What is a "Good" Cost Per Conversion for Music Marketing Ads?
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When running Meta ads to promote your music on Spotify and other streaming platforms, what is a 'good' cost per conversion?
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Hi Andrew, have you tested conversion campaigns vs. traffic campaigns in a single country, like the US or Germany? I tested this a bit, but I don't see much of a difference in Spotify for Artists.
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I would like to see you make a video on meta ads for afrobeats/ afro leaning artists because there is no video of that on the internet. Nobody talks about us and we need help too
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how can an indie artist gain actual fans not just rented streams? Thanks to anyone that chimes in, I am still new to music marketing.
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What is the math on all this? One of the auto ad sites has 15k Spotify streams for about $300. That equates to about $55? My math says that’s not profitable. When does anybody start making money with Spotify? If Spotify pays so little what’s the point of advertising?
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I have two questions:
1. Are these benchmarks based on the CPA reported in Meta Ads Manager? For example, if Meta reports a CPA above $0.60, but the actual CPA based on the landing-page data from SubmitHub Links is between $0.50 and $0.59, would you still consider that acceptable for a Tier 1-only campaign?
2. When the goal is to drive listeners to Spotify, are these benchmarks referring specifically to the CPA for Spotify clicks, or to the combined CPA across all DSP clicks?
For example, in my Tier 1-only campaign, around 70% of the DSP clicks go to Spotify, while most of the remaining clicks go to Apple Music. If the overall CPA across all DSP clicks is $0.60, the Spotify-specific CPA would naturally be higher than $0.60.
In that case, would you consider the campaign to be performing poorly because its main goal is Spotify, or would you still judge it based on the combined CPA across all DSPs?
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Hey Andrew! Just wanted to give you some feedback since I have been running campaigns following your tutorials for about 6 months now. The results have been fantastic, genuinely thank you for all you do for indie artists! I do want to mention something however, I switched to targeting Tier 1 countries only, and the results have been infinitely better versus targeting tier 1 and 2. Before, i was getting tons of clicks from brazil, they were super cheap, but it wasnt converting to spotify at all. Not just low engagement, but very few listeners from brazil at all. It felt like maybe i was stuck in a bot farm, and this was across a few different songs, ads, and creatives. Once i switched to Tier 1 only, I started getting a ton of great engagement and awesome metrics across the board. It's been 3 new songs, all getting 30-40 cents per click, 60-70% CTR, 3-5 streams per listener, 40%+ save percentages, etc. It could be the type of music i make, or the creative, maybe it just works better for Tier 1 only, but i just wanted to give this note for maybe anyone else who is struggling with the same issue of very low conversion.
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Thank you so much for this Andrew! any advice for what to do if you're consistently hitting the popularity score metrics for algorithmic boosts but the boosts aren't really coming?
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Hey I've got a question. Does Spotify push your music exponentially more if you spend more money?
Because I made a song, spent 150 bucks on it, with a 10 cent conversion rate mostly from tier 2 countries.
With Spotifys algorithmic push I made over 30 thousand streams, so I will probably break even at some point.
If I run ads with higher budgets, will the song become profitable?
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I have .25-30 costs across my ads but meta is delivering my ads soooooo slowly. No idea how to fix it
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The thing with these campaigns is even with a good cpc it’s just a rented growth, as soon as I completely stop my ads in a month or 2 the audience reduces back to what it was originally
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Oh, you wanna do a quick five minute video on how to properly address alternative accounts and how to hashtag Properly? Hearing that I have 60,000 alternative accounts to battle against for one record label really made me lol
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I was wondering if you can get to a stage (after spending many 1000s of £££ probably) when you have enough followers and you don't need to spend as much or none on advertising/running ads because you get the huge volume of streams from your followers. Spotify playlists placements (not botted listeners) are cheaper and you can achieve the same volume of streams. Not sure about gaining followers though
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The tiers of cost per conversion you mention in the beginning of the video are very far from what I would consider the same tiers. It would look more like this in euro <0,1 amazing, 0,1 - 0,15 great, 0,15 - 0,20 workable, anything above is just lighting money on fire that you will not be able to recoup through streaming or the majority of other side revenue streams that come from this investment. This is for well paying T1 countries only, which excludes countries like Spain and Italy and caps the age range at 54. And even then you are relying pretty heavy on getting decent algorithmic traction. This is for mainstream commercial type of music and is maintanable for budgets of up to ~ 1k a day.
