What is a conversion?

You may be wondering, when it comes to music promotion what is a conversion? How does it differ from a link click? What is a smart link? I'm going to answer these questions. 

What is a smart link?

A smart link is a landing page that has different links for a song. For example, it might link to Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes and YouTube Music. It looks like this:

Conversions vs Clicks

Now that you know what a conversion is, a clickthrough on the landing page to a DSP, we can compare it to clicks. But first i'll point out that 'conversion' can technically mean anything, it could be configured for a new email list signup, visiting a specific web page or selling a product. But in this post i'm talking about conversions as defined by a clickthrough on a smart link, or what many call a Spotify conversion campaign. 

Most of the time when you use clicks as an objective for a campaign like this, none of the clicks manifest as streams on Spotify. This can be as dramatic as 1,000 link clicks bringing less than 10 streams. Therefore all the ad spend is wasted. 

With conversions we're forcing people to jump through a small hoop. They must land on the landing page and click another button. That small action filters out a lot of the bot traffic, click farm traffic and accidental click traffic. This is why when we run a 'Spotify conversion campaign' and get 1,000 conversions, you get 1,000 to 1,500 streams in the short term alone.