News & Insights

Level up your music marketing with streaming conversion metrics

Music marketing in the streaming era is basically all about reaching people who are likely to be interested in your artist based on what they listen to today. Then, cultivating that relationship so that they ultimately become a long-term fan. There’s just one problem: how do you know it’s actually working?

Since music marketers started leveraging Spotify ads to promote their artists, we've consistently heard the feedback that common ad metrics like listens, impressions, reach, and clicks are not as important as understanding how an ad translates to engagement with their artists’ catalogues. But there was no way to effectively make that connection and measure engagement.

That wasn’t cool with us, so we introduced streaming conversion metrics on Ad Studio. We not only want to help you connect with the right audience and share your sound, but we also want to show you how listeners are responding to your ad and how it impacts what they’re streaming. With these metrics, you can now see what actions listeners take once they get to your artist’s Spotify page, and then be able to act on that information strategically.

Not sure how to bridge the gap between getting metrics and acting on them? No worries — we built the bridge for you! Our guide to understanding your campaign results will help you read the stats, understand your results, and make those crucial decisions that will improve ad performance.

The new metrics you’ll see in your reporting are the number of listeners, number of new listeners, both the listener and new listener conversion rates, and intent rate — the percentage of listeners who took actions showing intent to stream the artist again in the future. Listeners show intent by liking a track using the heart icon or adding the track to their playlist.

Equally as important as the metrics themselves is how they are collected and organized. The pre-exposure window tells us whether a Spotify user has listened to your artist in the 28 days before they heard your ad. If they have, they are considered a listener, but if they haven’t, then they are considered a new listener. The conversion window is the 14 days after a person heard the ad, where their actions are counted as a conversion. This is because they might not have been able to take an action in the exact moment they heard your ad or it may take a couple of listens for them to act. Your campaign window is how long you set your ad to run plus 14 days to account for the conversion window for the listeners that heard your ad at the end of your campaign.

In the past few months since we introduced streaming conversion metrics, we’ve been able to gather some initial learnings and strategies from campaigns about how you can use these stats to help facilitate the listener's journey to becoming a fan. For example, we found that listeners who add an artists’ song to their playlist or save a song are 1.4x more likely to continue listening to the artist 1 month later.¹ Users who streamed multiple times in the conversion window were 2x more likely to continue listening to the artist 30 days after hearing the ad.¹

Music marketers are already using these new insights to their advantage — and learning even more about their listeners. One up-and-coming artist who recently used Ad Studio to successfully drive new listeners did so by targeting not just fans of similar artists, but fans of similar artists with fan bases of a similar size. In another recent campaign focused on driving listeners to an artist’s back catalogue, the artist’s team was able to successfully increase their streams per listener quickly by targeting existing fans.

Pretty interesting, right? Basically, every ad is an opportunity to learn something new about your target audience that will help get you closer to your goals. There are even more insights into how you can use streaming conversion metrics to do this effectively in our guide to understand your campaign results.

Download the guide today and be on your way to next level expert status in both connecting with fans and understanding the impact.

1 Spotify First Party Data 2019

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