Hypeddit Ad Automation is Easy Mode for Spotify Promotion
I’ve been growing my Spotify audience with Facebook and Instagram ads for years.
Facebook Ads Manager is pinned in my browser and I check it multiple times a day, sometimes obsessively. I know my way around, but it’s not exactly intuitive. There’s definitely a learning curve, and the platform is constantly evolving.
What if there were a way to automate the entire process without ever having to crack open Facebook Ads Manager?
Enter Hypeddit Ad Automation.
My current self-managed ad campaign for my new single isn’t performing too well. Instead of promoting the song directly, I’ll use Hypeddit Ad Automation to direct listeners to a playlist that includes the new single:
For the time being I’ve titled it This Is Color Theory, but I’ve toyed with Color Theory Official Playlist, Color Theory Discography, and Color Theory, F*ck Yeah. Maybe not that last one.
The artwork is from my album Lucky Ago and the description is basically the same as what Spotify uses in their official This Is playlists, with a link to my Patreon thrown in at the end for good measure.
We begin by logging into Hypeddit where I’m greeted with my dashboard:
Click on Ad Campaigns, click the green plus to add a new campaign, and you’re given four options:
Easy, I want to Grow my Spotify playlist. The entire campaign creation is handled on a single page:
My Facebook account is already, connected, so there’s nothing for me to do but click Next.
After that, I grab links for the playlist and the song I want to promote from Spotify, and select a genre. Electronica is the closest option available, but it still makes me think of U2’s Pop album, from back in 1997 when the term electronica may have actually sounded cool.
Then the fun begins! Time to create the actual ad.
I don’t have any videos handy, so I’m going to let Hypeddit make them for me using the cover art from the playlist, after clicking the red “x” to remove the artwork imported from Spotify.
To create some movement, I can select an effect from the gallery. I count 23 options:
When I mouse over each of the blocks, it shows me what the animation looks like. Since my cover art is already pretty busy, I’m going to go with a relatively low key option: Particle Dust.
I could create the audio snippets offline, but I’m going to let Hypeddit take care of it for me:
Once you’ve got the start and end points where you want them, click on “create video.” Then do it again one or two more times to showcase different parts of the track. Hypeddit creates the videos in the background while you work.
Click on any of the video thumbnails to preview the result:
It even put short fades at the beginning and end of the audio!
Next up, you select the countries you want to advertise to. I’m going to select Tier One and Two Countries from the dropdown menu:
I’ve seen mixed results with a few of these countries, but for the sake of experimentation, I’m willing to give them all another shot. Eh, on second thought, I’m going to ditch Ukraine.
Next we enter artists we sound like. I went with a range of classic synthpop bands to current indie electronic acts:
Click on Generate Interests and Hypeddit searches for related interests to target:.
Oh dear, Electronica! There’s egg on my face. I could eliminate it, but I guess I’ll trust the AI.
Almost done! Now we select a budget. Normally I opt for $10 a day, but I can justify going higher for the purposes of this post.
Next up are some advanced settings, which Hypeddit recommends not touching.
Looking at the ad, I just have to make one minor adjustment…
Maybe electronica is in fact the best targeting, but I can’t imagine anyone calling themself an electronica fan. Instead let’s go with “New music for Retro Synth fans…”
Next up, we’re greeted with a summary, which I won’t screenshot here because it’s long.
Finally, check a few boxes to affirm that things are about to get real:
Check the boxes, save the draft, then publish!
Now sit back and watch in real time as the campaign launches:
After about a minute, it’s live in my dashboard, and I’m done!
This should go without saying, but it’s important that you let Hypeddit manage the ad campaign. Don’t go changing things around in Facebook Ads Manager! You can look but don’t touch.
Two hours later, I’m already getting impressions:
My Hypeddit Ad Automation Results
Fast forward one week and here’s where we’re at (click to enlarge):
Which ad set got the most impressions? Electronica! Maybe I shouldn’t have changed the text of the ad.
Surprisingly, Depeche Mode – my all-time favorite band and the one I’m compared to most often – performed so poorly that Facebook abandoned it.
