How to interpret the results of your campaign

0:00 Perfect is the enemy of good: the 80/20 rule

How to interpret the results of your campaign. That's right, it's time for some nerd s**t, I love nerd s**t, let's be honest, this entire course is nerd s**t, ah, my favorite. The first thing I want to say: perfect is the enemy of good. Whenever you're interpreting your results, and whenever you're trying to optimize, which we'll talk about in the next video, remember you're going to get 80% of the value from 20% of the work, and if you let yourself fall into the danger zone, you're going to put in 80% of the work to get an additional 20% of value, which is usually not worth it, especially if you're a musician with other stuff you want to be doing. Most of you watching this probably make your own music, in which case if you can get 80% of the value out of 20% of the work, and spend 80% of your time making music, that seems kind of ideal. So you're looking for a balance, don't beat yourself into the ground trying to optimize every little thing, but if it's a game to you and you're into this nerd s**t like me, maybe you want to really get at it.

1:13 The four columns that matter in Ads Manager

The columns most important to me in Meta Ads Manager are cost per result, cost per impression, engagement, and conversion metrics in general, things like click-through rates, cost per click, cost per engagement. Cost per result is my primary source of information, especially in Ads Manager, and you can extrapolate deeper as you look into other metrics. For example, if you're promoting a playlist, the saves on the playlist are more meaningful than click-throughs on your landing page, since cost per result is people clicking through your landing page, but not necessarily people saving the playlist, so you can calculate that yourself by dividing the number of saves by the total amount you spent that day.

2:02 Reading cost per impression by market tier

Cost per impression tells you context. If I'm running a campaign targeting different countries, tier one, tier three, and tier two-ish, you'll see it's $5 to reach 1,000 people in tier one, but only 63 cents to reach 1,000 people in tier three. That's contextual information that helps explain why your cost per result is so much lower in cheaper markets. These numbers change over time, and depend on a lot of factors, one of which is the standing of your ads account, as your account gets more mature your cost per impression seems to go down, but if you get in trouble or a lot of people report your ads, that number goes up. So keep an eye on this: if your cost per result isn't what you expect, check this and make sure it's not out of line.

3:15 Engagement and conversion metrics as diagnostics

Engagement is people liking, commenting, sharing, and saving your ad, that's secondary information telling you how people are engaging with your advertisement and content, and that's valuable too. Sometimes it's not just about the Spotify metrics, engagement is valuable, you're getting new followers, people who are into your stuff, they might not go to Spotify but they might really like you on Instagram, and maybe that means they're more likely to buy your stuff or come to your show. For example, my post reactions cost per engagement was 0.4 cents to get engagement in tier three, getting 7 comments, 16 saves, and 45 shares, for a total cost of $70 for one week. That's information telling you how your content is resonating with people on socials, and you want to aggregate that with how it resonates on Spotify to get a sense of how your ad is performing overall.

Lastly, conversion metrics help me identify problems and areas for improvement. If my click-through rates are trash, meaning the number of people who click on the ads, I've got to try a new ad, or my targeting is bad. If my cost per click is high, same deal, something's up with my targeting or I'm using the wrong creative, meaning the ad. Cost per engagement is more about how I'm branding myself. All of this is really about giving you information to identify areas for improvement, but I tend not to pay much attention to them, I mostly focus on cost per result, and all this other stuff is just more information to help figure out how to improve or see if there's a problem.

5:45 Why landing page data beats Ads Manager data

Now let's get into your landing page data, this stuff is super important. In this course we're using SubmitHub because it's free, so you can all sign up and use it for free, and they give you badass data, come on. Other tools out there are great but cost money, so whatever, who cares. I wanted to share this because this is how you get next-level data, the data in Ads Manager is the first layer, and it's also flawed, there are complicated reasons why, they can't perfectly track everything because of certain laws in certain countries about what information you can and can't collect, so not every click-through, not every click gets recorded exactly as it happens. That information is much easier to track on SubmitHub itself or whatever landing page service you have, because they don't have to transfer data using network requests back to Meta and deal with all the privacy stuff, it's all happening internal to their own system, so it's a little more accurate.

