Spotify playlist ads on Instagram

How I got 100s of Spotify Plays Cheap Using Facebook Ads

Last month I decided to experiment with Facebook ads for music promotion. Specifically, to try and boost my Spotify plays count. In this post Im going to share how I set up my campaign, targetting settings, and some numbers that resulted.

Getting Started

First, youll need to get a Facebook for Business account. Doing so will unlock many custom targetting settings for you to take advantage of, as opposed to just clicking the boost post button inside the Facebook or Instagram. You can get started by heading over to Facebook Business managerand loging in with your existing Facebook account.

It would also be a good idea to have a Spotify Canvas for the song youre trying to promote as theyve shown to increases the likelyhood of saves, shares, and playlist saves.

Setting Up

Once youre in Facebook Business Manager, create a new campaign and choose traffic as your marketing objective. For the daily budget you can put in anything over 1$. I recommend starting low and then scaling up once you zero in on your target audience and have a working ad campaigns set up.

The second step in the campaign set up process is creating an ad set. This involves choosing your target audience, age, gender, location, etc. Starting with location, from previous experience with Facebook Ads, Ive learned that the worldwide targetting option will get you the cheapest clicks, but the majority of them would be bots and thus a waste of your resources. So what I recommend to do for now is to only target first-world countries like USA, Canada, UK, etc. Dont worry, we will revisit location targeting later on once we have the campaign set up.

After location, youll be prompted to select age range. You should have some idea about the target age group of your music based on genre, but I also recommend consulting your audience insights in your Spotify for Artists, where youll get a report on your existing listerners age groups. Choosing age groups where you already have a good amount of listeners is a good way to make sure your budget isnt being depleted on clicks by users who are most likely not going to end up saving your music to their libraries. In my case the target age group was 18-34.

For gender, unless youre making a specific kind of music, leave it on all genders.

Detailed Targetting

The first thing you want to add in interest is obviously Spotify. This makes sure that whoever sees your Facebook ad likely has a Spotify account. Facebooks has the data on this since a lot of Spotify users link their Spotify accounts to their Facebook.

Following that, you want to click the narrow audience button which allows you to target specific interests within the Spotify interest group. Here is where you want to add genres that your music falls under. You can also add similar sounding bands, for which you can once again consult your Spotify for Artists Listeners Also Like segment.

You want to maximize the probability of clilcks that will result in Spotify plays, and Spotify plays that will result in Spotify saves. Keep an eye on the Audience Size meter on the right handside, you dont want it to be too broad which would waste your budget on poor quality clicks, while too narrow of an audience means your ad might not run at all.

Creating the Ad

You can upload a picture or video to show for 15 seconds along with your music. For my own experiment I used 15 seconds of the chorus from my own single Two Stars lyric video. Of course I had it trimmed for a vertical aspect ratio to fit the the stories format, and added a Spotify logo over it. If you dont have a music or lyric video, consider my lyric video services, or just use your release artwork. Videos tend to get more engagement than pictures, which means your budget is being spent more efficiently.

But theres no reaosn to limit yourself to one option. Try adding different segments of your song, different video and pictures to let Facebook figure out which one to show.

Next, put your Spotify song link in the Website URL. You can get this by going to your artists page on Spotify, right clicking the song you want to promote, Share, then Copy Song Link.

For the call to action go with Listen Now and once youre happy with the Ad Preview on the right right, scroll down and click confirm. Your ads should start running soon, congratulations!

Expanding Your Location Targeting

Once you have the Campaign all set up and running, I recommend duplicating the Ad Set and changing the target countries. This time go for countries with emerging economies. The reason for this is the cost of clicks vary wildly based on the users location, and dividing your campaign into various ad sets gives you the tools you need to make sure Facebook doesnt spend your entire budget on fake or very expensive clicks either.

For this idea to work, its very important to enable the Ad Set Spending Limit for each Ad Set, and allocating it a certain portion of your total campaign budget. Once youve done that, I recommend adding 1 or 2 more Ad Sets targetting different country groups. Over time you can see which locations work and adjust the spending limit of each Ad Set accordingly.

Results of Spotify Plays

During the time my campaign ran, I managed to get Spotify plays for an average of 8 cents. Based on the numbers I got in my Spotify for Artists, I can also estimate that the song was added to the listeners library about once for every 1$ spent, and the artist page followed about once for every 6$ spent. While these numbers might not seem that great, remember that they can all trigger Spotify algorithms to add your music to their algorithmically generated playlists, which could significantly boost your Spotify plays.

Do not expect your first campaign to make a return on investment, especially with Spotify offering payout cuts for promotion. But listeners who follow your artist page will be notified of any future releases, which can grow your audience and bring in more plays in the future. Remember that its not a race, its a marathon!