Again, you don’t need to look at Facebook Ads Manager. My results are neatly summarized on my Hypeddit dashboard:
Astute readers will notice a difference in the number of Facebook-reported conversions and Hypeddit-reported clicks. Hypeddit tracks all clicks, even ones with an ad blocker enabled, but Facebook can only see the ones from your pixel and the conversions API.
Click on the little graph icon for detailed analytics:
You can see from the rising red line that Facebook is honing in on my ideal fan. My cost per click is likely to decrease over time.
Most of my visits come from Facebook, which is no surprise to me.
No surprises here either. The crazy visitor numbers from US and Ireland are part of Facebook’s ad approval process. The rest are my usual suspects, mostly Mexico and Brazil.
Hypeddit also provides browser and device data. The vast majority of visits are on mobile.
You can restrict reporting to individual ads or ad sets using the filter menu at the top:
That’s useful intel to determine which audiences have the highest engagement. Structure your next campaign accordingly!
It’s nice that people clicked on the link, but what we really care about is what happens once they get to Spotify.
Apparently they listen to my songs for an average of 7 streams per listener! Those are results from my last 7 days, which span the duration of the campaign. The playlist gained 50 followers in the process.
Bottom line, Hypeddit Ad Automation works.
Could I do better? I’d like to think so.
John Gold, the founder of Hypeddit, has made it abundantly clear that Ads Automation was not designed for users like me.
I’m happy to devote a few hours every week to creating and testing ads. Sometimes I even enjoy it!
Who is it for? My friend Rainer of UAP is a great example. We’ve been sharing our results over email and he had this to say:
Hypeddit Ad automation is a game-changer for people like me who who have limited time to create and promote their music. It could be the first time many artists feel confident enough to try such a campaign, because they don’t have to study the Facebook backend in detail.
He created this playlist from scratch a little over two months ago, solely for his Hypeddit Ad Automation campaigns:
Here’s his last 28 days on Spotify for Artists:
Again, 7 streams per listener. His promoted playlist accounts for more than a third of his total streams!
That’s mostly at $5 a day, though he did experiment with higher budgets to give new singles a boost. His cost got all the way down to $0.18 per click to Spotify. That’s half of what I’m paying!
Rainer also sees spillover onto other platforms, particularly YouTube. The top track on the playlist has over 1000 views and the second over 400, and he’s done absolutely nothing to promote them there.
In fact, they’re not even on his channel (if he has one, I can’t find it). They’re just the art videos that his distributor adds automatically.
Hypeddit Ad Automation Conclusion
No matter how skilled you are at Facebook Ads Manager, I think Hypeddit Ad Automation is worth a shot. It requires a Hypeddit Pro account, which is $9 a month with a 7-day free trial.
If you use my affiliate link, I’ll get $1.80, which will go towards future experiments.
It’s not life-changing, but I appreciate it nonetheless!
Hypeddit Ad Automation does almost everything for you, but there’s still some setup required to get your Facebook ads account running and connected to Hypeddit.
For that, John created Spotify Growth Switch, a new video training to walk you through the process.
At the time of this writing, you can get it for a mere $17 here (also an affiliate link – thank you!).
Have you tried Hypeddit Ad Automation? Are you promoting your music with Facebook Ads? Share your strategies and results in the comments!
Great post Brian. Could you explain why you ditched Ukraine? Is it because you think they maybe have enough on their minds at the moment to be clicking on Facebook ads? Just wondering if I should do the same. I’ve read a lot of articles about artists there continuing to make music despite the war.
I receive plenty of playlist submissions from Ukraine! It’s probably fine, but I had an incident a few years back where Ukraine was converting as low as $0.04 but not generating streams. Back then I was using lookalike audiences, and since Facebook was optimizing for the wrong users (or bots), it messed up my data.
Good to know, thanks Brian
Hi Brian,
This seems like a worthwhile experiment. After all, FB ads mgr. is unwieldily, at best.
I’ve been creating FB ads for a while now and the key metric, at least for me, is Spotify saves and, to a much lesser degree, playlists.
I think it would be worthwhile to compare the differences in these metrics between our own FB ads and hypeddit’s.
In an ad I just ran it targeted the Philippines, specifically.
The streams, conversions and FB comments and shares were incredible. The saves and playlists – meh.
I think like you, even though my genre couldn’t be more different( jazz, and orchestral) Mexico, Brazil and Argentina actually save and playlist quite a bit.
