How to test and learn with Spotify Ad Studio’s campaign structure

What audience segments should I target? Does it matter which background track I choose? Should I run video or audio ads—or both? Remove some of the guesswork from your strategies and take a data-driven, test-and-learn approach to your campaigns with Spotify Ad Studio.

If you’re just starting to advertise on Spotify, it’s important to learn what tactics are working for your campaigns so you can optimize and achieve your ad objectives. Thanks to Ad Studio’s intuitive campaign structure and real-time reporting dashboard, creating your own campaign benchmarks is simple.

Every Ad Studio campaign consists of one or more ad sets, and each ad set contains a collection of ads.

This structure makes it easy to scale and manage campaigns with multiple creatives, targeting parameters, and budget levels. It’s also a useful tool for testing out different audience segments, messaging, and ad formats so you can learn what tactics are driving results. Here, we break down how you can get started in three steps.

1. Test different targeting tactics to learn more about your audience.

You can define targeting parameters for each ad set within a campaign on Ad Studio. Testing different audience segments can help you determine who is resonating most with your message and, ultimately, who your real target audience is on Spotify.

Basic targeting like age, gender, and platform can go a long way in helping you learn about your audience. But Ad Studio also offers targeting segments unique to Spotify that can give you a clear picture of who you’re reaching and how you can keep them engaged. Our advanced targeting options include interests, real-time contexts, and genre targeting.

Customer spotlight: Washington Prime Group

Washington Prime Group (WPG), a shopping center real estate investment company, recently experimented with targeting in a campaign focused on driving foot traffic to each of their locations. They created multiple ad sets within the campaign and assigned different targeting to each, testing their messaging against listeners' age, interests, and preferred music genres. While they saw an overall lift in foot traffic as a result of the campaign, the highest CTRs and completion rates were from the ads that mentioned the interests they targeted (like food and music) and used background tracks that matched the targeted music genres.

2. Experiment with creative messages and formats to find your voice.

Your creative is what makes your message stand out. And understanding which assets drive results can help you connect with more people in your audience. We recommend testing specific creative variables within your ads and ad sets to see what motivates listeners to engage:

• Voiceover profiles and accents: Tailor your voiceover profiles (Ad Studio’s free voiceover tool provides lots of great options to choose from) to speak to different audience segments. Voiceovers with region-specific accents can help your message feel local and familiar to listeners.
• Ad formats: Spotify is a sound-on environment, where even video ads are heard. Test audio and video ads separately and together to understand the contexts and moments listeners prefer to interact with your message during their Spotify experience.
• CTAs: Calls-to-action that encourage people to take specific actions tend to see better campaign performance—no matter the advertising channel. Try out different CTAs that clearly spell out what you want your audience to do.
• Background tracks: Mix up the background songs in your ads to see what genres your audience really dig. This way, you can identify the right playlists and listening moods to connect in.

3. Turn data-driven insights into action.

As you test and learn with Ad Studio, consider your campaign objectives and what questions you want to answer with each experiment you try. For example, “What CTA leads to the highest number of coupon redemptions?” or “Which real-time context helps me reach my audience when they’re ready to engage?”

You'll start to identify what works (or what doesn’t) for your business and map out your own best practices that you can apply to future campaigns. With enough testing and data, you’ll be able to record your benchmarks and scale your learnings across campaigns.

Ready to start experimenting? Sign up for an Ad Studio account or create a new campaign to start advertising.