@Empsh700I need an audit 💀. Been learning for a year. Stuck around .80 cpr going t1 heavy. I try to spinkle in some t2, for instance Brazil @ .30 two campaigns ago. If it was simply a matter of needing to impove music and creatives, I would be more than happy, but i'm constantly worried of broken campaigns. I feel like : when you don't have much of a warm audience and a $500 budget, you don't have room to make a single mistake. I went into last release with 2,500 active monthly listeners. Campaign collapsed so i turned it off early, didn't see a substantial boost from warm, and thus no radio surfaces opened this time. Maybe i'll bring a pro in. Idk
@CowboysEntitiesI’m running 18 campaigns at the moment - spending $300 a day - any campaign with a conversion rate over 18 cents, I turn off. I have several ads with less than 10 cents. But campaigns behind new songs is much better than campaigns promoting old songs - no matter what the conversion rate is
@wavesonwavesmusic@AndrewSouthworth I'm still getting used to the UI for Meta Ads, but one thing I don't understand is that in my starter conversion campaign, following your tutorial, my "Results" and "Cost per result" just show "Website view content" and "Per view content", while in this video your ads all show numerical values for these. So struggle to compare my figures to your tutorial because of the lack of a numerical value in the results fields.
Is that an obvious sign I've done something wrong? The only change I made was to select the Submithub landing page to be a redirect to try and prevent dropped traffic from displaying the landing page.
Interesting as always. Love to geek out to these vids. From my own experience, it does feel like there is very much a rolling of the dice, and pot luck to how things perform. I had 1 song, where all the ads were literally videos of things being crushed under an industrial press (the song was called 'the bit that breaks'. This was converting tier 1 AND tier 2 both at between 4-6cents per conversion. I have had other songs, where I have had bespoke visuals, and no matter whatI did (different bits of the song, different text etc) it wouldnt get below 40c. I have since reused the "crushing" visuals for another song, and that also did ok (15c per conversion)...so perhaps that is the lesson here, people like to watch stuff being destroyed/crushed! lol
@grantmorrissmusicI turn off anything above 20 cents on t1...
@dominik4154the breakdown of what actually counts as a conversion in the forecast tool is the part that finally made the cost per conversion number make sense to me. still doesn't tell you if those people become real fans though, which is why i started running things through popHatch after the ad to see if it was building an actual audience or just a temporary bump.
@prakharagarwal6673I think tier 2 countries aren’t worth it tbh, low ctr and the listeners don’t stay and they pay way less 1000 streams from Mexico pays about 300 -400 streams from France so look at all those conversion u have to get just to make the same amount as a tier 1 country
@iamgreatness6649What I have noticed is that the better the ad content and how it fits with the song, the lower the cost per conversion, even in tier 1 countries. For example I’ve seen great results with certain song/creative combos that give me under $0.20 per click in tier 1 countries and when it doesn’t perform well, the cost per click goes up. So post Andromeda, the best way to lower your cost per click isn’t through targeting but through better ad creatives that closely match with the song.
@BrentLeVasseurFuuuuck... I'm on the second day of my campain and I'm having 2,74 per conversion. I excluded USA and Canada and focused just on latam countrys and europe.
How can I make it cheaper?
Andrew's a genius.
@ericmonseIs it smart to mix T1-T3 countries in one ad set
And also with a budget of like $100-200 how many ad set do you think one should have
EPIC
@jamesdpterodactyl3068Not just cost per conversion, but also love for you to talk more about streams per conversion.
My latest promotion had decent conversion cost, but I had about 50% stream to conversion ratio… and Brazil in particular had lots of conversions but very few streams (yes, landing page and all that)
title pulled me right in 😭
@roheezyrapsWhy are we. Still promoting
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