So, at least for me, streams can be one-offs but the saves help build longevity and that would be key to know if Hypeddit’s program is ferreting out those listeners any more effectively than FB. Perhaps it’s the same.
Thanks for continuing to post this very informative and helpful info.
Phil Klein
San Mateo
Good stuff Phil!
I don’t track saves because they aren’t isolated to the playlist, but I do track playlist follows in a spreadsheet. If that drops off and my cost per conversion hasn’t risen, I know something is up.
I’ve never had much luck with the Philippines, even with FB comments and shares. Same with Indonesia, and of course India. I haven’t tested tier 3 in some time, but if I were to, it would be in a separate ad group.
As Hypeddit is just a frontend for Facebook Ads Manager, I wouldn’t expect any differences, though you might look in Ads Manager to see how Hypeddit configures its campaigns and compare to your self-managed campaigns.
Hi Brian!
I have been a pro member of Hypeddit for years and use the platform for creating my smart links and used the download gates in the past after taking one of John’s courses (again not one I could follow through!!!!), so I was thrilled to see this launched… answer to my prayers!
I tried it a month ago and my results have not been great (I paused the ad yesterday in fact).
Reading your post I wonder if it is because whilst I followed all the steps initially, after a few days, FB Ads prompted me to adjust something (can’t remember exactly but I think it was to merge the ad sets into one because they were targeting the same people or something to that nature)… so I did.
I am thinking perhaps I scuppered the process that Hypeddit has specifically set up by doing that? Do you think that following FB’s advice and not leaving things be as advised was self sabotage?
On the plus side I LOVED how easy it was to set up and use (as you know I am not good at the marketing side).
On the minus side, I did email Hyppedit to ask for advice when I saw that the results were not the amazing, fast results that the promos hype(!) it up to be, and was given some generic answers. They did answer very quickly a few times (so another plus), but I was hoping someone would have a look at what I had down and give me some advice based on that rather than the generic ‘did you make sure you did this or that… have you given it x amount of time’).
Anyway, I like Hyppedit as a tool in general, and I like John as a personality (when I do manage to watch his videos!!), and I will def try again with a different track and this time NOT TOUCH A THING!!!
I’ll report back, but I guess my take away from this was not to mess with the process next time!
Best wishes
Paula!
I know exactly what you’re talking about. Facebook is always prompting me to “optimize” my ads or combine ad sets. That will absolutely sabotage Hypeddit.
I’ve never emailed Hypeddit support but they wouldn’t have been able to help anyway, since they don’t have direct access to your ads account.
So yeah, give it another shot and maybe don’t even look at Ads Manager. I’d love to hear how it goes!
Hi Brian
I’ve been using John Gold’s Spotify Growth Engine and YouTube Growth Engine for over a year now, with good results, I think. I say “good results” because someone from Facebook Ads Support told me that my cost per conversion was below the average cost, which I attribute to John’s method. Secondly, John explains it all really, really well. But there’s no way around the fact that it is a complex topic, and it took me well over six months to get comfortable with both Facebook Ads and Google Ads. I consider myself very techy, having worked as a software engineer for years…but get just one little thing wrong in your ad set-up, and you won’t get the results you wanted, and it can take weeks to find that out.
John’s latest innovation, which you review above, is the Ad Automation. I tried this about three months ago with poor results – poor compared to my existing campaigns. I used ‘indie rock’ as one of my targeted interests, and it is really too broad a term to be of any use. Facebook allocated all of my budget to it, and not to any of the individual artists I picked out.
By coincidence, the day before your review, Brian, I had revisited John’s Ad Automation, and taken out another campaign. This time, I left out ‘indie rock’, as a targeted interest and I’ll see how that goes.
I agree with your conclusion above, that “no matter how skilled you are at Facebook Ads Manager, Hypeddit Ad Automation is worth a shot.” For me, John’s courses were so good that his other stuff is also worth trying.
Joe
Great to hear from you Joe!
You’re so right about one little mistake sabotaging your whole campaign, especially with Google Ads!
As for genre, I think in both of our cases, people may not really identify themselves in that way. Like I said in the post, I don’t think anyone would admit to being an electronica fan. It just sounds uncool and dad-rock-y.
