How do I create a conversion campaign? Part II

0:00 Choosing engagement as your campaign objective

In this video, we're actually going to create a new conversion campaign. If you're wondering how they actually look once they're created, go back and watch the previous one, that's part one. We're going to hit Create, we're inside Meta Ads Manager creating a conversion campaign. The way you get here is through engagement, that's your campaign objective, and we're specifically focusing on conversions. You can create other sorts of campaigns: Awareness, which is just trying to reach a lot of people without optimizing for engagement, good if you're a big artist who wants people to know about a tour and you're retargeting an existing fan base. Traffic is similar, but tracks people actually clicking and loading a landing page or messaging you. Leads is good for collecting leads for sales and stuff. All this other stuff is more advanced, do engagement, go to conversions.

This is the way. Click Continue, then it's going to give you some options, and we don't want the tailored messages campaign, it's probably going to say something different to you, because it's trying to provide an optimized and automated experience for most people. Spotify conversion campaigns are not what most people are doing in Ads Manager at all, it's a massive program, tons of people using it, probably one of the biggest businesses there is, this is Facebook's whole business. So this is a streamlined setup for common use cases that we're not doing, don't do it, you can play with it but it'll just waste your time, and I don't recommend it, you guys are pros, you're taking the course to learn how to do it yourself. So we're going to go to manual engagement campaign and set the stuff up right, then hit Continue, and now you have a new engagement campaign.

2:30 Campaign setup: naming, bidding, and budget level

We're going to name it, because naming's important, I'm going to call it MM for Marmalade Mountain Spotify Conversion Campaign, that's what this campaign is for, getting conversions for my music to Spotify. Campaign, ad set, ad, remember they're tiered: you can have multiple ad sets per campaign and multiple ads per ad set, but only one campaign, that's the focus of this particular campaign, and you can have many campaigns for your whole project, but we're just setting up one for now.

Special ad categories, not relevant, that's for employment, housing, social issues, political stuff, there are requirements in different countries, ignore it, you don't need it. Bidding type, buying type, auction, we're bidding for placements, you're automatically placing bids within Meta's system to get your ad shown to your audience, and you're competing against everybody else trying to do that, that's how it works and why cost can drastically vary, it's cheaper in certain countries because fewer people are targeting that specific audience. Campaign objective, engagement, I recommend doing ad set budget, this gives you more granular control over how much money goes to each ad set. If you set it at the campaign level, which is also great depending on your goals, it depends on your who, what, where, why, and when, but most people are going to want ad set level. Campaign budget means it gets set at the campaign level and distributed automatically to whichever ad sets get the best results for the cheapest money, great if you don't care which ad set it goes to, but the problem is if you have a really cheap audience in one ad set, all your money goes there and none goes to your other ad sets. I don't do that because I want to make sure I'm hitting different markets for different reasons.

A/B test is when you want to compare things and not have them compete against each other for the same audience, remember it's an auction, so if you don't do an A/B test and create two ad sets that overlap audiences, you're competing with yourself for placements, which sucks, you don't want to do that. If you want to prevent that you can set up an A/B test, and it'll make sure they don't overlap, a great tool for when you get deeper into this, but we're not going to need it right now. Then we hit Next, and now we're inside our ad set, new engagement ad set.

5:35 Setting your ad set's why and target countries

Let's do tier one countries, I'm going to call it Tier One Countries because they're my primary target. My why for this conversion campaign: I want to trigger the algorithm and improve listenership in my home country and places I know I want to tour, so let's say that's my why, I want to build listenership so I can tour and get shows, and make sure I'm hitting those markets. There's more nuance to this, actually, because if you trigger algorithms in cheap countries, you can get it to push your music for free through the Spotify algorithm to your tier one countries, but I'm going to focus on marketing directly to them now and show you what that looks like.

7:32 Choosing your conversion event and pixel

Then I'm going to choose, okay, I don't want messages, this is where you set your conversion, I don't want to send people to message me through Instagram, not my goal, I want them to go to my landing page, because I'm trying to get them to convert. I want a maximum number of conversions, I don't want link clicks, reach, impressions, or landing page views, I want view content. We are optimizing for a view content event on our landing page because I'm using SubmitHub, so we're going to choose our pixel, the Marmalade Mountain Spotify conversion pixel, and choose View Content, you'll notice it's in active events. There's also inactive events, like this Hypeddit thing, which requires you to create a custom event, a pain in the a*s, and that's one reason I recommend SubmitHub because it's just easier. If yours is showing up in inactive, go back to the pixel and landing page videos, set your pixel, test the event, make sure it's set up properly, and give it 24 hours, it needs time to process through Meta's massive system to get to active. If it's not active, don't publish your ad, just give it a day, once it shows up active, you're good.

