Music Scam Alert

How Many Streams Do Ads Generate?

That depends on how much you’re spending, how optimized your custom audience data or lookalike audience is (don’t worry about that right now), what countries you’re marketing to, and a myriad of other factors.

But there are a few things you can know for sure. If a company claims they can get you millions of streams for a $200 dollar campaign, that’s not possible. $200 dollars, at $10 dollars a day, is just twenty days of ads – at the minimum budget. Even in a perfect world, there’s no way you’d get more than 400 or 500 streams from that. And that’s if you’re a marketing professional, using large data set lookalikes, and your targeting is highly refined.

I know those terms are probably a little meaningless right now, but it doesn’t matter – all you need to know is, the absolute highest possible number of streams you could get out of $200 in ads would be in the range of 400-500 streams.

And it’s not like just anyone could pull that off. I’m letting you know this so that you don’t find yourself in a situation where you’re hiring an unknown marketing firm to handle your campaign, and you walk into that expecting this semi-sketchy company to be able to get you those numbers. They can’t. Some can – but they’re big names in the advertising business and would cost an arm and a leg to hire.

Important Note:

✍🏻 As I explain these concepts and answer these common questions, just understand that what I will be discussing here are broad averages. There are plenty of individual factors – specific to your brand, your region, your budget, your experience, you musical style, your audience, your interest targets, etc – which may skew these averages for you personally.

Despite the many variables that can influence ad cost, understanding a ballpark cost for Meta Ad Marketing is a topic I believe too many experts and teachers in this field shy away from, for all the reasons I’ve listed above.

For that reason, I will try to briefly explain Meta Marketing and then I will give a quick overview of what costs are common and anticipated with that. But, again, understand that these common-costs and average-factors may be a lot different for you, depending on various factors.

If you’re just starting out in Meta Marketing, however – these numbers and concepts will probably align to what you can expect to see in terms of cost factors when running ads.

In Meta Marketing, there are lots of factors which can dramatically effect how many converted listeners you get for your ad budget. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, a quick crash course on what is easily the most complex topic, out of everything you will have to learn to be a successful independent artist: Meta Ad Marketing.

Sidebar: 

📌 There are various services that allow you to create a landing page. They are all about the same in terms of how effective they are, but some cost more than others. I personally recommend Hypeddit for these purposes, but there’s really no wrong answer.

Sidebar: 

📌 There are different schools of thought on whether or not you should try to direct all traffic to one streaming platform so you can build your audience faster there, or if you should give the listener options in case they don’t have the one platform you’ve linked. Personally, I only link Spotify, but there are excellent marketers who get good results from linking both Spotify and Apple. It’s your choice.

So once your listener makes it to the landing page with your Spotify button on it, what they don’t see is that there is a tiny snippet of code, invisibly embedded in the header of the landing page.

That little snippet of code is called a Pixel, and its job is to track what the user does on your landing page, and then report that information back to your Meta Ads account.

From there, the Meta Ad algorithm can start to build up a data set of knowledge on what kind of user follows through with the desired action (which, in your case, will be to click through to Spotify) and what kind of user doesn’t.

So, let’s dive back in: Your user has now clicked the button on your ad (that button is often called a CTA, or Call To Action) and now they’ve made it all the way to your landing page.

🌳 But you’re not out of the woods yet. Around one quarter to one half of the people who make it to your landing page won’t go any further. The reasons for this comes down to basic human attention span – or the lack thereof.

Most just lose interest. Some people get there and realize they clicked the button on your ad on accident.

Or, this person may not be a person at all – it might have been a bot. Bots can’t complete complex actions in series, such as clicking a second button on a landing page.

So the bot stops at the landing page, unable to go further. That’s the reason you need a landing page. The pixel data is important, but, if you didn’t need a landing page, you wouldn’t need the pixel data, as anyone clicking the CTA would be presumed to have ended up on Spotify from there – because that’s where the CTA button would go.

Either way, Meta needs to know when someone aborts on the landing page, because it helps Meta to learn who is motivated enough to click through all the buttons just to hear your song.

All the Pixel knows is that the user clicked the Spotify button – it can’t track what the user does after that. So the pixel might tell Meta, “Hey! This ‘type’ of user just converted!” and Meta will say “Great, I’ll find more users just like that one to show these ads to.”

At which point, Meta has learned the wrong thing, and will now be looking for people who are likely to click-through on a Spotify song, but who don’t actually have Spotify.

That’s why so many marketers find Meta to be incredibly frustrating. Even more frustrating, it’s the best tool we have.

This “bad learning” can actually be a big problem, and it’s another factor that can change how much ads cost, and influence how effective your campaigns ultimately are. It’s not something there’s an easy solution to, either.

So, to summarize, there is a chance that some of these “conversions” that are reported back to Meta won’t equate to actual streams. But, for the most part, they should. 

Now that you’re aware of the fine print: for simplicity’s sake, let’s consider one conversion as equivalent to (at least) one stream on Spotify.

There is small cost involved just in showing your ad to people, and that cost will be higher or lower depending on market value (in a minor way) and the country you’re targeting (in a major way). So, in short, showing ads to Americans and Canadians is the better move for your career, but, it will cost more to do that.

🎯 Audience Targeting:

Costs are higher for more specific audiences like targeting certain music fans (e.g., fans of Kendrick Lamar) compared to broader groups. But, conversions are also higher when your targeting is highly refined. So with the greater cost comes greater efficacy.

Because the Ad algorithm is supposed to learn who likes your music over time, the idea is that costs are high at first when targeting specific artists, but eventually it learns who – within that fanbase – is also a fan of your music, and as it does, those costs go down, as it is able to find more and more people just like those original targets with greater ease.

🧠 For these reasons, definitely use refined targets. Targeting “music” is like targeting nothing at all, because everyone has at least some level of interest in “music”.

The same can be said for targeting Drake. If everyone – at the very least – dabbles in liking Drake, then targeting Drake is like targeting everyone. And targeting everyone is like targeting no one.

There’s nothing that can be done about it, though, aside from avoiding the temptation to interact with negative comments, which just drives home the point to Meta that the people you’re engaging with are your core, ideal audience. And if they’re haters, they’re clearly not your ideal audience.

And, to be fair, Canva is fine for these purposes, provided you put some thought and effort into creating content with it. Companies that seem scammy are very unlikely to do that. Even if their intention really is to run ads for you.

But just know, that often is not their intention. Because the only thing easier than running bad ads is running no ads at all, and skipping town with your cash.

It’s bad either way, at the end of the day. Running ads that aren’t effective just eats up money, and you’ll gain very little (if any) traction from it. Being scammed is, honestly, only nominally worse.

That’s because Meta Marketing was really setup to service those selling physical goods. You, as someone who is trying to get people to stream your music, are neither selling, nor marketing physical goods. You’re trying to get someone to be interested in a digital media product which is free for them to consume.

You’d think that would be easier to do – but because Meta was built on the assumption everyone would be selling tech gadgets and pink sauce, it misses the mark in terms of knowing “automatically” where to place your ads. That means you’re going to have to make those decisions yourself.

But vertical placements like Reels has also been shown to have higher conversions rates compared to other placements, likely due to the immersive nature of the full-screen mode, and due to the fact that most people watch reels with the sound on, whereas they often have their volume muted when they’re scrolling their feed.

✍🏻 If you’re noticing some contradiction here, you’re not alone. This is commonplace in marketing – studies and strategies often provide conflicting advice.

It really just comes down to what works for you and your music, which is something you’ll only discover through trial and error.