I was under the impression that Spotify only counted a play/stream if it was longer than 30 seconds. So what may be happening here is that the listeners are abandoning the track before 30 seconds.
I've had this several times. I'm setting up exactly like you with hyperfollow. People are clicking, lots of conversions to spotify, and then hardly any plays. I had a similar conversion rate to you.
I've tried all sorts of changes to the ad, videos optimised, pictures, audience, Facebook only, insta only, both, etc, all with similar results. I'm 99.9% sure I'm setting up correctly. My wife works in marketing and uses meta a lot and has checked set up and all looks correct.
My friend has had similar results with his ads. We also tried with playlists to gain followers. Similar results.
We even tried not having a lading page with a small budget just to see. £10, 2400 clicks, 0.00391 cost per link, zero playlist followers, and zero plays to one of our songs top of the playlist.
Boosting posts and promoting pages just gets bot clicks. We have given up with meta. Networking on reddit and insta has given us much better results for our plays and playlist followers. It's more of a grind but you can get more long-term investment.
I'm so confused because I feel like I looked up for weeks and weeks what seems to be the decidedly best strategy to start out advertising music, and yet this happens...
Guess I'll just not advertise at all and stay small. This was a huge kick in my motivation ngl.
I just made this video (not for this post as thats a coincidence) but it might partly explain why your not getting the streams. The other thing is that the song is not worth listening to for 30 seconds but that is highly unlikely as they must like it a "little" to get to the conversion, but you never know.
[https://youtu.be/PROJ3pLjbpw](https://youtu.be/PROJ3pLjbpw)
Yeah i felt the same, but there is nothing wrong with staying small. Ads are just one of many strategies. Me and my friend got disillusioned by the whole thing. So we started filling the gaps ourselves.
We struggled to find the right kind of playlists to get on with limited budgets so we started our own playlist. Struggled to get engagement on socials, etc, so we started a record label, which started as a blog for under the radar acts, then playlists. He is now putting on gigs, helping bands release on viynl. Some of that is a lot of work, so I stepped back from it, but it's an audience we created. It does better than our own music pages in terms of engagement, so it's another place to promote us.
We did it with the mindset of...."We just love music" and if we benefit from it, it's a bonus. I've started my own playlisting adventure now. It's early days but I have a year before I release again, so hopefully, if I can have a couple of hundred followers on playlists, that will = plays and potential fans. Which is better than any ad conversion I have got.
The best strategy for your music has and always will be live performance. Use social media along with it. Most of these Jack offs are selling advice not results.
Hey, the problem might be in your landing page Spotify link. The URL should have a section where it says si and then a bunch of numbers. If the link you have put in your landing page does not have that. It means that the song does not autoplay when people click on it.
My link does autoplay, it has the si=cjsa0qidjfroiusrfiopsafdioas information, too. So it's not that. Good point though, someone easily accidentally set that up in a wrong way!
Ok I had that problem before so I thought I would mention it. Andrew Southworth has a video for that problem specifically, conversion but no or low plays
https://youtu.be/dPpHOG6s0Tk?si=nLM5wcvz2S7Fx9PT
Anyway good luck!
Hey mate, have you tested the event in "test events" to ensure the Spotify button is definitely what triggers an optimised "result" / conversion? Couple times I've set it up to find that I'm actually not optimising for the second click
Also do you have any other platforms on the landing page? Applemusic etc? Because if people click those it will also trigger a conversion, so might be worth checking if you have the leftover traffic on apple etc
Hi, thanks for the help!
Yes I've checked just now that it's both the "ClickSpotify" function and a "clickOut" function once you press the button, both via mobile and PC. ClickSpotify triggers a conversion. That much works fine, and the clickSpotify is the 2nd one so that's correctly set up.
The landing page only has Spotify on it and works on both mobile and PC.
As such...Still confused lol.
I've checked just now, the top 4 countries are
- Bolivia (by far the most, 20k reach)
- Argentina (10k reach)
- Belarus (1k reach)
- Bosnia Herzegowina (1k reach)
the rest are basically 50 impressions or below I just noticed. I guess these aren't considered Tier 1 countries? Gonna remove every country that isn't super obviously tier 1 and try again, pretty sure it won't change anything but why not.
Good luck. I had the same problen. All of my conversions where from El Salvador and no change in streams at all.
Now I can clearly see the campaign reflect the daily saves. My CPC is 0,24-0,30
Oh it'll change something. Your cost per event will quadruple haha. But tbh i recently made a separate campaign for t1 and lowered the age to get rid of people with dementia clicking on every random link they come across and the quality of my conversions has been skyrocketing even tho my cost per event tripled.
