Facebook Ads for Spotify Best Practices

I’ve written about Facebook and Instagram ads for Spotify many times, like here, here, and this one from April of 2018 where I noted that I’d spent $5888.35 on Facebook ads to date.

Three years later, it’s $20,614.84.

While there are still useful angles to explore in those older articles, this post supersedes them. Not because they were necessarily wrong, but because the platform and practices have evolved.

For example, Instagram Stories was far and away the best ad placement for music two years ago. Viewers tend to be receptive to exploring new music, and have their sound on.

The problem is, most musicians know that by now. The resulting competition has driven ad costs up. Lately I’ve gotten cheaper followers through feed ads.

My Spotify following in March 2021

I’m spending $20 a day on Facebook ads, split between promoting my artist profile and my synthwave playlist.

I’m up to 9K profile followers and 17K playlist followers.

The big bump in the middle came from my Gleam ROLI giveaway

Every morning I track my follower growth in a spreadsheet. Here’s March so far (click to enlarge):

conv = conversions, CPC = cost per conversion, CPF = cost per follower

Right now I’m paying about $0.30 per follower for both my profile and playlist.

The latter has been pretty stable, but the former is just starting to settle in since I added India last week. More on that later…

My current Facebook ads for Spotify

Here’s my current profile ad for feeds:

And my playlist ad for feeds:

Same audio! For whatever reason, this little snippet of the last verse going into the coda outperforms everything else I’ve tried.

You may have noticed my feed videos aren’t square. They’re actually 4:5 or 1080×1350. I render them at 2x (2160×2700) in ScreenFlow for retina screens, though I’m not sure it makes a difference after Facebook processes it.

The result takes up more screen real estate on mobile, at the cost of black bars on desktop:

I get very few conversions on desktop, even with square video, so it’s totally worth it.

My stories ads are 9:16 (2160×3840), and are basically the same as the feed ads but with an added prompt to “swipe up to follow.”

I run both variations in a single ad using the “edit placement” function:

The eight placements I’m running are Facebook News Feed + Video Feeds + In-Stream Videos, Instagram Feed + Explore, and all three Stories options.

It doesn’t really matter though. As long as you don’t waste your money on Audience Network, Facebook will optimize for the best performers.

My profile ads dominate in IG feeds, but my playlist ads do better on Facebook (click to enlarge):

Breakdown by Placement, March 1-20

Facebook Ads for Spotify Targeting

I target all Spotify countries, divvying them up between my profile and playlist ads so they don’t compete against each other in the auction.

The playlist ad hits the Americas plus Oceania, which roughly translates to Mexico and Brazil (click to enlarge):

Spotify playlist ad, Breakdown by Country

The profile ad delivers to the rest of the world. Mostly Russia, but India will surely overtake it soon:

Spotify profile ad, Breakdown by Country

Up until last week, my ads wouldn’t run to India, and I couldn’t figure out why until Facebook support told me:

Facebook page restrictions

At some point, I must have blocked a bunch of countries from viewing my page’s content.

Since removing all country restrictions, most of my profile conversions are coming from India. I’m good with that! Spotify for Artists confirms that they’re actually listening to the track:

Can you spot when my ads to India started delivering?

That’s not always the case though. The $6.55 I’ve spent so far this month on Algeria doesn’t appear to be paying off, so I may drop it:

PSA: Country comparisons are only available for individual songs!

I’ve already dumped Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia for the same reason.

Considering where my ads are being shown, you’d think that my Spotify Top Countries would be Mexico, Brazil, and Russia. Nope! I have more listeners in the US than those three countries combined:

USA! USA!

By now you’ve probably heard of the whole “trigger cities” concept. By advertising in cities that have high music consumption and low advertising rates, you trigger the Spotify recommendation engine, resulting in more algorithmic streams worldwide.

I’ve never zeroed in on specific cities, and I can’t prove that the underlying assumption is correct, but I can testify that 15% of my streams, 8.5K in the past 28 days, are from algorithmic playlists.

Conversions Objective Setup and iOS 14

I’ve described where I’m targeting, but not who. I’m targeting a lookalike audience of users who previously clicked through to Spotify from my ToneDen landing page, which looks like this:

The Spotify link directs to my profile, not the song

I optimize for Spotify clicks using a custom conversion:

You might be wondering, don’t I want YouTube and SoundCloud plays too? Sure, but I don’t want Facebook to optimize for them! I can already get YouTube views for far less.

Explaining how to set everything up in the midst of iOS 14 changes would take its own quite boring post. Before you can configure your ad, you have to verify your domain, create the custom conversion, add it to Business Settings, and configure the web event in Aggregated Events Management.

And before all of that, you have to host the link on a domain you own, which took me five minutes with ToneDen. Just go to Settings/Advertising, click on “Add Domain,” enter a subdomain, then add a CNAME DNS record at your hosting service:

Now all my go.colortheory.com links direct to ToneDen. You can do the same with Feature.fm and Hypeddit.

If this all sounds too technical, I recommend John Gold’s Spotify Growth Engine. It’s dirt cheap through my link, and John hosts a weekly coaching call and Facebook Group where you can ask questions if you get stuck.

So again, I’m targeting a lookalike audience of users who already performed my desired action: clicking through to Spotify. Of course, I didn’t have that audience to begin with, so I started by targeting a lookalike of 75% video viewers.

My only other restriction, which is hardly a restriction at all, is setting the age range to 16-64.

So that’s my current playbook, honed from months of careful testing. In the near future, I’ll swap my profile and playlist targeting and retarget users who watched 50% of the prior ad. In other words, I’ll show the playlist ad to users who already watched half of the profile ad, and vice versa.

Beyond that, I’ve got a laundry list of further ideas to try out, and a list of conclusions I’ve drawn so far, which I’ll expand on now.

Facebook Ads for Spotify Dos and Don’ts

Without further preamble, here are my best practices for Facebook and Instagram ads to grow your Spotify following:

DO visit Facebook Ad Library for inspiration

Did you know you can view anyone’s ads? You should absolutely explore how other artists in your genre promote their music.

If you see a blank page, click on “All Ads.” It defaults to politics for some reason, for me anyway.

DO keep your ads simple and direct

I’ve tried animations, Spotify canvases, and official music videos. None of them work as well as the simple images you see in the examples above, with subtle animated overlays courtesy of the Motionleap app on my phone.

DO include the Spotify logo

The Spotify logo instantly tells users what your ad is about, and lessens the chance that they click through just because they like the pretty picture. You only want to pay for, and optimize for, Spotify users.

You can grab the Spotify logo as a transparent PNG from me here.

DO use Dynamic Creative to test headline, text, and description

Believe me, you can do better than “Out now on all major platforms!” I’ve found that “Listen now on Spotify