9:45 Budget, dynamic creative, and audience controls

So now I've got my conversion set up, cost per result goal, I'm going to skip it, too advanced. Dynamic creative, I recommend turning it off so you have more control and see what's actually going on, instead of you creating different ads it just tries a bunch of combinations and picks the best one, I don't like this because there's less information, and I think you getting information and learning is more important right now. We said we'd do $10 a day for our ad set, so set your budget at the ad set level since we did ad sets, it's going to start today with no end date, we're just going to let it run $10 a day until I tell it to stop, it'll say you'll spend an average of $10 a day, but sometimes more, sometimes less. Budget scheduling, you can do all kinds of stuff there, too advanced, let's skip it.

Audience controls, this stuff is super important, and it's always changing, all of the stuff you're seeing in this video is changing all the time, Meta's constantly changing these tools and testing things, you've got to be patient with it. If you're not seeing exactly what's on my screen, that's okay, use the information and focus on the concepts, this stuff will be impossible to always be on top of because it's too much, so just work with things the best you can, and if you're confused, go to our community and talk about it. Here's where you have audience controls and Advantage+ audience stuff, I recommend, as of right now, switching to original audience options, because this is a lot of new machine learning and AI, and it's just not quite there yet, so switch to original audience, it's going to try to convince you not to, ignore it, use original audience, it is the way, as of right now, and this can change.

12:41 Building your audience: locations, age, and niche artists

We're going to create a new audience since you probably don't have one yet, and you've got a lot of controls here. The first thing we set is our locations, I said we're doing Tier 1 countries, and I know I'm planning on touring Canada and Australia because this is a tour-focused campaign, you can get very specific, like targeting the exact address of a venue within a five-mile radius if you want, but we're focusing on countries and regions. I also know I'm going to the UK, Germany, France, and Denmark, these are all the places I'm touring, but this is going to be different for everyone, you're just going to do wherever you're focused on for your why, that's your where part. These are the countries for my Tier 1, and over here in my audience definition it tells me how many people fit this audience, currently you want to stay in the green zone, this is 240 to 283 million people. You can also add locations in bulk, type a list, copy-paste, use your Spotify data to figure out where people are resonating with your music if you're just trying to get listenership, that's a great way to figure out where to target.

Then you set your age range, I know my demographics are 18 to 45, that's just where my listeners are, everybody's going to be different, and some places won't let you advertise to certain people in certain age brackets, that's legal issues in different countries. I'm going to do all genders, and this is where you get into interests, demographics, and behaviors, super important. Number one, Spotify, because we're doing a Spotify conversion campaign, we want to hit people who like Spotify, so we filter for them, then hit Define Further, notice it says And must also match, if you just add things it's an or, meaning people who like Spotify or this other stuff, but I only want people who like Spotify and a list of other stuff.

For my music, I know I want them to like a niche set of artists, the more niche you can get, the better, as long as your audience is large enough to get the data you need, you want to start niche. So I'm going to pick artists in my niche, this is challenging every time because not everybody's going to be in here, but I'm accustomed to it and know which bands I can find that will work for finding my audience, you just have to experiment. I'm not going to find Phoebe Bridgers, she's not in my niche but I'm always surprised she isn't in there, but I can find other artists much smaller than her that are, so you work with what you can and try to triangulate your audience. I'm going to pick Violent Femmes, The Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett, these outsider musicians who are really in my niche, and record labels like Matador Records, an indie label, and Ryan Adams, who's contentious but fits this specific niche of outsider-ish folk music, perfect for me. You want to think about who's really in your scene, and who you can find, and work your way from the smallest artist up. I know that people who like Shannon & The Clams, shout out, I love you guys, I'm going to pick them, no disrespect, Phoebe Bridgers isn't here but Shannon & The Clams is.

You're going to make a list, include anybody that feels like it works, but not too many people because you don't want this to be too huge. This is too small, so I'm going to keep going: Sub Pop Records, Sonic Youth, probably weirdos who'll like what I'm up to, I love it, the Meat Puppets, another great band that fits my vibe. Okay, now I'm over a million, that's good enough for me, you might want more or less, experiment. There's also a suggestions feature you can click for more, Mac DeMarco, that's a great one for me, Courtney Barnett, she's great for me too, this is super helpful, you just don't want to click them all because then it gets too broad, and you can always add more later. This is kind of what's happening, it's going to stretch a little bit outside of what you give it to find you more results.