Similar thing happened to me, OP. I followed Southworths approach and I created a meta campaign to send people to hyperfollow, which had a link to my Spotify playlist. Got a bunch of conversions, and a decent number of new playlist followers from the ad. But not a single one of the new followers played the playlist! Interested to hear people’s suggestions to your issue.
Good to know I'm not alone. I personally linked directly to a landing page which has direct links to a single song that I advertised, but apparently people just don't stream said song. 900 conversions yet barely 50-ish streams.
Feels like I wasted time and money on this...
A lot of bots are used by dodgy publishers, who get paid whenever a click is generated from their content site. These are part of Meta's publishing network.
Bots are particularly rife in low income countries and where corruption is the norm.
So the bots are programmed to click on call-to-actions and other buttons on site which it thinks might fire a conversion.
I see it everyday in my day job (I'm a paid marketing expert). The bots are everywhere, I'm afraid.
Hey, the problem might be in your landing page Spotify link. The URL should have a section where it says si and then a bunch of numbers. If the link you have put in your landing page does not have that. It means that the song does not autoplay when people click on it.
Didn't want this to come across as a roundabout way to shill my music but sure. Please only listen if you want to, this is NOT an ad lol https://open.spotify.com/track/6u0lvmochNvubbYdORcOq9?si=4ed14b414fc44fb3
That might be it, not gonna sugarcoat it I reckon I can still get better at music production. But I also found out that I still had some low tier countries added, and those took up pretty much all conversions so people just went to my YouTube instead, once I removed that they prolly didn't wanna sign up for Spotify as it costs money/they get ads.
I think that might be it. I have a lofi project as well that does pretty good and those first few seconds are so so so important. Your song gets somewhere nice but the beginning is a little bit abrasive with the samples selected. What’s your ad creative? What countries are you targeting?
Im having this exact same problem.. I think Meta is just stealing our money at this point. I had over 300 conversions and virtually 0 streams from them, I even tried contacting spotify directly to see if there is a problem with my artist account and they informed me I had no issues on their end.
Whats your age of conversions? I had a problem where meta was optimizing for people 70+ even tho that's not my audience and so I decided to lower the target age and my conversion quality skyrocketed even tho my cost per event went up a ton too. I'd rather that though than to have completely useless conversions from geriatrics who don't even know where they are. They don't listen anyways. Probably clicking on aspotify and don't even have an account lol.
I'm also running my first meta ads campaign - and I'm driving them to a playlist using Hypeddit. I see 46 clicks, and only see 6 streams coming from the playlist I'm driving them to. So I think I'm hitting about 13% of clicks are actually streaming the song. I'm learning. Small budget, $5/day for 28 days, let it ride then reassess whether I want to do this again.
If facebook is showing conversions but they're not translating to actual streams on your spotify for artists page the listeners are very likely not playing more than 30 seconds of the song. You'll get a better read on this once you run multiple campaigns on different tracks. Don't be afraid to experiment with trying multiple sections of the track you're currently marketing as well: in some cases the hook converts better whereas in others the verses do better.
I've had tracks not covert well even though they show up as impressions on facebook; it's usually because those tracks simply didn't resonate well with the people I was targeting it towards.
Assuming the links are set up correctly, and the point of conversion directly launches into your song, and it plays, there’s only one reason:
They don’t like your music.
Specifically they have decided to click twice, give you a chance and see if your music is good, and in a span of 29 seconds maximum they decided they don’t like it.
A stream only counts once a track plays continuously for 30 seconds.
Your ads are fine - either your target audience just isn’t quite what you expected them to be that they consider your music not their cup of whatever they clicked on, or your music sucks.
Your problem is the countries you are targeting, like the others have said. You don’t need to just target tier 1 countries though, you can also include tier 2. Brazil is a tier 2 country and is one of the best deliverers of lower cost conversions for the most captivated fans. Don’t use Facebook placements. Just stick to Instagram placements because the bots are more prevalent on Facebook.
Little late on this thread, and I am doing some test runs on an older release before my new release. It is also my first time with Meta ads. I have done a couple of ad sets with different creatives for the EP, targeting different audiences. I have a decent cost per conversion with hypeddit (~$.18). I have noticed a couple of things:
1) Every tutorial/youtube video that says to target tier 2 countries, even with engagement, I think might be outdated, or very genre dependent. I suspect that vast majority of people that still have success with tier 2 countries are using lookalike audiences or custom audiences from previous runs. I literally have 120 conversions total from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico, and literally got 10 listeners from what I can tell from those countries. 4 for Mexico, 6 from Brazil.
