Seeing as “set it and forget it” is Passive Promotion’s whole reason for existence, I took it for a test drive with my latest Color Theory single “The Naked Eye.”

I’ll walk you through the campaign creation process and share my results, but keep in mind that SubmitHub founder Jason Grishkoff is constantly updating the platform. Things will likely look different for you!

Alright, let’s get this show on the road.

Easy Mode vs. Advanced Mode

For starters, I went with Easy Mode for the ultimate kick-back experience. Advanced Mode has extra options like influencer marketing, album reviews, and graphic design.

Pick a package

There are three preset Spotify-focused bundles: Starter (120 credits), Boost (250 credits), and Scale (550 credits). There’s also a Custom mix builder if you want to dial in your own ratio of playlists, Meta ads, and blogs. Lurking at the bottom of the page is a Branding option (100 credits) specifically for blog submissions.

I went with Boost: Work toward your first 1,000 streams. 150 credits for 10 days of Meta ads to Spotify, plus 30-40 playlist submissions and blogs.

I also checked the “Blogs: submit to 10-15 for 30 credits” box, bringing the total to 280 credits. Why? Because I happened to have exactly 285 credits after converting all my curator earnings.

At this point, you may be wondering what 280 credits translates to in US dollars.

The sticker price for one credit is $1, but you can get up to 25% off of that by buying in bulk:

Additionally, you can get a 10% off coupon from me here, which should stack.

Jason told me that people pay around $0.80 per credit on average, so I’ll use that figure in my calculations going forward.

For me, 280 credits is $140, because I’m able to convert my curator earnings to credits at $0.50 per.

Pick a song

Next up, you select a previously uploaded song or add a new one. I always upload a high-quality mp3 and provide SoundCloud and YouTube as additional sources.

Of course, you’ll also want to add the Spotify link when you get it. In my case, I uploaded nine days before release and didn’t have it yet. DistroKid’s Spotify URI looker-upper has been broken for me since the start of 2026 and I can’t get them to fix it.

And so it begins…

That’s all there is to it! Select Easy Mode, pick a package, pick a song, done.

It took five minutes from start to finish, and half of that was taking screenshots.

I received an email confirmation explaining what happens next:

1. Learning phase – We’ll send your track to a selection of curators to see how it performs. This takes about 3 days.
2. Analyze & optimize – Based on the results, we’ll adjust our targeting for a second round of submissions.
3. Meta ads – We’ll set up and manage ads to drive engagement.

The Learning Phase

Three hours later, I received another email saying they’d submitted the track to 15 playlisters and 7 blogs to start the learning phase.

At this point I’d worked through a few more submissions and earned more credits, so I added 35 more to Playlists.

Round one results

The next day I received an email summary with way more than 15 playlisters and 7 blogs:

For the most part, these were great picks.

There are a few that I knew wouldn’t accept the track, either because they only accept instrumental synthwave or they’ve told me a dozen times that they don’t like my voice.

Balancing that out, a few names I didn’t know turned out to be receptive.

A couple of days later, I received an email with the subject line: Round 1 results: 35% approval rate

• Sent to 59 curators
• 18 approved (35%)
• 33 declined
• 8 didn’t respond in time

Solid results. We now have a good sense of which curators are responding well, and we’re using that to guide round two.

My average approval rate is around 45%, with my highest being 68%, so seeing 35% with a bunch of new names thrown in is respectable.

Round two results

There weren’t many credits left to spend on playlists and blogs, but the second round netted me four more approvals:

• Sent to 74 curators total
• 22 approved (35%)
• 40 declined
• 12 didn’t respond in time

You still have 8 credits remaining. We’ll continue sending to curators in the background to make the most of them. You won’t hear from us on every send, but you can always check your package page for updates.

Keep in mind that this all took place before release day! The main event, Meta ads, was still to come.

Before it kicked off, I topped up the Meta Ads budget by 130 credits, bringing it to 280 total (28 per day over 10 days).

Release day: Meta ads begin

It typically takes me 4-6 hours to set up a Meta campaign, most of which is devoted to creating videos in Canva. Offloading that chore to SubmitHub was glorious.

First, they generate a landing page. Mine is here.

