Data analytics with Spotify Ads, is it easy? How effective is Spotify Ads? As a digital audio advertising platform, it allows companies and marketers to promote their products and services to millions of listeners and even conduct traffic and marketing analytics. The platform has users who spend nearly 148 minutes per day listening to music. Spotify Ads give marketers a chance to promote their brands directly to millions of listeners in certain geographic locations across the world.

Spotify has been expanding its market outreach with over 300 million ad-supported audiences. A majority of these users spend more than 2 hours listening to music, giving brands a chance to get their message heard. That’s not all; these ads offer multi-format advertising campaigns that usually drive more traffic than traditional marketing campaigns. Users also benefit from web traffic analytics provided on the platform.

Spotify Ads Functionality

Spotify Ads advertise and promote your products and services to certain interests and market segments. For example, you can use Spotify Ads to focus on an audience from a certain region, depending on their music preference.

You can easily target specific audiences depending on their preferences, including gaming, sports, politics, fashion, and others. Spotify Ads targeting feature makes it possible to identify and categorize users according to their interests. These data analytics services are useful for companies looking to promote their brand to certain people. An overview of the common ad types is provided below:

  • Audio ads: These ads cannot be ignored or closed by listeners, giving brands a chance to get their message heard.
  • Display ads: They are clickable ads that make a visual impression and help to drive traffic to the brands’ websites.
  • Video ads: These ads combine audio and visual effects to make your brand marketing campaigns more memorable to the listeners.
  • Podcast ads: Spotify podcast ads are highly effective because listeners of the podcasts are emotionally attached to the subjects. Running these ads guarantees engaged listeners, improving conversion rates.
  • Sponsored playlist: This format gives brands maximum exposure as the playlist is visible to a larger target audience.

Spotify Ads Data Transfer

Spotify Ads enhance proactive marketing analytics. Spotify has analytical tools that allow advertisers to collect data about marketing metrics. Key performance indicators like conversion and engagement rates are easily accessible. Alongside using the Spotify analytics feature for data transfer, the platform allows you to move data to external tools like BigQuery and AgencyAnalytics easily. This enables users to manage their data without limitations. Spotify Ads make it possible to collect your data and move it to your preferred destination for further analysis. The screen below highlights the outcome of Spotify Ads data transfer to AgencyAnalytics.

Spotify Ads Reporting

Spotify Ads has comprehensive data analysis tools and a reporting system that offers information to manage, optimize, and monitor your marketing campaign. You can easily access the interactive dashboard for setting ads and monitoring delivery trends and insights. Alongside the inbuilt reporting features, you can utilize third-party analytical software to report ad campaigns. Data tools like Report Garden and AgencyAnalytics are effective in converting marketing data into engaging and interactive dashboards and reports. Users will rely on the integrated campaign reporting to evaluate ad spending from a single dashboard. The screen below highlights what the Spotify Ads dashboard would look like.

Spotify Ads Customer Support

Spotify Ads has integrated customer support, featuring FAQs, tutorials, articles, and direct email.  Once you have any challenges, you should check out the available tutorials, articles, and FAQs to resolve the issue. If the problem persists, you draft an email to Spotify Ads’ support team to get more specific assistance. You should provide all relevant information and screenshots via email to ensure your request is handled effectively. But, many marketers don’t appreciate the absence of a phone number to connect with customer support more promptly. It’s unclear how long the Spotify Ads help center takes to respond to the users.

Spotify Ads Price Breakdown

Spotify Ads do not have fixed pricing points for marketers. This is because the platform allows brands to customize their marketing campaigns depending on their budget. This implies that you can set up an advertising campaign with your planned budget and depending on the traffic you intend to drive to your business. Spotify Ads Manager has features that allow you to register and customize your campaigns depending on your budget. The ads manager comes with standard ad campaigns, accelerated features, and even a frequency cap to ensure your marketing dollars work for you.

Spotify Ads Free Trial

You can try out Spotify audio ads for free for your first ad. This first ad does not have restrictions. You are free to customize the message and content in the advertisement using Spotify Ad Studio. That’s not all. If you are not satisfied with the first draft, you can ask for an adjustment free of charge. The free trial ad is a good way to evaluate whether the platform fits your brand and boosts the visibility of your business.

Spotify Ads Price Packages

Spotify Ads pricing starts from $250. That means you will need $250 to start advertising your brand on Spotify. No additional information is provided in terms of pricing. However, the pricing structure of Spotify Ads has three key factors including: standard, accelerated, and frequency cap. Under the standard, you can spread your budget throughout a certain schedule. The accelerated option allows you to deliver ads quicker, but with daily stops when the budget limit is reached. Frequency caps are beneficial in limiting the number of times the ads will be displaced to avoid fatigue. Spotify Ads give you control over your advertising budget, starting at $250.

Spotify Ads Customer Reviews

Customer reviews placed on Reddit indicated that Spotify Ads have mixed results, with some users reporting a decline in return on their investment in the ad campaigns. A user raises concerns that podcast ads are not ideal for their brand, and Spotify fails to place ads on podcasts and content that matches the interests of the listeners. The major reason is the challenge of Spotify Ads being able to effectively target users depending on the content they consume on the platform.

However, there are benefits to using Spotify Ads as a user reported an improvement in branded traffic due to the effective targeting of the right audience.

Spotify Ads Pros and Cons

ProsCons
Spotify ad studio allows you to personalize your ads depending on the target audience.Spotify targeting options are limited as it’s difficult to target listeners depending on their favorite music.
The platform provides multi-format ads, including audio, video, and display ads to boost brand engagement and branded traffic.The return on ad spending is low, making it not suitable for big ad spenders.
The platform is fully customized to enable marketers to create and run their campaigns independently.You can start advertising with a budget of $250, which can be pricey for some users.
There is a free trial for your first audio ad. 

Verdict

Spotify Ads is perfect for small startups looking to boost their brand awareness. The ads on the platform are discovered by millions of listeners depending on your advertising budget. The platform gives you the first ad for free. With multi-format ads, Spotify Ads platform is an effective brand awareness tool for many businesses. However, Spotify Ads should deal with its current limitations, like the low return on advertising spending, limited options to target users, and inability to advertise to premium Spotify users. The pricing structure needs more clarity in terms of costs per impression, reach, and other data analytics metrics, more so for new users.