How To Turn Your Spotify Track, YouTube Video Into An Interactive Ad
CD Baby’s Chris Robley walks us through the benefits of advertising your music online, and how you can turn any Spotify track or YouTube video into an engaging, interactive ad.
By Chris Robley from the CD Baby DIY Musician’s Blog
Want to get your song or video in front of the right new listeners?
We do too. That’s why we’re really excited to announce the launch of a new Interactive Ads format within Show.co’s Ad Builder tool. It’s the easiest way to build your audience online.
You can now instantly turn any Spotify track or YouTube video into an eye-catching, interactive ad that’s playable right then and there without the person having to leave the site they’re on. The ads will be targeted at music fans who visit websites related to your genre, so you know they’re the right audience.
These ads look great and are simple to build (we do most of the work). Since we assist you in targeting your audience based on genre and outlet, interactive ads are also really easy to launch. Best of all, our early testing has shown that an interactive ad often gets four times more results than a traditional, static banner ad — so you see more engagement for less money.
Why should you advertise your music online?
More music is being made and released than ever before. Competition is fierce. That means very few people will take notice of your music just because you’ve made it!
You need to do SOMETHING ELSE besides simply releasing music in order to:
- Get seen
- Capture attention
- Drive results
All the usual promo efforts apply here, from a big publicity or playlist campaign all the way down to playing a show (remember those?) in front of people who’ve never seen you.
Advertising can play an important part in that mix. It can also serve multiple functions along the listener’s journey, helping you create a “halo effect” with your music.
Your interactive ad can be:
- an introduction
- something that reinforces awareness
- or even the final nudge towards “conversion” (where someone takes the action you want: listening, subscribing, following on Spotify, etc.)
Of course we all hope everyone converts, but that’s not how advertising (or humans) work.
The Rule of 7 in marketing and advertising is based on psychology: people have to see something over and over and over and over and over and over again before they care. In the days of print and television advertising, that was really expensive. The power of online advertising isn’t just in the conversions or clicks, but in the affordable reach and impressions you gather along the way.
How do interactive ads stack up against other forms of advertising?
We’ll go deeper into best-practices and results in future DIY Musician articles and podcast episodes, but I’ll just give you a quick example from some of my own recent testing.
I ran an Interactive Ad campaign through Show.co. At the same time I ran a 15-second video ad on Instagram Stories via the Facebook ads platform.
If any of the advertising lingo below is confusing or you just want the short version, here’s the summary: I got better results with Show.co.
My interactive ad variations drove traffic to either my Spotify profile or to a secret page on my website with bonus content related to the song.
The CTR (“click-through-rate,” which is the percentage of people who clicked the ad) for global audiences were similar, and at a similar cost, when comparing Interactive Ads to Instagram Stories. For narrower audiences like English-speaking and EU countries, Show.co gave me cheaper results.
But here’s the real difference. The Instagram Stories video was a dark/ghosted post, meaning it didn’t “stack” engagement because the only people who saw it were in the ad audiences. It wasn’t doing anything else besides… advertising.
But with Show.co’s Interactive Ads, the very content of my ad was a monetized Spotify or YouTube player. Views and streams WITHIN the ad counted towards play-count totals AND drove revenue.
Not all clicks are created equal
Next, I found that many of the clicks on my Instagram Stories ad didn’t correlate to increased stream counts, Spotify followers, or growing listenership in certain territories. That might warrant some changes to my target audience were I to continue this test, but when I compare it to the ‘easy button’ of Show.co’s Ad Builder, my interactive ads delivered better results for WAY less work.
Specifically, with the interactive ads that drove traffic to my own website, not only were the ads themselves counting towards monetized streams, but the people who ended up on my website were immediately “pixeled” (in case I do want to hit them up later via the Facebook ads platform). I also noticed an increase in email subscribers being driven by a popup on that webpage.
The results I got through Show.co had a fuller, more tangible effect.
Here’s how easy it is to create an Interactive Ad for your music:
- First, go to Show.co’s Ad Builder tool and create an “Interactive Ad”
- Next, drop in the URL to one of your YouTube videos, or a track on Spotify, Apple Music, or Soundcloud
- Tell us where you want people to GO when they click on your ad
- Then customize your ad and preview how it looks in real-time
- Lastly, choose where you want your ad to appear, set your budget, and launch your music into the world!
With Ad Builder, it now takes less than five minutes to create an interactive ad that will reach real music fans online. All you need is a link to your song on Spotify or YouTube. We’ll do the rest.
