Last year, our groundbreaking Sonic Science research found that listeners find Spotify significantly more engaging and immersive than other popular media platforms like social media, TV, and radio.¹ Even more compelling, an impressive 93% of this engagement transfers to ad engagement.²

This presents a unique opportunity for businesses to connect with their audiences. Ad Studio, our intuitive self-serve ads manager, empowers brands to manage their digital campaigns on Spotify with ease, control, and performance.

We've been busy building and evolving our ads manager to put the power in your hands to launch ad campaigns that aim to deliver your business objectives in just a few clicks. Our ads manager is an auction-enabled, objectives-based platform that helps you deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment.

Today, our ads manager is a simple-to-use, one-stop shop for advertising needs spanning audio asset development, campaign creation across multiple formats, and measurement. There are plenty of other functionalities, too—which is why we've created this guide to walk you through what it has to offer.

Let's break down the three major benefits of advertising on Spotify via our self-serve ads manager.

Ease: Get started in just a few clicks

When it comes to self-serve, ease of use is a must. With Spotify's ads manager, you can create digital audio ads from scratch—and repurpose existing video assets to maximize your time and resources. Better yet, you can get started for as little as $250 minimum spend per ad set.

All of our advertisers have access to Spotify's free ad creation tools. You can create campaigns in six easy steps:

1. Write a script (or let us do it for you)
2. Pick your music from our library of background tracks
3. Record a voiceover with one of our partners
4. Incorporate existing video assets, like the ones you've already created for social media ads
5. Review your ad
6. Preview and share your ad

Our self-serve platform makes it simple and intuitive to move through these steps—in fact, you can have a campaign up and running in as little as 24 hours.

Control: Customize campaigns to specific goals

In Spotify's ads manager, you're in control of launching a campaign that's customized to your business goals.

When setting up a campaign, select the objective that's most relevant to your advertising goals—whether Reach, Impressions, Clicks, or Video Views.

You can also customize your target audience to help you reach the right people among Spotify's ad-supported audience. In addition to factors like age, gender, location and language, advertisers can target by music genre, contextual playlists, podcast episode topics, and hobbies or interests to help tailor ads to the right people.

Spotify's ads manager allows you to set flexible daily or lifetime budgets, so you have control over your ad spend. It gives you a view of your estimated results based on bid cap, schedule, and budget. To avoid ad and brand fatigue, our platform also lets you set a custom frequency cap for your ad set—so you're not over-saturating your target audience with the same message.

Performance: Track and tweak to help optimize results

In addition to ease of use and greater control, our ads manager offers advertisers multiple ways to boost performance. While Spotify's superpower is audio, video consumption is growing 48% year over year on the platform.³ You can invest in campaigns across audio and video, including Opt-In Video, to improve campaign performance and maximize effectiveness and reach. Or, augment your audio ads with formats exclusive to our ads manager, like the Canvas companion visual asset, to help drive engagement and purchase intent. These diverse ad formats allow you to convey your brand's message in the most effective way.

You also have the option to choose Automatic Placement, which leverages machine learning to connect with both music and podcast listeners with a single ad set that incorporates audio or video ads.

As for reporting, our ads manager offers real-time access to tools that provide deep insights into your audience metrics and delivery. Advertisers can understand their ads' performance and pacing mid-campaign, and assess and optimize accordingly.