By default it only includes Spotify, which is fine if maximizing Spotify streams is your only goal. I added the other links myself because around 20% of my conversions typically go to Apple Music.

Then, they select targeting:

Country targeting was a little different from my usual suspects, but nothing jumped out at me as problematic.

Finally, they make the actual creatives, 5 to start, which are generally stock footage with text overlays. With your song playing underneath, of course!

SubmitHub tells you what will happen next in an email:

• First week: Meta enters a “learning phase,” where it optimizes your creatives. Conversions are typically slower and more expensive during this period (1-2 per credit).
• Second week: Meta identifies what works best, or we step in to make adjustments. We’ll email you an update on your ad’s performance.
• Third week: Your ad should be running smoothly, with costs per conversion decreasing. If not, we’ll help you decide the best course of action.

When your remaining budget starts to run out, we’ll email you about automatically renewing the ad. To opt out, visit the “status” section of your ad and look under the “budget” section.

By default, they run the ads from their own Meta ad account, but I chose to have it run from mine instead. Meta sends an email invite with a link to approve or deny the access request.

Meta ads results

After a few days I was able to see the winning ad. It’s no longer available on the dashboard, but from what I saw it was simple, appropriate, and seemingly effective. At its peak, it was generating 1.6 conversions (clicks from the landing page to a streaming service) per credit. At an average cost of $0.80 per credit, that’s $0.50 per conversion.

That’s not horrible in and of itself, but only 8% of users who clicked on the ad were clicking through to a streaming service from the landing page. I’m used to seeing at least 40%.

That tells me that either people didn’t understand what they were clicking on, or Meta was optimizing for the wrong sort of user. The vast majority of conversions were from Mexico, which is normally reliable.

They continued testing new visuals, and I added four of my own.

I decided to test a quick campaign on my end via Hypeddit with those four visuals, and managed $0.18 per conversion the following morning.

Figuring I’d just handle the ads on my own, I pulled the plug on the Meta ads portion of the SubmitHub campaign and was immediately refunded 107 credits.

And then…

My cost per conversion quickly climbed back up to roughly what SubmitHub had been doing, depending on how you price a credit.

I ran my campaign for another week and decided to save my money for the next song.

Here are my final SubmitHub Meta ads results:

In retrospect, I should’ve just let the SubmitHub Meta campaign ride, if only for the sake of this post! It’s not clear that I did any better on my own.

SubmitHub Packages Conclusions

So, was it worth it?

My playlisting and blog submission results were par for the course, the key difference being that it didn’t cost me an hour of my time. SubmitHub hit up all the usual suspects and then some, in an intelligent fashion.

The Meta ads campaign saved me another 4-6 hours, or would have if I hadn’t decided to get my grubby little hands dirty and launch my own.

My Meta ads budget was 280 credits, of which 107 were refunded back to my SubmitHub earnings when I pulled the plug, leaving 173 credits actually spent on ads. They generated 192 conversions, which works out to $0.45 per conversion at my cost of $0.50 per credit, and $0.72 per conversion at the typical $0.80 per credit.

And that’s not factoring in that someone had to actually make the 10 creatives!

So yeah, it was worth it!

Here are my results in Spotify for Artists. My SubmitHub ads campaign stopped on April 9, and as you can see, streams dropped off sharply afterward:

Maybe next time I’ll try a bigger campaign, while also launching a Meta campaign on release day to see which performs better.

Have you tried SubmitHub Packages for yourself? Share your results, observations, and questions in the comments!

In the meantime, Google deprecated the campaign type I was using and disabled my retargeting audience.

When I saw John Gold of Hypeddit’s video, How I Got 22,000 YouTube Views for $18 (NEW 2025 Method), I thought to myself, “You know who isn’t getting 22,000 YouTube views for $18?”

So I tried a Hypeddit “Grow my YouTube video” campaign, which couldn’t have been easier to set up.

I created four campaigns at $5 per day: one to all countries, one to tier 1 and 2 countries, and two to tier 2 countries.

The campaign to all countries got similar results to John’s, netting nearly 10K views for $12 before I pulled the plug. You can click to enlarge any of these screenshots:

I also got 29 earned likes and 2829 earned views. So why did I pull the plug?