6:57 Your conversion rate and the 40% floor

This is where I go to get more specific information about what is and isn't working, and I can show you some of that live right now because I've been f*****g with my ads and making some mistakes, and you can see their performance going up and down. Each landing page displays its data a little differently, but the general idea is the same: you want to know how many people are loading the landing page, that's this purple line, and how many people are clicking on the link to Spotify, that's the blue. SubmitHub also gives you Spotify followers as a bonus, I believe that's playlist follows or likes, or maybe overall Spotify followers, whatever, I don't actually care about that for real. The main thing I'm looking at is the purple and blue, I want to know what percentage of people are clicking through, because that tells me how well my targeting is, how effective my ad is, and how much money I'm wasting showing it to the wrong people, since you're paying per 1,000 impressions. It also breaks it down geographically, which is great.

The conversion rate is something you want to pay attention to, and mine is around 48% right now, that's actually bad. I'm glad we're looking at this because it's not terrible, but I honestly say that if a campaign's conversion rate is below 40%, something is seriously wrong and needs to be fixed, anything above 40% is on the right track. Knowing that mine used to be consistently 60% to 70%, that means I f****d my ads up, because I'm constantly running experiments and focused on getting more information to share with you guys, and not just optimizing the campaign.

8:51 Diagnosing a drop by country

So we can go in and start to figure out why these conversion rates are so low, meaning the number of people who clicked compared to the number who opened it. I'd look by country, and right off the bat my conversion rate in India is terrible, 26%, and in the United States it's terrible too, 15%, so something's up with my ads running in the US and India, I'm wasting a lot of money showing it to people who don't care. For a while I'd just delete any country from my campaign that was performing under 40%, that might be worth doing here, I'm not sure, traditionally India and the US have performed very well for me on this ad, and it might be that I've exhausted that market by showing my ad to them too many times, which makes sense since I've been running this as a massive experiment. So maybe I'll change that, run a different ad, and run it back to India and the US to see how it does. I'd check that over a couple of days to see if it's consistent, once again 29%, 29%, India and the US are giving me trouble, I'm going to work on them, though the US is doing a little better here. So I'd think, what changed that the US was performing much better and India was performing much better a few days ago, and I know I changed my ads a couple of days ago, so that's information about how I might want to adjust.

There's always going to be a disparity between what you see in Ads Manager and what you see here, plus time zone disparities, it's complicated, don't be surprised if you see that. The core thing to see here is that when you first start an ad campaign, your conversion rate is going to be lower and start to improve, that's meta optimizing for your target audience, that's why meta ad campaigns are so effective, they get better as they go on. Apparently mine get worse too because I've been doing a s****y job managing it, but that's because I'm busy doing other things. When you see drastic changes, that should be information for you, and you might want to expect it. For example, I made a change to my campaign back in June or July, and it's September now, I added some new ad sets because I wanted to see how they'd perform, and sure enough my conversion rate dropped, but historically I remember those numbers started to climb back up as it adjusted to the new ad sets. So keep in mind the conversion rate will be variable and depend on how you change things, every time you change your ads they have to go back into a learning phase, testing out your new ad, content, or audience before it starts to optimize, so your conversion rate will come back down and then climb back up, if it doesn't, you want to see if you can fix that.

Like I said, you want your conversion rate to be a minimum of 40% after four days, or there's something you need to fix. When you're starting a new campaign with a new ad account and a new pixel, it doesn't know a ton about you yet, so it'll take more time for the conversion rate to grow, be patient with this. That's why I say give it four days, create your campaign, don't touch it, and then take a look, because every time you touch it, it has to start over, so let it go for four days and see how it does, then evaluate.

