WTF is a conversion campaign?

0:01 Defining the conversion event

What the f**k is a conversion campaign? A conversion campaign is a type of advertisement that optimizes for a conversion event. In our case, that event is a viewer clicking on a link to go to Spotify.

Of course, you can have them go anywhere else besides Spotify, but that's what we're going to focus on, and we'll get into it. This is what that looks like in practice.

0:28 What the ad and landing page look like

So here's an ad that I'm running. This is my band, Marmalade Mountain, and "Strange Angels" is my album. I'm actually running these ads myself, since I'm also an artist.

I'm going to have some music playing over a video, or maybe a photo, whatever you want, though I highly recommend a video. When you click on it, it says "Listen now," and it takes you to a landing page. We've all seen these and probably hate them, but it turns out they're there for a very good reason.

0:54 Why the pixel matters

Landing pages allow you to place something called a pixel on them, which tracks events, tying back to what we were talking about before, where a conversion campaign optimizes for a specific conversion event. That event is clicking on this link to go to Spotify. That information goes back into the advertising system and tells it, "Optimize for people like this."

1:13 Filtering out bots, and where the click can lead

This allows us to filter out bots, which it turns out there are a lot of on the internet, and it also allows us to focus on people who are very intentional about listening to our music, which is super important. After they click this link, it takes them to Spotify and then starts playing your music, or you can have it do whatever you want. It can take them to a playlist, an album, or an artist page.

There are a lot of different things you can do, and we're also going to talk about all of that. This is super effective as a flow because you're introducing your music and your vibe, then double-checking that people actually want to listen to it before telling the advertising system, in this case Meta, "Hey, this is the type of person that we want to show our ads to."

2:05 The payoff: saves, listeners, and streams

So that way, you're getting only very engaged listeners who like your s**t on Spotify. This means you're going to get a bump in saves. You're also going to get a bump in listeners and streams, but saves in particular, because people are really into your s**t before they even get there.

2:24 A real campaign's numbers

This is a campaign I was running for my own music, back from February to March of this year, and you'll see I was getting around 500 saves a day. I think I was spending 30 bucks a day or something like that, I can't remember exactly.

2:37 Wrap-up and what's ahead

At one point during the peak of the campaign, it was more like 700 saves a day, which means 70 people were saving the album, since there are 10 songs on the album at 700 saves a day. This is a great way to filter for intentional listeners, which feeds Spotify's algorithm really positive information about your music. We're going to talk about the impacts of that, and how to use it to your advantage, later in this workshop.