Here were the top countries:

And here are the top YouTube channels where the ads appeared:

The age of the viewers is a mystery…

… until we click through to the channels my video appeared on. Here’s the top one:

They’re basically all non-English kids channels.

To be fair, one can’t rule out the possibility that Pakistani preschoolers simply adore my music and will grow up to be my biggest fans.

The tier 1 and 2 campaign performed just as well, except now I was reaching kids in Peru and Colombia. My tier 1 campaign went out to children in Portugal, Spain, and Italy for 7-10x the cost.

Whether or not my videos will be recommended to non-English speaking children in the future is an open question. This sort of targeting would be suicide with the Spotify algorithm, but I really don’t know how it works on YouTube.

Here’s what our robot buddy Claude had to say about the 2829 earned views:

Those earned views are almost certainly non-human. They serve the fraudster’s goal of generating ad-revenue and inflating metrics for resale, not reaching real synthpop fans. To avoid this waste, exclude high-fraud regions altogether and focus budget on markets with proven, genuine fanbases.

For contrast, I spent $30 on my tier 1, highly targeted, longstanding subscription conversions campaign and got zero earned views for $30 over the same time period, while also getting 53 new subscribers and 45 earned likes.

I spoke with John about it and he’s since updated the “Grow my YouTube video” campaign. Here’s what he said:

After we chatted about the channel placements I updated the Hypeddit campaign settings. The setting that appeared to best eliminate channels with kids content was under optimized targeting ➤ only show ads to people within age and gender specifications. By default, Google Ads allow targeting outside the age/gender specs so this is now turned off. This update has been live since October 31.

For me there were still three kids channels showing up in “where ads showed”. But only with one to three impression each. And thinking back to the days when my girls were little, I can rationalize a handful of those views. I would watch Little Baby Bum with them every once in a while. It was my Youtube account. It was me selecting the videos. I watched the ads. So from YouTube’s perspective, I would have been the audience to target.

I haven’t tested out the updated campaign myself, but I can 100% confirm that enabling that setting virtually eliminates the kids channels.

My suggestion if you want to launch a Hypeddit campaign is to target no wider than tiers 1 and 2, because the cost per view to Peru and Colombia is about the same as to Pakistan and Iraq.

I spent the next month duplicating and tweaking those campaigns with the help of Google Ads Editor, testing everything I could think to test, spending $1100, and capturing screenshots every step of the way.

Rather than subject you to all that, I’m going to show you where I ended up, and how to get there if you’d like to replicate my campaign structure.

Here are my results in the 8 days since my last tweak (again, click to enlarge):

My tier 1 campaign includes the US, UK, and Canada only. For $33 I got 62 subscribers but only 91 views.

Beyond country targeting, my tier 2 campaign is identical. It’s mainly hitting Brazil and Mexico, and netted 557 subscribers at the same cost, plus 228 earned likes, at 218 views.

Somehow it did all that with only 15% more impressions. Are users in Brazil in Mexico that much more receptive to my music, all else being equal? I’m not sure what to make of it.

My tier 3 campaign is closer to my Hypeddit campaigns and mostly for social proof, netting me 11K views for $16.

It’s optimized for clicks instead of conversions (subscribers) and only runs in-stream. That’s the type of skippable ad that plays automatically when you just want to watch the damn video.

The key difference for all three campaigns is that my ads are only shown to men ages 25-64.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love women as much as the next guy, but most of my fans are men.

The tier 1 and 2 campaigns are pushing five songs, both the video and Shorts, wherever it thinks it can get the most conversions. The tier 3 campaign is just to boost the view count on my latest video.

Alrighty then, let’s see if we can’t recreate my tier 1 campaign from scratch!

YouTube Ads Campaign Creation

There’s a degree of setup required that I won’t be able to help you with, as I did it many years ago. At the very least, you’ll need to connect your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel.

Once you’re logged in to Google Ads, hit the multi-colored plus button in the upper left to create a new Campaign.

Select “Create a campaign without guidance” and then “Demand Gen.” You don’t have to select a conversion goal.

Enter a name for your campaign and select “YouTube engagements” as the campaign goal.

Enter your daily budget and disregard the shameless plea for more money.

Apparently you can do this at the ad set level, but I set location and language here.

I’ve disallowed tablets, TV screens, and Windows users. I’m kidding on that last one.