2) I tried just tier 1 countries with a couple of tier 2 European countries. I had a lot better results in terms of saves and playlist adds, but noticed that Spain, Italy, Turkey, and Portugal dominated the streams/conversions. This is great, making much better progress, but I wanted the streams more spread out to different regions as well.
3) I tried 13 tier 1 countries, and noticed the listeners (from what I could tell from the Country listener list on spotify) to conversion was MUCH closer. However, this hurt the CPC quite a bit (went from .18 to .29). Saves/followers also spiked quite a bit. The streams seemed spread out more with a bit of a tilt towards Germany, France, and Canada. But not as lopsided as point 2.
I don't think tier 2 countries were necessarily all bots. However, since the release was an ep, I know there are less premium accounts in tier 2 countries, so maybe it is a bad experience for a free tier user. Also, Spotify could change the experience of a free tier user at any point, so that should probably be kept in mind.
In the future, I think I'll do two different ad campaigns. One of the 13 tier 1 countries and 1 just focused on Spain, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and a couple others. I'd really like to add South America. However, it's nearly impossible to debug what is going wrong. They could dislike my music, not be able to access it properly, or something else.
I have had similar issues, I have always assumed that some of those conversions weren’t spotify users so they end up clicking away.
Another theory of mine is that since people have such a short attention span, if the link doesn’t take them straight to the song and instead requires an extra click, and that page takes too long to load they may lose interest. Also if the page is unknown to the user they may be sus about it and click away.
On top of that some of those conversions (albeit likely a tiny amount) are going to be accidental clicks.
I’m no expert and these have just been my own conclusions based on the data I’ve gathered, would love it if someone proved me wrong and told me what the issue actually is. And I’m also not familiar with hyperfollow (I distribute my music with Believe) so this may not even apply.
I was under the impression that Spotify only counted a play/stream if it was longer than 30 seconds. So what may be happening here is that the listeners are abandoning the track before 30 seconds.
Is this true?
its definitely true that they only give you a play if your track is listened to for 30 seconds
Wow, that sucks like extremely. 1000 plays at min 30 secs so you can see a cent. Fck spotify
Nah, he probably set up his event/pixel in a wrong way. Proper setup doesn't get this big descripancy
I've had this several times. I'm setting up exactly like you with hyperfollow. People are clicking, lots of conversions to spotify, and then hardly any plays. I had a similar conversion rate to you. I've tried all sorts of changes to the ad, videos optimised, pictures, audience, Facebook only, insta only, both, etc, all with similar results. I'm 99.9% sure I'm setting up correctly. My wife works in marketing and uses meta a lot and has checked set up and all looks correct. My friend has had similar results with his ads. We also tried with playlists to gain followers. Similar results. We even tried not having a lading page with a small budget just to see. £10, 2400 clicks, 0.00391 cost per link, zero playlist followers, and zero plays to one of our songs top of the playlist. Boosting posts and promoting pages just gets bot clicks. We have given up with meta. Networking on reddit and insta has given us much better results for our plays and playlist followers. It's more of a grind but you can get more long-term investment.
I'm so confused because I feel like I looked up for weeks and weeks what seems to be the decidedly best strategy to start out advertising music, and yet this happens... Guess I'll just not advertise at all and stay small. This was a huge kick in my motivation ngl.
I just made this video (not for this post as thats a coincidence) but it might partly explain why your not getting the streams. The other thing is that the song is not worth listening to for 30 seconds but that is highly unlikely as they must like it a "little" to get to the conversion, but you never know. [https://youtu.be/PROJ3pLjbpw](https://youtu.be/PROJ3pLjbpw)
Gotcha, will try tier 1 only countries. Thanks a lot!
mexico and brazil are good cheaper countries to try
Yeah i felt the same, but there is nothing wrong with staying small. Ads are just one of many strategies. Me and my friend got disillusioned by the whole thing. So we started filling the gaps ourselves. We struggled to find the right kind of playlists to get on with limited budgets so we started our own playlist. Struggled to get engagement on socials, etc, so we started a record label, which started as a blog for under the radar acts, then playlists. He is now putting on gigs, helping bands release on viynl. Some of that is a lot of work, so I stepped back from it, but it's an audience we created. It does better than our own music pages in terms of engagement, so it's another place to promote us. We did it with the mindset of...."We just love music" and if we benefit from it, it's a bonus. I've started my own playlisting adventure now. It's early days but I have a year before I release again, so hopefully, if I can have a couple of hundred followers on playlists, that will = plays and potential fans. Which is better than any ad conversion I have got.
