How To Get Started With Spotify Advertising

At Quill we use Spotify advertising for the vast majority of our clients. We love it for a variety of reasons but the main one is that you’re advertising to users that are already on their preferred listening platform. When it comes to advertising on the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagrams of the world, you’re asking users to discover the podcast and then click off of social media into a listening platform to tune in. 

That’s a pretty big ask. 

Overall we’ve found that advertising a podcast on social media tends to be good for awareness but Spotify tends to be better for both awareness and actual clicks. Spotify ads show up on free accounts only though, and you may be thinking, don’t the vast majority of people have a premium account at this point? Yes, many people do, but there are still over 155 million free accounts that you can be advertising to. 

One thing that I will quickly note about podcast advertising in general is that it’s not really possible to track clicks to downloads (yes, annoying). So while Spotify tracks clicks for you, you then have to monitor how your downloads fluctuate during the periods you’re running ads. 

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive into creating your Spotify Ad: ‍

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1. Setting Up Your Spotify Advertising Account 

To begin, you need to make a Spotify advertising account in Spotify Ad Studio. This is pretty self-explanatory, just head over to Spotify Ad Studio and click “Start Now”. 

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2. Creating Your Ad

Now we get into the creative part. Time to bring your ad to life! 

With Spotify advertising ads can be a maximum of 30 seconds in length so you have to capture listener attention and get your message out there quickly. This is usually the formula that we follow when creating ad scripts for our clients:

Spotify Ad Script Formula

1. Thought-Provoking Statement: Write something shocking or a statement/question that your target audience can immediately relate to. This is to catch a listener’s attention.
2. The Host: Introduce the host(s) of the podcast.
3. About the Show: In just one or two short sentences write out what the podcast is about. Who will you be talking to? What value will listeners get from the show? 
4. When to Listen: Finally, write when listeners can tune into new episodes. 
5. CTA: Since you’re advertising on Spotify you can’t really say “listen on Apple”, so have your CTA be something like, “listen on Spotify”. 
   

And that’s it! Once you’re done with your script, time yourself reading through it so you have an idea of how long it’ll be when you decide to record. 

Recording & Editing

Once your script is good to go it’s time to record! At Quill, we record and edit all of our ads in-house, and you’re more than welcome to do the same. If you already have your podcast setup, it’s pretty easy to get your ad recorded and edited. 

But, if you don’t have the resources or capabilities to record and edit your ad, Spotify has a tool in Spotify Ad Studio that does it all for you. Basically you feed them your script and the background music you’d like, and then professional voice actors will record the ad. They’ll also cover the mixing and mastering of the ad once it’s recorded. 

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3. Launching Your Ad

Now it’s time to share your ad with the world!

Creating Your Campaign

From your dashboard in Spotify Ad Studio, you’ll be asked to create your campaign. Within your campaign, you’ll have ad groups (similar to Google Ads). You can set your ad groups as different items -- maybe by episode, or based on your targeting parameters. It’s all up to you. 

Budget

Spotify has a minimum of $250 USD that you need to set for a campaign. From here you can increase the budget however you want. We usually recommend having our clients start with the $250 budget and increase based on performance, since at the end of the day, Spotify Ads aren’t going to work for every single podcast out there. 

Targeting 

Once you reach this step you need to start considering who exactly your audience is and who you want to be targeting. 

Spotify Ad Studio lets you target based on: 

1. Age 
2. Gender
3. Location 
4. Interests: a full list of the interests that you can target are linked above. If you’re advertising a podcast, we recommend always checking “Podcasts” as an interest on top of the more targeted options. This makes sure that within your interest targeting, you’re focusing on individuals who listen to podcasts as well. ‍
5. Real-Time Context: when do you want users to hear your ad? When they’re in the car? Working out? Maybe relaxing or cooking? You can target that! Pretty cool, right?‍
6. Genre: we love this feature since you can target users based off of the music that they listen to. If you have a series that is intertwined with a specific musical culture, you can tap into that. ‍
7. Fan Base: if there’s a certain fan base that you want to target for your series then you can also target for that. For example, if you have a podcast with a Lizzo appreciation episode, you can directly target Lizzo fans. 
   

Once you’re done with targeting, approve the ad and send it out to the world! You’ll receive a confirmation email once Spotify has approved your ad. 

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‍Measuring in Spotify Advertising  

Once your ad is approved and running, it’s important to regularly check in and analyze performance. Spotify reporting allows you to do just that.

Spotify provides you with information including:

• Impressions 
• Reach 
• Frequency
• Completion Rate
• Clicks
• CTR
• % of ads played to XX%
• Age 
• Gender 
• Location 
• Device 
  

You can also export and download some of the metrics you gather from Spotify. If you navigate to your ad set, there’s an arrow next to “download data” within the ad set’s report tab. This function allows you to export your ads information! 

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Launching Spotify Ads 

And that's it! Pretty easy, right?  

If you have any questions about launching your Spotify Ad or bringing your podcast to life, get in touch with the Quill team!