The defaults should be okay for the rest, so we can move on to the ad group.

Name it whatever you’d like and restrict it to YouTube.

We’re going to have to create a new audience, so select “Add an audience” and “+ New Audience.”

Here’s what I’m doing:

The custom segment is basically people who search terms related to, or visited websites related to, synthpop.

And the Your data section is just people who viewed any of my videos, so straight up retargeting. With any luck, a Video Viewers audience will be available to you in the dropdown menu:

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve restricted the campaign to men ages 25-54.

Last and MOST IMPORTANT: You need to enable “Only show ads to people within my age and gender specifications” or else your video will end up on kids channels.

Or you could disable optimized targeting altogether, but I haven’t tested that yet.

UPDATE 11/21/25 – I tested it and my campaigns performed better by disabling optimized targeting completely. CPM went way up on my tier 1 campaign from $0.62 to $10.81, but I got more conversions (subscribers) at a lower cost per conversion ($0.45 down to $0.31).

Google also told John about another setting that we both have enabled. It’s under Tools ➤ Content Suitability ➤ Excluded Content Themes ➤ Content suitable for families.

Finally we have the ad (click to enlarge):

The final URL is my raw channel URL with ?sub_confirmation=1 tacked on the end, which brings up a “Confirm channel subscription” pop-up when clicked.

You can try it for yourself here:

www.youtube.com/channel/UC6ycjrcIXEbI4jsX9BhZ4_w?sub_confirmation=1

I’ve included three videos: the actual video for the song (which is just cover art), a one-minute clip of the song as a Short, and the winning ad from my Meta campaign as a Short.

I’ve added my logo, enabled resized and shorter videos, included a bunch of headlines and descriptions, and set the call to action to “Subscribe.”

I’ve also got four more ads, which are the same idea but different songs.

The idea is that Google can pick and choose which will best generate engagement, or more specifically conversions. For me that’s a subscription, but it may not be for you until you set it up.

When we selected the YouTube Engagements goal, we were presented with this text:

YouTube engagements optimize for “Engagements” conversion goal and only use video ads on YouTube for optimal performance. You can manage your conversion actions on the Conversions page in your account.

You’ll find the Engagement conversion goal under Goals ➤ Summary ➤ Engagement, then click Settings.

I set it as the account-default goal and my conversion action is channel subscriptions. If you’re not seeing the same thing, I’m guessing you’ll have to set it up on the previous page my selecting “+ Create conversion action.”

And that’s it for the tier 1 campaign!

My tier 2 campaign is identical other than the countries: Brazil, Mexico, Portugal. The latter is barely seeing any action so you might as well cut it.

My tier 3 campaign targets Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay. Instead of “YouTube engagements,” the campaign goal is “Clicks.” Under ad set settings, channels is set to “YouTube in-stream” only. The ads themselves are just the main videos, no Shorts.

The tier 3 campaign is primarily for social proof, but it only reaches the demographics I selected, who at least have the potential of becoming genuine fans. You can expect 600-700 views for $1.

Though I’m happy with my campaigns, I’m sure that my settings aren’t 100% optimal. I’m open to suggestions!

Did I miss anything? Do things look different on your end? Please let me know where my guidance could be more clear and helpful!

I couldn’t target warm audiences, Spotify blew through my budget in the blink of an eye, and the results were mediocre.

Instead, I opted for Marquee, but at some point they added a requirement of 5,000 monthly active listeners in your target market.

To clarify, we’re talking monthly active listeners, not just monthly listeners.

I’ve currently got 17K monthly active listeners, and apparently less than 5K of them are in the US. It must be close though, because I was able to run a Marquee campaign to the US at the end of July.

My collab with UAP wasn’t doing so hot with Meta ads, so I thought we should try a Marquee campaign. That wasn’t available, but I was able to target warm audiences in the US with Showcase, and I was pleasantly surprised with what we got for $37.51.

You can click to enlarge any of these screenshots:

3.1 streams per listener with a 21% intent rate is pretty damn good, though it is a 4-track EP. I used to insist on 25%, but I’ve shamelessly lowered my standards.

I mathed that out to 325 streams which will earn us $1, but I know better than to expect positive short-term ROI when promoting to Spotify. In the long run, who knows?