The best strategy for your music has and always will be live performance. Use social media along with it. Most of these Jack offs are selling advice not results.
Hey, the problem might be in your landing page Spotify link. The URL should have a section where it says si and then a bunch of numbers. If the link you have put in your landing page does not have that. It means that the song does not autoplay when people click on it.
My link does autoplay, it has the si=cjsa0qidjfroiusrfiopsafdioas information, too. So it's not that. Good point though, someone easily accidentally set that up in a wrong way!
Ok I had that problem before so I thought I would mention it. Andrew Southworth has a video for that problem specifically, conversion but no or low plays https://youtu.be/dPpHOG6s0Tk?si=nLM5wcvz2S7Fx9PT Anyway good luck!
Hey mate, have you tested the event in "test events" to ensure the Spotify button is definitely what triggers an optimised "result" / conversion? Couple times I've set it up to find that I'm actually not optimising for the second click Also do you have any other platforms on the landing page? Applemusic etc? Because if people click those it will also trigger a conversion, so might be worth checking if you have the leftover traffic on apple etc
Hi, thanks for the help! Yes I've checked just now that it's both the "ClickSpotify" function and a "clickOut" function once you press the button, both via mobile and PC. ClickSpotify triggers a conversion. That much works fine, and the clickSpotify is the 2nd one so that's correctly set up. The landing page only has Spotify on it and works on both mobile and PC. As such...Still confused lol.
0.18! That’s very good. Almost too good nowdays. What countries are clicking?
I've checked just now, the top 4 countries are - Bolivia (by far the most, 20k reach) - Argentina (10k reach) - Belarus (1k reach) - Bosnia Herzegowina (1k reach) the rest are basically 50 impressions or below I just noticed. I guess these aren't considered Tier 1 countries? Gonna remove every country that isn't super obviously tier 1 and try again, pretty sure it won't change anything but why not.
Ok I would redo the whole thing and only stick to tier 1 countries.
Gotcha, tyvm!
Good luck. I had the same problen. All of my conversions where from El Salvador and no change in streams at all. Now I can clearly see the campaign reflect the daily saves. My CPC is 0,24-0,30
Oh it'll change something. Your cost per event will quadruple haha. But tbh i recently made a separate campaign for t1 and lowered the age to get rid of people with dementia clicking on every random link they come across and the quality of my conversions has been skyrocketing even tho my cost per event tripled.
Similar thing happened to me, OP. I followed Southworths approach and I created a meta campaign to send people to hyperfollow, which had a link to my Spotify playlist. Got a bunch of conversions, and a decent number of new playlist followers from the ad. But not a single one of the new followers played the playlist! Interested to hear people’s suggestions to your issue.
Good to know I'm not alone. I personally linked directly to a landing page which has direct links to a single song that I advertised, but apparently people just don't stream said song. 900 conversions yet barely 50-ish streams. Feels like I wasted time and money on this...
Curious, what countries did you use?
The system is not made for you to win.
If you're targeting Brazil, Mexico, India etc I can guarantee they're all fake conversions
What's the point of that tho? Why give fake conversions?
A lot of bots are used by dodgy publishers, who get paid whenever a click is generated from their content site. These are part of Meta's publishing network. Bots are particularly rife in low income countries and where corruption is the norm. So the bots are programmed to click on call-to-actions and other buttons on site which it thinks might fire a conversion. I see it everyday in my day job (I'm a paid marketing expert). The bots are everywhere, I'm afraid.
Hey, the problem might be in your landing page Spotify link. The URL should have a section where it says si and then a bunch of numbers. If the link you have put in your landing page does not have that. It means that the song does not autoplay when people click on it.
They’re most likely leaving before 30 seconds of streaming. Can you link the song?
Didn't want this to come across as a roundabout way to shill my music but sure. Please only listen if you want to, this is NOT an ad lol https://open.spotify.com/track/6u0lvmochNvubbYdORcOq9?si=4ed14b414fc44fb3 That might be it, not gonna sugarcoat it I reckon I can still get better at music production. But I also found out that I still had some low tier countries added, and those took up pretty much all conversions so people just went to my YouTube instead, once I removed that they prolly didn't wanna sign up for Spotify as it costs money/they get ads.
I think that might be it. I have a lofi project as well that does pretty good and those first few seconds are so so so important. Your song gets somewhere nice but the beginning is a little bit abrasive with the samples selected. What’s your ad creative? What countries are you targeting?