That's how you create your first audience. We're not going to do this yet, Advantage detailed targeting has been applied, we'll expand your audience beyond your detailed targeting when it's likely to improve performance, that's fine, I don't even think we can turn that off. I'm going to click Save Audience, here's the details, and I'm going to call it Tier One, Marmalade Mountain Music Marketing Doesn't Have To Suck Course V1, and click Save. Now I have a saved audience I can use whenever I want, I forgot to put that this is tier one, so I'll rename it and click Update. This is a little tricky, Update versus Save as New: if you have an audience you're using on different ad sets, unless you want to update it across all of them, click Save as New, otherwise it's going to change your audience on every ad set where that audience is applied, in this case I haven't put it on anything yet, so I'm comfortable clicking Update, but be careful with that one, I've been through it.

20:20 Placements: what to turn off and why

This is something you have to disclose these days, the beneficiary is me, and I'm also the payer. Placements, this is super important, do not use Advantage+ Placements, it's terrible, oh my god, it's terrible, all this stuff is so annoying. Edit, manual, I promise you it's going to say you can get better, don't do it. Audience Network will ruin your ads, why? Audience Network is when you're playing a game on your phone and it forces you to watch an ad, and people are trying to click out of it, so they click out, and they're not actually at all interested in your music, they're just clicking on stuff to get the f**k out of the ad because it's so annoying, and that's going to mess up your conversions. You're going to get a ton of conversions through Audience Network, and then it's going to optimize your ads to run to that, even though it's not actually helping you, turn it off. Messenger, turn it off too, you don't want to be sending DMs to random people to listen to your music, it feels forced, you want people to feel like they're discovering you.

Facebook and Instagram are the only two we're going to consider, I recommend thinking about your audience, are they on Instagram, are they on Facebook. Most of the time in the United States and Canada, I believe, it's just Instagram, a lot of other countries, Facebook is more popular for music discovery and engagement between people and communities, it really depends where you're targeting. I'm going to turn off Facebook for now because Instagram is where my conversions are very strong, but you can absolutely work with it, those are the only two I'd consider. Then you can control where it's shown, this is super important, I only want to show it in the Instagram feed, I don't want to show it in all this other crap, stories and reels, that's it, everything else off, not search results, not apps, not messages, not in-stream ads, f**k all of that, Instagram reels, Instagram stories, Instagram feed, that's it.

Then I'm going to hit Next, it's going to commonly give you errors, and they may or may not be real, let's find out. Facebook search placement not allowed alone, huh, there is no Facebook search, turn that off, that probably just fixed it. Sometimes it gets a little buggy, you're going to see that, just be patient with it, you get used to it, it's a behemoth program, it's very complicated, just patience, and you go through and adjust things, you'll get it to work. And now we're into our ad, this is where we choose the creative, I'm not going to name it until I know what I'm going to use. Is this a partnership ad? No, this is if you want to combine your ad with another group, like your record label, and show both names at the top, that's not what I'm doing. Identity, Marmalade Mountain, this is where you choose it, this is why you need these accounts connected, if you don't know how, go back to the prerequisites and the last video and get them connected.

24:31 Building the ad, the creative, and publishing

Ad setup, create your ad, don't do catalog, that's a whole different thing for selling catalog items, very powerful for sales campaigns, but we're going to do manual upload, a single video, turn off multi-advertiser ads, add sources, website URL, create ad. This is where you set the link you want people to go to, we do not want them to go to my website, we want them to go to the landing page, SubmitHub Links, this is the test page we made. You can see all this data I'm getting, 27,000 people have loaded it, 16,800 of them have actually clicked through and gone to Spotify, look at all this data SubmitHub gives us, it's incredible, it tells us how it's doing, how many people are following the playlist, and geographic breakdown by country. This is why I recommend using this service, it's free and really good, shout out to those guys for doing a great job. I'm going to drop the link into my website URL, click Preview URL, look how clean that is, incredible, I'm going to place it there and it's working.

Now I need to add my creative, that's why nothing shows here yet, I'm going to add a video, if you don't have one you click Upload, I already have stuff in here so I'm just going to pick one, since I'm going to make a whole bunch of different ads. First I'm going to use the one I was showing you guys earlier, this simple video, little zoom, little sparkle, plays the song. There's a lot of information here because stories and reels have a 9 by 16 aspect ratio, so it's asking if I want to stretch it out, I think that looks like garbage so I'm leaving it alone, you can create different versions of your videos optimized for different experiences, in some cases I recommend it. 9 by 16 is cool but it gets cut off at the top and bottom in certain instances, so you actually want 4 by 5, I know it's a lot, I'm just going to use 1 by 1, square, since 4 by 5 is best and square is second best, and if you have 9 by 16 you can provide it as a third option for stories and reels, I'm going to use the same for feed.