So we tried Showcase campaigns to five more countries (again, click to enlarge):

Even the worst performer got 3.1 streams per listener. While the audiences in the Germany and Australia campaigns were technically warm, I had to open them up to Programmed listeners, who only heard my music through Autoplay or algorithmically generated playlists like Release Radar and Discover Weekly.

The warmer the targeting, the better the results.

No surprise there.

More importantly, it didn’t blow through my budget in a day. Spotify took its time and spent $222 of our $500 budget across the five sub-campaigns.

And so when the two-year anniversary of my last album rolled around, I figured I’d give it the Showcase treatment.

In the US, I got 211 listeners for $87.42, with a 15.2% intent rate and 3.6 streams per listener. In the UK I picked up 73 listeners for $40.66 with only a 9.6% intent rate, but 5.8 streams per listener.

I didn’t really know what to expect promoting an old release, but Showcase again showed restraint and spent only two-thirds of my budget, which was the minimum allowable ($100 per country).

I don’t want to bore you with charts and numbers (I know, too late), but I have to share my top performer: my new album.

My US campaign got 226 listeners for $65.41, with 6.5 streams per listener and a 28.3% intent rate. And 683 saves!

So I ran it to 7 more countries (don’t forget you can click to enlarge):

In aggregate, Spotify spent $189 of my $700 budget with a 17.8% intent rate. It did especially well in the UK, so I took a leap of faith and launched new campaigns to the US and UK with default targeting.

That means Spotify gets to choose, and so far it’s been fairly discriminating. The intent rate is lower, but so is the cost per click. Here’s what I’m seeing in the UK so far for $174.24:

253 listeners, 3.7 streams per listener, 10.3% intent rate, and 349 saves. The US campaign isn’t doing as well, which is unusual, but it’s only $72 in.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with these results. It’s especially nice to have Showcase as an option when your Meta campaign is failing.

In almost all cases, I chose the headline “Getting buzz” to invoke a whiff of FOMO, though I couldn’t find any data to suggest that it outperforms other choices such as “You might like” and “Recently released.”

Be aware that in order to run a Showcase campaign, you need 1000 streams over the past 28 days in the country you want to run the campaign in.

Albums and EPs perform better than singles, as you might expect, but there is one benefit to running Showcase campaigns on singles: they only go out to premium accounts, because only premium accounts can select individual tracks to play.

As a result, the royalty rate is higher and the listener potentially more valuable. But again, it’s not like you’re going to turn a profit anytime soon!

Have you been using Spotify Showcase and/or Marquee? Share your results and thoughts in the comments!

With a $20 pro subscription, you can generate 60 videos per month, and it only takes a few minutes.

Making videos in Kashie

You start by uploading an audio file. You can trim the song in their editor, but I prefer to prepare the clip beforehand in a dedicated audio editor. I’ll typically make it just under 20 seconds with a couple seconds of fade at the end.

Then you paste the lyrics and sync the timing by holding the space bar for each word. It’s like syncing lyrics on DistroKid, except the stakes are much lower since it’s only 20 seconds.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve messed up on DistroKid at the very last line of a 4-minute song!

To make things easier and somewhat grotesque, you can sync at half or quarter time. They also offer AI transcription, but if you want something done right…

Now we’re ready to make some videos!

All you have to do is pick a style and click “Generate video.” There are over 50 choices including Dark Fantasy Anime, House of Horrors, and Singing Cats.

You can also update the lyric style…

But I’m sticking with BRAT because I’m team Charli. Somewhere my kids are cringing.

Each style contains multiple clips, assigned to your video at random.

If you don’t like the clip it chose, you can click the little refresh icon to re-roll as many times as you’d like.

The clips themselves are great, but I do wish they were all formatted to fit the aspect ratio. It seems like maybe half of them have black bars at the top and bottom. Jumping between aspect ratios every few seconds feels less than ideal to me.

Granted, you can just keep re-rolling each clip to make sure they all match, but that slows things down considerably and somewhat defeats the purpose of the platform.

Click “Generate video,” select another style, and do it again! Your videos will generate in the background and you’ll be notified when they’re ready to download.

All of your videos appear in your library, where you can preview, download, or delete them.

