It’s important to choose the right objective for your ad campaign, but which one should you choose?

For sending potential fans offsite to someplace like, say, Spotify, we like to use traffic campaigns and conversion campaigns, depending on our objectives.

Both of these campaign types are ideal for sending users to your Spotify artist profile, your song, or your very own playlist. Traffic ads are easier to set up, but conversion ads give you greater reach and more security.

Each campaign type has its benefits and its drawbacks, so let’s break down some of the fundamental differences between these two campaign types.

Traffic ads

Let’s start with traffic ads.

A traffic campaign is the simplest way to go from zero to advertising your music on Spotify–there is very little in the way of setup time, and Meta’s ad platform makes the process of creating your first campaign fairly straightforward.

With a traffic campaign, you need:

• An ad account

• Ad creative (e.g. image or video)

• A link to place in your ad (e.g. your Spotify artist link)

Outside of these three things, it’s mostly a matter of targeting and understanding how to get the most out of your ad campaign, but the technical process of actually getting started is virtually nonexistent.

Conversion ads

Ok, so what about conversions?

Well, setting up a conversion campaign requires a bit more technical know-how. You’ll need to have a more robust understanding of Meta’s advertising platform as well as a bit of knowledge about how to configure your domain and your pixel.

With a conversion campaign, you need:

• An ad account

• A pixel

• A domain (e.g. tomdupreiii.com)

• Ad creative (e.g. image or video)

• A landing page (e.g. go.tomdupreeiii.com/hero)

• A link to place inside the button on your landing page (e.g. your Spotify artist link)

As you can see, this process is far more in-depth than creating a simple traffic campaign.

“Ok Tom, then why would I want to use conversions at all?”

Define your objectives

The answer is: it’s all about what you’re trying to accomplish. 

Traffic ads, though easier to set up, come with more risk. This campaign type is susceptible to bot traffic (a clever bit of code that drives up your ad expenses without delivering results) and lacks the secondary confirmation of receiving pixel data from your landing page to confirm the user even made to your page in the first place.

As a result, traffic ads work great in “tier 1” countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, etc, as bots are virtually nonexistent in these countries, but it’s a lot more expensive to advertise.

Your growth will be slower, but you’ll make more money per stream.

It’s a trade-off.

On the other hand, conversions, though more complicated to set up, give you the freedom to take a more global approach with your music marketing. Because they function on a data-confirmation-style system, it is more difficult for a conversion ad to be “botted” in the same way traffic ads can be.

This gives you the freedom to advertise all over the world, targeting countries with highly-engaged listeners on Spotify like Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, but these countries pay out vastly less per stream than our previously-mentioned tier 1 countries. 

Faster growth, but less revenue.

So, again, it’s a trade-off.

My advice is to pick your objective and cultivate your campaign decision from there.