12:38 Saves as the clearest Spotify signal

When you're looking at Spotify data, the main thing to look at to see how your campaign is doing, especially for a single or an album, is saves, because that's the clearest data. You're going to see the biggest disparity between the amount of saves you get when you aren't running a campaign, maybe 10 or 20 a day, to 700 a day, you can really tell when your ads are running. If you're not getting any save spikes, something's wrong, the targeting's bad, the music isn't resonating, the ad's broken, something's up, so go back and try to identify it using these different metrics. Your click-through rates tell you about your targeting and landing page, your cost per click tells you about your ad, and your cost per engagement tells you about your brand and relatability.

We were just talking about save spikes when you're running campaigns, but I want to show you how they compare to listener and stream spikes. Save spikes are really obvious, but if you looked at listeners it's way less clear, it's harder to tell where your campaigns are and if they're performing, it kind of just looks like it's growing, but if we go back to saves it's really obvious. So what's the actual impact of these campaigns? If we go back to the listenership, there's a spike that starts to happen, and it's hard to tell because of the scale of the graph, but we're doing around 400, low to mid 400s on average, the spike happens and we start doing 500, 600, that's actually a 50% increase, so that's a big deal. It's hard to tell because the spike makes the scale of the graph weird, but that's a pretty big long-term listenership improvement well after the campaign is done, the campaign happens here, the listenership improvement happens all the way over here, so there's a long tail on your marketing efforts. The same happens later with another campaign, the listenership stays up afterward, so there's a long-term impact from it, and it's the same with streams, you get the spike after the campaign and your streams just go up, there's a new spike and they stay up, they go back down a little but overall it's still a big increase from where it was.

If you're running a playlist campaign, you'd want to look in Spotify for Artists as well, but you can also use the followers number, it tells you a ton about how people are engaging with your playlist, and you can calculate the cost per save, how much it costs to get these saves and how much you spent on ads, that's really valuable information about how well your playlist campaign is going. Maybe you need to work on the actual playlist itself, maybe your first song is getting streams but people aren't saving it and aren't listening to later songs, that's something to consider, maybe you need to improve the playlist. So you can look at the saves number to tell whether it's performing well.

15:53 Playlist retention: where people drop off

I'm going to go back into Spotify and show you how to interpret playlist data there too. Remember the songs are placed throughout the playlist, so let me pull up the last seven days for accuracy since I've moved the songs around a little. We care about relative retention within the playlist: 640 people listened to the first song over the last seven days, that's all right, I'm not particularly impressed, a little less than 100 a day, that's just because my ad campaign isn't doing as well since I haven't been paying attention to it, so there's lots of room for me to improve, and that's what interpreting results is all about. But the other really valuable information is that I can tell there's a drop-off: about half the people make it to song number seven, my second song in the playlist, remember there are six or seven songs in between, and then there's another 15 here, another 15 here, this is the 37th or 40th song. What's crazy is that you can see the drop-offs, but by the time people get to the middle of the playlist, almost every one of them makes it to the end, 134 people in the last seven days listened to all 37 songs in the playlist, that's f*****g awesome, right?

So not only are all of my songs getting streams, but everybody else on that playlist is getting streams too, it's strengthening all my associations, and it's telling me the retention rate of listenership on my playlist with the audience I'm targeting. Obviously the ideal is that all these numbers are equal and very high, but there's going to be drop-off, so you can optimize for these numbers, if you can get the last number to be really high, that's great, you want each one to be high, and if you see a drop, for example if one song was way less than another, I'd know people aren't digging that song on this playlist, so I'd remove it. It's valuable if you can get this data from other people on your playlist too, so you can coordinate and figure out what is and isn't working.

So just to recap, I want to come back to this because it's so important for people like me who are obsessive, but right now I need to put in a little more than whatever percent I've got going into it, the 80/20 rule: just get to the point where you've got 80% of the value out of it, and then move on to the next thing, because you could just create a whole new campaign for a whole new song, and that 80% of value coming out of the campaign for the new song is worth way more than the extra 20% on your last campaign. So try to keep moving forward, keep learning, keep that growth mindset going, and enjoy yourself, have a good time with it.