And that’s more or less it! Simple enough, eh?

Here’s one I just made, the second one in the screenshot above.

Kashie videos as Meta ads

I tried using Kashie videos as ads in several Meta ad campaigns promoting my new album.

For the most part, they underperformed my tried and true formats (the Classic and Cover ads below), with one exception:

In this case, Meta gravitated towards the Kashie ad despite the relatively high cost per conversion. But when I put the winning ads from my individual song campaigns into one big album campaign, the Kashie ads got left in the dust.

That said, if I’d kept this particular campaign going, the cost could’ve come down. There’s no harm in throwing a few Kashie videos into an ad set to test it!

Kashie videos on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts

I’ve been running a little experiment since mid-October to roughly coincide with my album release.

I created new accounts on TikTok and Instagram with branding to match our co-op playlist. Before posting on TikTok, I watched some synthpop-related content to teach the algorithm who to share my posts with, because apparently that’s how it’s done. It’s not about who you follow, but what you consume.

Every day I post one Kashie video to each platform. After a week or so, I added YouTube to the mix, since the videos are published as Shorts and don’t clutter my channel page like they would my TikTok or Instagram profiles.

Though now that I think about it, I suppose I could also post them as stories on my main profiles. Anyway…

None have gone viral, but some certainly do better than others (click to enlarge):

Remember that I’m just shouting into the void here! I haven’t spent any time engaging with others or doing anything to promote my profile.

Has it been worth the hassle for 1.6K views? Not really, but it’s not that much of a hassle, and something could pop off at any time.

Things aren’t much better on Instagram:

So roughly the same. If I just wanted views, I can get them on YouTube for less than a penny.

Speaking of YouTube… (again, click to enlarge)

My Kashie videos are routinely getting over 1K views and 40 likes. Unfortunately I don’t know of a way to get full analytics data on just my Kashie videos.

Is that great for a channel with 29K subscribers? Probably not, but I can post to all three platforms in 10 minutes. Agentic AI isn’t quite up to the task yet, but I’m sure it will be soon!

For now, I’ll keep going, since I’ve got 32 videos left to share after exhausting my 60 video limit on Kashie. Perhaps I’ll discover that certain songs or styles work better than others, which could potentially inform another round of videos.

Normally I’d have a referral link for you, ideally with a discount. I’ve sent multiple tickets to support, DM’d on Instagram, and sent emails to multiple addresses and have yet to get a response. So if you run into an issue, you’re probably on your own!

Have you tried Kashie? Maybe a similar service or AI-based approach to content generation? Let us know in the comments!

The most reliable way to grow your audience on Spotify and other streaming platforms is with Facebook and Instagram ads. If your audience is under 30, you’ll do perfectly fine with just Instagram.

Advertisers have been complaining about the gradual loss of manual control and targeting options. Soon you’ll be able look at an object while wearing your Meta glasses, say “hey Meta, sell this,” and it’ll do the rest.

Does it matter that you can no longer target fans of obscure bands or limit your ads to running only on Instagram Stories to females age 21-24 from 2-4 am on Wednesdays? Not to me!

I’ve been asked countless times for a screen-by-screen walkthrough of my campaign creation process. My usual excuse is that Ads Manager changes every 10 minutes, so anything I post will be obsolete tomorrow. That’s still the case, and also keep in mind that your Ads Manager probably looks different than mine to begin with.

Along the way, I’ll share my thoughts on the various opportunities and pitfalls presented. If you’d rather just read about my latest album promotion, skip to the next heading.

We’re going to be building a conversions campaign that directs users to a landing page, like this:

You don’t have to list that many options. Just Spotify and optionally Apple Music are perfectly fine for our purposes here.

I’m going to trust that you can create the smart link yourself. You’ve got plenty of options for hosting it, including Hypeddit (seen above), Feature.fm (more features, more expensive), and SubmitHub Links (totally free).

I’m also not going to walk you through setting up your Meta Pixel or creating a Custom Conversion in Events Manager. I’m pretty sure the latter isn’t even necessary anymore, at least with Hypeddit, which I’ll be using in this example.

With that said, let’s get this show on the road!

Meta Ads for Music Campaign Creation

Start by opening up Ads Manager and hitting the green + Create button below “Campaigns.”