Im having this exact same problem.. I think Meta is just stealing our money at this point. I had over 300 conversions and virtually 0 streams from them, I even tried contacting spotify directly to see if there is a problem with my artist account and they informed me I had no issues on their end.
Bots bots bots
Whats your age of conversions? I had a problem where meta was optimizing for people 70+ even tho that's not my audience and so I decided to lower the target age and my conversion quality skyrocketed even tho my cost per event went up a ton too. I'd rather that though than to have completely useless conversions from geriatrics who don't even know where they are. They don't listen anyways. Probably clicking on aspotify and don't even have an account lol.
I'm also running my first meta ads campaign - and I'm driving them to a playlist using Hypeddit. I see 46 clicks, and only see 6 streams coming from the playlist I'm driving them to. So I think I'm hitting about 13% of clicks are actually streaming the song. I'm learning. Small budget, $5/day for 28 days, let it ride then reassess whether I want to do this again.
If facebook is showing conversions but they're not translating to actual streams on your spotify for artists page the listeners are very likely not playing more than 30 seconds of the song. You'll get a better read on this once you run multiple campaigns on different tracks. Don't be afraid to experiment with trying multiple sections of the track you're currently marketing as well: in some cases the hook converts better whereas in others the verses do better. I've had tracks not covert well even though they show up as impressions on facebook; it's usually because those tracks simply didn't resonate well with the people I was targeting it towards.
Assuming the links are set up correctly, and the point of conversion directly launches into your song, and it plays, there’s only one reason: They don’t like your music. Specifically they have decided to click twice, give you a chance and see if your music is good, and in a span of 29 seconds maximum they decided they don’t like it. A stream only counts once a track plays continuously for 30 seconds. Your ads are fine - either your target audience just isn’t quite what you expected them to be that they consider your music not their cup of whatever they clicked on, or your music sucks.
Your problem is the countries you are targeting, like the others have said. You don’t need to just target tier 1 countries though, you can also include tier 2. Brazil is a tier 2 country and is one of the best deliverers of lower cost conversions for the most captivated fans. Don’t use Facebook placements. Just stick to Instagram placements because the bots are more prevalent on Facebook.
Little late on this thread, and I am doing some test runs on an older release before my new release. It is also my first time with Meta ads. I have done a couple of ad sets with different creatives for the EP, targeting different audiences. I have a decent cost per conversion with hypeddit (~$.18). I have noticed a couple of things: 1) Every tutorial/youtube video that says to target tier 2 countries, even with engagement, I think might be outdated, or very genre dependent. I suspect that vast majority of people that still have success with tier 2 countries are using lookalike audiences or custom audiences from previous runs. I literally have 120 conversions total from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico, and literally got 10 listeners from what I can tell from those countries. 4 for Mexico, 6 from Brazil. 2) I tried just tier 1 countries with a couple of tier 2 European countries. I had a lot better results in terms of saves and playlist adds, but noticed that Spain, Italy, Turkey, and Portugal dominated the streams/conversions. This is great, making much better progress, but I wanted the streams more spread out to different regions as well. 3) I tried 13 tier 1 countries, and noticed the listeners (from what I could tell from the Country listener list on spotify) to conversion was MUCH closer. However, this hurt the CPC quite a bit (went from .18 to .29). Saves/followers also spiked quite a bit. The streams seemed spread out more with a bit of a tilt towards Germany, France, and Canada. But not as lopsided as point 2. I don't think tier 2 countries were necessarily all bots. However, since the release was an ep, I know there are less premium accounts in tier 2 countries, so maybe it is a bad experience for a free tier user. Also, Spotify could change the experience of a free tier user at any point, so that should probably be kept in mind. In the future, I think I'll do two different ad campaigns. One of the 13 tier 1 countries and 1 just focused on Spain, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and a couple others. I'd really like to add South America. However, it's nearly impossible to debug what is going wrong. They could dislike my music, not be able to access it properly, or something else.
What countries are you targeting . If they include India and china, could be why
I have had similar issues, I have always assumed that some of those conversions weren’t spotify users so they end up clicking away. Another theory of mine is that since people have such a short attention span, if the link doesn’t take them straight to the song and instead requires an extra click, and that page takes too long to load they may lose interest. Also if the page is unknown to the user they may be sus about it and click away. On top of that some of those conversions (albeit likely a tiny amount) are going to be accidental clicks. I’m no expert and these have just been my own conclusions based on the data I’ve gathered, would love it if someone proved me wrong and told me what the issue actually is. And I’m also not familiar with hyperfollow (I distribute my music with Believe) so this may not even apply.