On Spotify Ads Studio

I shared some thoughts on Spotify Ads on Twitter & LinkedIn so wanted to expand on it.

When I first came across a Facebook Ad for the Spotify Ads Studio beta. I jumped on the train to sign up. Much like Snapchat, Spotify didn’t start as a programmatic ad platform. You had to talk to sales, have huge brand budgets to create ads on Spotify. My guess is, post IPO, Spotify needs to show revenue growth and aggressive run rates so it made sense to tap into to the SMB advertisers market who represent a massive volume.

This is not a business essay so Spotify business & financials are irrelevant. On to the Ad Studio.

Mechanics

To kick things off, I created a very basic ad for my consulting business 42+ Agency. The campaign creation is a great experience. You can write a script (text) and request a voice over from the kind of voice/language you prefer. I picked a middle aged English language voice over for a basic script with a peppy background music.

A terrible script in retrospect.

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You pick a image, headline and you are good to go on the creative side.

You add a tagged URL. Pick you targeting by:

- Geo (Canada)

- Device (All)

- Gender (All)

- Genre / Playlist / All Music (Focus — assuming that’s what folks listen to when trying to work)

Budgets are a minimum of $250 CAD.

The voice over was turned around in under 20 minutes. It definitely did not sound robotic. I think they either have some voice-over artists on staff or tap into a voice over artists market place.

Observations:

Going into it, I expected that it was going to get no clicks. I got 2 clicks so far. A 0.02 CTR. Pleasantly surprised. There is no conversion tracking or java-script — this is NOT a direct response channel.

The way I look at Spotify Ads is that its a assist channel. You won’t see direct conversions (utm -> GA Goal hit) what you might see is an overall lift in your conversions over time & perhaps a increase in direct traffic. My budget is too small to actually measure any lift but think of it this way.

Someone hears your ad on Spotify a bunch of times. Next time they hit Google or see your social or blog post — they click through on it. Or they hear your ad on Spotify, and instead of directly clicking through then and there, they perhaps look you up on Google 2–3 days after as something comes up and they associate your brand with that.

Naturally Spotify Ads is probably a better fit for FMCG or retail/consumer brands but a well scripted B2B ad can work well too. Just treat it as a assist channel rather then a direct response one.

Thoughts / comments / questions? Tweet me @kamilrextin

Originally published at Kamil Rextin .