Growth Suite FAQs and Troubleshooting
If you have a question about the Spotify Growth Playbook, or anything else related to our Growth Suite, please browse this FAQ article below! 👇
The following topics are covered in this FAQ:
How do I make a creative asset for my Growth Playbook?
How do I improve campaign performance or reduce my CPF (Cost per Follower)?
When it comes to improving your Spotify Growth playbook results, there are 3 primary variables in play that impact your overall performance. Linked below are some in-depth videos that audit successful campaigns, providing you with context to figure out where you can make improvements for your ad campaign!
1. Interest Targeting - You can't target everything as an interest, so it's all about finding a balance where you're not going too broad or too narrow. Here's a video going in-depth on how to approach your interest targeting for your ad campaign! Click here to watch!
There are two main recommendations to keep in mind here: 1) Prioritize quality over quantity and 2) Limit this to 10-15 interests, to try not to go too narrow or too broad!
2. Location Targeting - You can either run the campaign globally with our tiered targeting system or define your own custom locations. If you've tried the global option and experimented with different creatives + interests and you haven't gotten things to click, you might want to experiment with some custom location targeting!
Here's a video going in-depth on how to approach the location targeting for your campaign! Click here to watch!
3. Ad Creatives - One of the most important parts of your campaign is your ad creative. Even if your interest and location targeting is spot on, if individuals don't find your creative engaging you likely won't see many conversions!
Our main recommendations are:
Try to use full-sized, properly formatted videos for IG stories ads
Delete the image we auto-generate for your campaigns
Don't go overboard with A/B testing (if you're only spending $5-10 only 2 variations max)
Here's a video going in-depth on how to approach your ad creatives for your campaign! Click here to watch!
We've got extremely detailed videos going into context about how to improve these factors here - this guide covers everything there is to know about the growth ad performance:
Campaign Type - As Facebook now requires having a custom domain in order to run conversion ads, if you've set up your custom domain and associated your pixel with your domain, your campaign will run as a conversion campaign (if you haven't done this your ad will run as a link clicks campaign). You can think of this as instead of optimizing for a click, we're optimizing for a click-through going after a higher quality of user on IG. If you haven't done this already please check out the following guide!
What is CPF and how is it calculated?
Whenever you see the "Cost Per Follower" metric, we're simply pulling the total net change to that follower count over the course of the campaign. Spotify usually updates the follower count every 24-hours.
We update these metrics directly from these platform's API, but here are a few important things to keep in mind:
Different systems update follower counts at different times. Instagram growth for example normally is pretty quick to report, whereas Spotify only updates follower counts once daily at 12 pm ET.
As we track the net, it's important to ask yourself what other variables could be at play that are impacting your campaign in either a positive or negative direction. Sometimes fake accounts will be purged from Instagram or Spotify, and this may negatively impact your CPF.
What are the three audience tiers?
If you've been curious about what these different tiers of audiences on your playbook dashboard mean, keep reading to understand what's behind them!
One of the major pitfalls you can run into when running conversion campaigns targeting global traffic is that FB/IG commonly overspends on very cheap countries that get you cheap clicks.
Because Facebook is trying to find the cheapest cost per click, often times you might notice too much of your budget gets spent on countries that don't actually translate to results. The theory behind the tier system is to help better control where Facebook allocates the campaign's budget.
We research the 80+ active countries where Spotify is available, and bucketed those countries into different tiers depending on how expensive it is to advertise to those markets!
Tier 1 includes major markets (like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.) that are the most expensive to advertise in. As you move down the tiers it gets cheaper to advertise to advertise to those countries and we cap the amount of budget that is spend by each tier to make sure Facebook doesn't waste your budget on markets that are less likely to provide results for you!
Why can't I access the Spotify Growth Playbook?
In order to use Spotify Growth, you need to:
Be on a base subscription plan (Basic or Pro)
Chosen the $50/mo Growth Suite Add-On.
The Growth Suite includes the Spotify Growth, YouTube Growth, Instagram Growth and TikTok Growth Playbooks.
You can access your billing section by going to https://www.toneden.io/settings/billing
Why can't I find my artist page while creating the campaign?
If you can't find your Spotify profile by searching, you should be easily able to copy your Spotify Artist link and input that instead!
Why does the campaign only allow me to link to the artist's page?
Our Spotify Growth Playbook campaigns link directly to the Artist's Profile, not to an individual release! The goal of this campaign is to drive followers, and thus you'll want the most minimal amount of friction possible for the fan to click that follow button.
When you send people to an individual release, there is no call to action button to follow the artist. Meanwhile, on your main profile, the follow button is easily accessible to users.
This campaign tries to impact longer term sources of streaming growth (i.e. profile, user's playlist and library, Spotify algorithmic playlists), driving to the main profile allows your new fan to do the following:
Discover your newest releases while also being exposed to your entire discography
By giving them more music to discover, it increases the likelihood they'd find something they enjoy and save it to their own playlist of library (which is when a good chunk of streams come from in the long run)
The more data points Spotify has on who is listening, saving, following, etc. increases how impactful Spotify's algorithms can be as a new channel of discovery to get your music in front of the right fans
If you're looking to run a campaign more oriented for a specific release, you'd want to spin up a promoted music Smartlink (fanlink) campaign.
How do I make a creative asset for my growth playbook?
Our biggest suggestion I'd have is to use video/audio for your creative rather than an image. We typically don't see images perform well at all - video with audio is key as that's the 'hook' to get someone to follow/listen. We recommend editing your campaign, removing all images, and replacing with a video (with audio) or two.
To be more specific, here are the parameters you should follow for an ideal Growth Suite creative asset:
1080x1920px (story sized) video, 15 seconds. Options: a 15-second cut from a music video, a clip from a live show. Here are some examples of what this should look like. No matter what, aim for a strong call to action and always include the track name you want the end use to stream when they land on your Spotify Artist page
We recommend taking a peek at our Spotify Best Practice documentation here:
And our guide on making creative assets for our Growth Suite Playbooks:
Lastly, you can peep our guide on the top IG story creator apps you can use to easily spin up vertical video creative:
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