Then it gives me some optimization options, visual touch-ups will stretch it out, that actually looks good to me so I'll let it go, if I wanted I could turn it off and it wouldn't stretch, but this looks okay because it's keeping it within 4 by 5. Text improvements, any text I provide may appear in different places, that's fine, I'll leave that on, experiment with these and decide what's right for you. Look at my beautiful ad, text on your video may be covered by your profile icon or call to action, something to consider, I'm just going to let it be. For the text, don't put 'now on all platforms,' everyone does that, or 'listen now,' put something with character, I like 'new playlist for the real ones, love you guys,' it's personal, it communicates my brand, it's sharing a gift. It's going to give you a bunch of s****y AI copy options, don't do it, you can create multiple options here, maybe I'll add the tagline 'alt folk, outsider rock, indie weird, genuinely f*****g dope,' and put an angel emoji on it, this means it's going to try these different pieces of text and see which one performs best, you can get really specific with this, I want an emoji because it's going to perform better since people like emojis, this means it's going to compare these two and see which performs better, and you can see that data.

Headline, I'm going to skip it, but you can add one and options for all kinds of things, optimize text per person enabled means it'll try putting this text in different places to see what works best. Call to action, I want Listen Now because I want people to listen to the music, I'm not going to do an A/B test of my catalog since I already decided I'm good with this. Destination, I've got my link set up, I'll preview it, make sure it's working, looks good. Display link, I want marmalademountain.xyz, I'm going to put my personal web page because that's the link I want it to show, and that's the domain I own, I don't want any of this other crap. Languages, you can automatically translate your ads or add your own translations, I don't normally do that but let's try it. Here's the tracking, this is my pixel, it's set up, website events, offline events, that's a whole other thing I have set up, you can get into that, I don't even know that it's necessary, URL parameters, we don't need those right now.

Let's name it, this one is the Many Years Ago one, that's the name of the song used in this video, Many Years Ago cover ad, and I'm going to hit Publish. When I hit Publish, my ad goes into a test phase where Facebook checks it, makes sure there's not language problems or stuff that violates their policies, and it's now being published. We can go see that by going back to Campaigns, let's refresh, oh, probably because I have it set to active ads, if I turn that off, here we go, Marmalade Mountain Spotify conversion campaign, it says no ads even though we know there's one there, give it some time, ad's inactive, processing, that's why, and here's the ad.

33:46 Duplicating ads and adding a tier two audience

I want to give it more options, one ad is not enough, so I'm going to go back into the ad set, tier one countries, and click Edit. There's a few ways to get to edit, but that's one way, now I want more of these, so I'm going to duplicate. Quick Duplicate copies everything about that ad, and it's going to say 'Many Years Ago copy,' I'm going to do the same ad but choose a different song called 'Drawing Circles on the Ground,' otherwise it's going to be the same thing, same video, different song. I don't have to change anything, this is all set up, all I have to do is change the video and choose a different one, click Next, there it is, looks like I want, done, everything's set up how I want, the text is the same, this is why Quick Duplicate rules. Publish, now I've got two ad options, you're going to want to do a few.

Then I'm going to go in and duplicate it again, I've got to wait till it's done publishing, and I'm going to try a different version, using a completely different video, Album Intro Vid, it's funny that all my text is the same because I've done this so many times. In this one I'm going to choose a completely different video, a totally different vibe, this is an album ad, it doesn't make sense for the playlist, but that's okay, I'm just doing this to show you guys an example, so we want to test to see which of these works the best. Then I'm going to publish that, now I've got three different ads in one ad set, all part of my conversion campaign. I can also do the same thing by quickly duplicating my ad set, it's going to try and get you to do all this stuff, don't do it, duplicate current setup. In this one I'm going to do tier two countries, this is not my main focus, a little cheaper to reach them, but I also want to allocate budget to them, so maybe I'll put $5 into them instead of $10. I'm going to leave everything else the same, except change the countries, I'll hit Edit, change this to tier two, and not hit Update because that would change the tier one information, so I'll remove all the tier one locations because I don't want to compete against myself, and add locations in bulk: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, because I'm also interested in touring these places, or triggering the algorithm in these cheaper markets, which will then go back and reach my main audience. This can really be expansive, Spain, Italy, whatever, but I want to keep it around the same cost per impression, so I'll take some off and hit Match Locations, there it is, I'll add those four locations, you might want many more, same targeting, everything else the same, you might want to specify exclusions too, like people who like these bands but not people who like Taylor Swift, for example. Not Update, Save as New, Tier Two, Marmalade Mountain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, everything looks good, save it. Now I've got two different audiences, the same ads, a tier two ad set, I'm going to hit Publish, and then you can do the same thing for tier three, then you've got three ad sets with three, I'd recommend three to five ads per ad set, $10 in your tier one, a little less in your other tiers, and that's how you're going to set up a conversion campaign.