We want Conversions, which falls under the Engagement objective.

Immediately we’re hit with the first of many “Meta knows best” prompts that we have to bypass by selecting “manual.”

Next we’re presented with our full campaign structure: Campaign, Ad Set, Ad.

The only things you need to mess with at the campaign level are the name and daily budget. I like to name my campaigns with a single letter for the campaign type (“C” for conversions), followed by the name of the song.

Hit “Next” and we move on to the ad set.

Here’s where things get interesting! Let’s hold off on naming our ad set until we’ve nailed down the targeting.

Select “Website” from the Conversion location dropdown and the rest of the fields will appear. Dataset is apparently their new term for Pixel. This is the first time I’ve seen it!

If you’re using Hypeddit, the Hypeddit Smart Link Click should be available, assuming you’ve entered your Pixel data and tested clicking on a link so Meta can see it. I also entered my Conversions API access token into Hypeddit at some point in the distant past, which is presumably why it has the green check.

You set up Conversions API access in Events Manager, under Data Sources. That’s different than a Custom Conversion, which again you probably don’t need to worry about.

Rest assured that getting to this point is the hardest part! Once you get your conversion event to show up in the dropdown, the rest is cake.

Then we’ve got value rules, which I wrote about recently. Totally optional, but if you leave things as-is, most of your conversions will likely come from Brazil, Mexico, and Malaysia if you adopt my country list.

There’s nothing to do here because we enabled “Advantage+ campaign budget” in the previous step. That means Meta will allocate budget to the ad sets that perform the best and starve the losers.

But that doesn’t apply to us, because we’re only going to use a single ad set.

Why? Because targeting is dead. As I’ve heard said many times, the creative is the targeting.

John Gold of Hypeddit told me about an experiment he ran:

He created a campaign with 84 ad sets, each with a single ad, and allocated $3 to each.

Then he created another campaign with the same 84 ads piled into two ad sets (there’s a limit of 50 ads per set).

Both campaigns converged on the same winning ad.

The only difference is that the one where he manually allocated the budget spent a lot more to get there.

Historically I’ll leave interest targeting blank, or just Spotify, or Spotify and Apple Music. It really doesn’t matter. Meta will sort it out.

If you haven’t run these types of ads before, pointing Ads Manager in the right direction with some broad genre targeting may speed things up and certainly won’t hurt!

It defaults to just the US, in the US anyway. If you want to use my list of Tier 1 and 2 countries, click “Add locations in bulk,” select Countries from the dropdown menu, and copy/paste this list of 34 countries:

Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Latvia, Monaco, Malta, Mexico, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, United States, South Africa

And click on “Match locations.”

It should come up with 42 locations, which you can simply add, or if you want to keep your list tidy, you can to delete the 8 offshoots like United States Minor Outlying Islands, Netherlands Antilles, French Southern Territories, etc.

Most people in the music promotion space will tell you to “Switch to original audience options” and target specific artists/bands or at least genres.

I really don’t think that’s necessary. I’ve been using Advantage+ audience for at least a year, after testing it and finding it performed at least as well. It’s only gotten better since then!

That said, you could absolutely considering lowering the age from 65+. I’ve been using 64 for reasons I’m now unsure of.

For placements though, you’ll want to override Advantage+ by selecting edit, “Manual placements,” and deselecting everything but Instagram, and optionally Threads.

I’m not seeing many conversions from Threads but the cost per impression is cheap and it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything.

As for the actual placements, I’m using five: Instagram feed, Instagram Explore, Threads feed, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Reels. The lion’s share of conversions comes from Instagram Reels.

While you might technically get a lower cost per conversion by letting Meta handle placements, these specific placements are more likely to lead to actual streams of your music.

When I add Facebook placements, my cost per conversion reliably drops, sometimes precipitously. Is it due to bots? Accidental clicks? I don’t know, but typically I don’t see any improvement in Spotify for Artists. If you want to add additional placements, do so carefully and methodically.

After the ad set is fully configured, I’ll go back and name it in a way that encapsulates my settings, like “Spotify 18-64 T1-2 CW IG.”

Next up, you create the actual ads.

These should be 15-20 second 9×16 videos (1080 by 1920 pixels) that showcase at least three different parts of your song. I’ll provide some pointers and examples later on.

