori’ assumptions about what you’re trying to accomplish. Meaning, they’re guessing at what you’re going for to try and get you better results in the absence of data.
In the past there was a singular Conversion campaign objective. But several years ago they changed the setup to make campaign objective more about your actual goals. To put it simply you’d:
- Choose Sales if you’re trying to sell something
- Choose Leads if you’re trying to get contact information
- Choose Engagement if you’re trying to get people to engage with something
With a typical Spotify conversion campaign, we’re trying to get people to engage with music. We’re not trying to sell anything and we’re not trying to get contact information.
Now, remember those ‘a priori’ assumptions? Well, if you choose Sales and have no pixel data in your account it’s first going to look for people who they think are likely to purchase something. This will typically be much more expensive. However over time as your pixel gets more data it will use your data instead of their internal assumptions, and it won’t matter.
This also means that if you’ve already been using Sales or Leads for a while and getting good or great results, there is no reason to switch. But if you’re new to this and starting from scratch you should use Engagement because it simply makes the most sense for what you’re actually trying to get people to do.
If you’re wondering how these campaigns are setup from start to finish, check out this video:
Also consider checking out my list of the best music marketing companies.
