If you just hired us to run an ad campaign to promote your music on Spotify, we want to make sure you fully understand the results you're getting inside Spotify for Artists. It's more complicated than just 'more streams'.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see this song has been out for about 5 weeks and has 28k streams. Thats great, but we can drive 28k streams many different ways. We use ads because we know they're real listeners and they are a high engagement traffic source. This is why we have a 3.5 streams/listener (quite good) and a 50% intent rate (also quite good).
Engagement Metrics On Spotify
There are a few stats in particular that are useful when measuring the quality of an ad campaign in Spotify for Artists.
- Saves
- Playlist adds
- Streams / listener
- Followers
- Source of streams
- Intent rate
Saves are when the Spotify user saves the song to their library, and it also adds it to their liked songs playlist. Playlist adds are when the user adds the song to their playlist that they own. Streams / listener are how many streams the song has gotten on average per listener.
If you add up saves and playlist adds, and divide by the number of listeners, we call this the 'intent rate'. It's a simple way to sum up how much 'intent' the song is getting for listeners listening to it again in the future.
Source of streams can be useful because this tells you where streams are coming from.
- People directly from our ads will fall into 'Your profile and catalog' for their first stream.
- When they save or add your song to a playlist and listen again, they will fall into 'Listeners own playlists and library'.
- We typically assume the combination of these two categories is what your ads are driving, unless you have a massive social media following.
- Our favorite category is 'Listeners own playlists and library' as this leads to a long tail after the campaign is over. This is why we want all those Saves and Playlist adds!
- Our second favorite category is 'Spotify algorithmic playlists' because they're free. In this video this includes Release Radar, Discover Weekly, Radio, Mixes, etc.
Other Things To Note
There are a few caveats we want you to be aware of.
- The vast majority of streams happen after the ad campaign is over, from all those people that saved / added the song to a playlist. Algorithmic takes this even further.
- We can easily tell what streams came from playlisting separately from our ads, but we can't separate organic traffic and ads. This means if you already have a big fanbase it may be harder to see results as it's 'lost in the noise'.
- While we love algorithmic playlists and we aim to trigger them with our campaigns, you need to understand that they do reduce the streams per listener and intent rate. Algorithmic playlists are still playlists, and they will lower your quality metrics - but it's okay!
- Editorial playlists will also lower quality metrics, but this is also okay! The burst of free streams is nice and we can easily tell it apart from our ads.
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