How a Spotify conversion campaign actually works: warm up, test, cut, scale

“We run Instagram ads for your song” can mean anything. This is exactly what it means at Sonist, phase by phase. We run the same system on our own releases.

Phase 0: warm-up

Before we ask anyone to click, we run a short video-view campaign at a low daily budget. It builds an audience of people who watched the clip, which is a much better retargeting pool than cold interests. It also gives the ad account signal about who reacts to the song. Three days minimum.

Phase 1: testing

We build several ad sets and run them side by side with separate budgets so one cannot starve the others: a broad set with almost no targeting, a high-affinity set built from fans of similar artists, and a behavior stack that combines music-platform behavior with interests. Each set gets four to eight creatives.

The metric we watch is cost per conversion on the landing page. Under fifty cents is acceptable. Under thirty is a winner. We also watch click-through rate and cost per click as early warnings.

Phase 2: the kill switch

Every set and creative gets a fair window. We do not touch anything for the first few days or fifty conversions, whichever comes first, so the learning phase can finish. After that, anything above the cost ceiling gets cut. No sentiment. The song is not the problem, the audience or the clip is, and there are other combinations to try.

Phase 3: scaling

The survivors move into a campaign with a shared budget so Meta can push spend to whatever is converting. We build a lookalike audience from the people who converted, and once a country has fifty conversions we expand to the next tier of countries. The scaling phase runs until the budget is spent.

What you see

A dashboard link with landing page views, conversions, which platform people chose, and country split. In Spotify for Artists you should see saves, playlist adds and followers moving within the first week. That is the number that predicts long-term streams, not the stream count during the campaign.

What we need from you

• The audio, the artwork, and the Spotify link or ISRC.
• Reader access to Spotify for Artists so we can see saves and followers.
• Any footage you have. We will cut our own clips either way.

That is the whole system. If you want it run for you, start with a package. If you want to learn to run it yourself, that is a conversation for a consulting session.