What is a good cost per Spotify conversion?

Author

Andrew Southworth
April 22, 2024

Hey friends!

Today we’re going to talk about what is a ‘good’ cost per Spotify conversion.

Specifically, this is for Meta ad campaigns where we send people to a landing page and track conversions to streaming services (like Spotify) using the pixel.

If you’ve never heard of this before, you can learn how to run one from scratch by watching this video or checking out my course Spotify Growth Machine.

When you first run one of these you don’t have a benchmark for what is a ‘good’ result. That’s what i’m talking about on in this newsletter.

The first thing I want to point out is that there are a lot of factors that go into this, so these numbers can vary. The second thing I want to point out is that these are my personal ranges, and i’ve done these thousands of times over the last 4 years - so don’t be bummed out if your results are currently worse, you’ll get better over time.

The last thing I want to bring up before I give you the numbers, is that this assumes that your music is good or great. Great songs can perform badly, but bad songs rarely perform great (music is subjective, bad to you might be great to someone else and vice versa).

Specifically for tier 1 and tier 2 countries combined I would say this:

  • Under $0.20 - phenomenal / amazing

  • $0.20-$0.30 - great / awesome

  • $0.30-$0.40 - good / okay

  • $0.40-$0.50 - mediocre

It’s hard to label above $0.50 ‘bad’ or set a certain threshold for ‘awful’ because it depends on the context. If you’re getting great engagement on Spotify the campaign itself might be doing great even if the cost per result is expensive.

It also depends on your budget, because the larger your budget becomes the more you’re able to accept higher costs per conversion and still achieve a positive result. If you have $300 per month for marketing you have to be a lot more picky with which campaigns you run compared to if you have $2k per month.

If you wanted the list for a tier 1 only audience, I would say to roughly double the previous numbers. The thing is, some songs will have similar costs per conversion in tier 1 as they do in tier 1 and tier 2 combined (in rare cases, tier 1 can even be cheaper than tier 2). I’ve run dozens of campaigns in the last year with under $0.30 per conversion in only tier 1 countries.

Planning Budgets

You shouldn’t spend the same budget for every song you release. Ideally you’d spend most of your budget behind songs that get the best performance, and the least amount in songs that have the worst performance.

Plan an average budget per song but be willing to only spend 25% or 50% if the performance is poor, and reallocate the rest of that budget to another song or your next song. Also, be willing to spend double or triple your budget on high performing songs - the money you save on low performing songs is used to balance out the extra spend on the high performers.

I do this type of variable budget planning for my own music, and as a result at Forbid Media we ask clients if they want to pivot to another the song when the cost per conversion is too high.

It sucks when you get more than one low performer in a row. You start to wonder if something changed with Meta ads, or you start second guessing the quality of your music. But i’ve worked with people who got three awful campaigns in a row and then their 4th attempt took off and 10X’d their streams on multiple platforms.

Typically I assume out of 10 songs that I release as singles, i’ll have:

  • 2 amazing campaigns

  • 2 awful campaigns

  • 6 great to okay campaigns

Some people do better than this, some people do worse than this.

New Content

Let's talk about 7 music marketing trends, hacks and tips you NEED to know for 2024.

In this video Taran Gray and I talk about how artists can make money from music without relying on streams, and how to capitalize on the TikTok algorithm.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

  1. My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.

  2. My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.

  3. Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.

  4. 1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.

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