Name your ad, select your accounts in the Identity section, and under Ad setup, select “Manual upload” and “Single image or video.”

There are a lot of options here and I won’t go into every one, but as a general rule, you have to actively fight against their recommendations, which are automatically enabled.

For example, Ads Manager will automatically add music from their library to an image ad, even if the ad itself is a post on Instagram where you added your own music. It’s frustrating and deceptive to the user.

The website URL is your smart link, and I like to use spotify.com as the display link. Even though the ad doesn’t take the user directly to Spotify, they likely don’t know what Hypeddit is. I don’t think the display link is shown with the placements we’ve selected anyway, but it is in the Facebook feed.

Add your video and come up with some primary text options and headlines. These only matter for feeds, so don’t stress too much about it. Select “Listen now” from the Call to action dropdown menu.

When you upload your video, it will present you with a series of Site Links, which it scrapes from your destination URL. Click the pencil icon and then flip the radio button to turn them off, as shown.

Upload your video, wait for it to process, select it, and skip the trimmer if it’s longer than 15 seconds,

I create my ads so that they work when cropped to square, so the video takes up more space in feeds.

You’ll then be accosted by a slew of AI enhancements, which I recommend disabling. That said, I haven’t tested each of them individually. You never know.

Meta will also offer AI-generated text which you can take or leave. Most of it is cringe-worthy, but I’ll begrudgingly confess that one of its suggestions performs well: “80s Synth Revival.”

There are a bunch of other potential ins and outs, but that’s the meat and potatoes of it.

Once you’ve got an ad you like, click the three dots and “Quick duplicate” to swap in your next video, and don’t forget to turn off the newly enabled site links and AI enhancements.

Then, when you’ve created all your ads, make one final pass to ensure that all of that junk is fully disabled before hitting publish.

My Meta Ads for Music Results

My new album came out on October 17.

I had 181K release day saves on Spotify thanks to Rise, which created a massive spike in my data, so I’m going to focus on October 18 through November 7, which is the last day for which I have complete results.

Here are all the Meta campaigns I’ve run during that period:

Yeah, it’s messy. Here’s why:

I started by reviewing all the song campaigns for the singles from the album, and settled on four winners: Flavor, The Rehearsal, Where Tigers Are Said to Roam, and Undone.

I created new campaigns for each, using the winning ads from the previous campaigns, plus a few new ideas. Most of the new ads came from Kashie (read my review here), but none of those beat out my old standbys.

I also created a matching campaign for When I Can’t Remember You, the focus track of the album by process of elimination. It was the only one I hadn’t already released as a single.

I ran those at $15/day for about a week, then created a single campaign (C – TBC) to house the best ads from the five campaigns, and disabled the rest.

I’ve been running that campaign at $60/day ever since. It’s a lot of money for me, but hey, it’s not every month you release a new album.

For once, I didn’t actually practice what I preach in regard to using a single ad set. I thought I’d throw meta a curveball with this interest targeting:

It more or less matches the theme of the album. Notice there’s nothing remotely related to music!

And yet, that ad set beat out the one with Spotify as an interest target. To me it demonstrates that Meta will end up in the same place regardless of where you start.

Here are my results in Spotify for Artists. I’ve chosen Saves as the metric to watch because it’s closely tied to ad spend. Turn off the campaign and saves plummet.

On average, I’m getting 675 saves a day, divided by 12 tracks means that 56 people are saving the album.

Over that same period, my monthly active listeners have gone up by 900. It’s not just from Meta ads though. I’m also running Showcase campaigns, which I’ll write about soon!

I can’t afford to keep going at $60/day for much longer, but I’m hoping that listeners will revisit the album enough to make the campaign pay off in the long, long long run.

Last but not least, here are my top two ads. I not-so-loosely adopted the format from my Southworth Media campaign.

I created them in Canva, where I set rulers at 420 and 1494 pixels to block off a square so it works when cropped:

The opening video is my Spotify canvas, which I animated using Kling AI. The rest of the video elements are all stock footage in Canva.

Well now, that was a lot! If you followed along and created your own campaign, please let me know where things could be more clear.

Are you using Meta ads to promote your music? Share your strategies and questions in the comments!