Being a fan of indie rock sounds cool enough but, as you said, unspecific.
But I can totally see someone identifying as, in John’s case, a house fan. Even an EDM fan, though it’s also broad and perhaps losing luster.
Not to take anything away from singling out fans by genre. Facebook only provides so many options.
What’s cracking Brian!
Way to go on the post. Always appreciate your articles. Great job!
I’m curious to see if you are considering giving the promote a song feature a shot on John’s automation.
I do agree with you though that there’s more we can do on our own versus the automation but for artists who either don’t have the time or aren’t interested in understanding FB ads manager, this may be a tool for them to expedite their process.
When you ran this campaign, did you opt into the automation having access to your ads account?
I was going to give this a shot for a client but I was concerned that the initial prompts were letting you know that it was going to have access to your ad account and be able to publish on your behalf. If it’s going to run an ad campaign for you that’s one side but what if down the line there are ads running without you knowing? Or audiences that are being created from your pages?
Lol, my apologies ahead of time, and hope this doesn’t come off as skeptical banter.
Looking forward to hearing from you Brian.
What’s up JC?
For this particular campaign, there wasn’t any opt-in, but this wasn’t my first time using ad automation. Maybe there was the first time and I forgot, or maybe since my Facebook account was already connected, the little disclaimer at the end of the ad creation process was all it needed.
The idea of the AI running rampant with an ad account seems wildly far-fetched to me. I doubt it can create audiences or custom events or anything beyond what Ads Manager can do. And what’s it going to run secret ads for? Hypeddit? 😉
Not to say that all that isn’t coming! I wouldn’t be surprised if an AI could manage an entire promotion, from asset generation to ads, in the next six months. For now, that’s far beyond what this highly focused feature is capable of.
Hope you’re doing well!
Thanks for the respond Brian!
Thought I’d ask as there have been other 3rd parties that will run ads for other people in the past using the ad account they received access to.
Lol, let me rephrase opt-in with a security box disclaimer. So when we opt in through an integration we would get that box that says “you are giving permission to so you and so” in having access to your pages and ad accounts and allowing them to post on your behalf. Etc.
Lol hoping the skepticism doesn’t sound far fetched but wanted to bring it up with you.
There is that “quick legal stuff” with three checkboxes that I screenshotted. That’s the only permission I remember giving. But I’ve known John for a long time and trust him completely, so I probably would’ve clicked through without giving it much thought regardless.
What precisely is the “AI” behind this? As noted, this just appears to be a simplified front-end to FB Ad Manager
Sorry for the delay in replying! Your comment got flagged as spam for some reason.
Maybe there’s more to it, but that’s roughly my take as well. There’s a certain magic around the term “AI” these days that may be more marketing than reality, but it’s certainly fair to say that Facebook’s ad platform is AI-driven.
As always, I find your post extremely informative. I have used Facebook’s ad manager but would be happy to have a simplified process. The less time I spend on marketing, the more time for making music!
I have a basic question: if I read the info correctly, your hypeddit campaign generated 422 clicks, and Spotify reports 214 listeners. Does that mean about 50% of the click-throughs stop playback before 30 seconds? And how do you know the 214 listeners are traceable to the campaign? I have a hard time correlating my campaigns with Spotify results, sadly.
Great questions!
Off the top of my head, a couple of possible reasons why Hypeddit clicks don’t align with Spotify listeners are that 1) some may have clicked more than once, and 2) some didn’t play any tracks, or played them for less than 30 seconds.
I know those listeners are traceable to the campaign because if I don’t promote the playlist, virtually nobody listens to it. You can test this yourself by creating a playlist and not promoting it! 😉
Hi, can I use Hypeddit to promote multiple artists?
Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure you’d need to set up multiple accounts.
I just launched my very first Hypeddit/FB/Insta/Spotify campaign, as a Spotify Growth Switch campaign. Excited to see how it does! (I’m a marketer by trade, and usually love diving into adtech…but I gotta admit, it was nice to let someone else pilot this time around. Perhaps next time.
Does Hypeddit ad automation have a “retargeting” option? (For example, I was wondering if I could add a second “email collection” campaign, only focused on individuals that successfully engaged/clicked on this first campaign…)
Onwards and upwards!
Keep us posted!
There’s no retargeting option but in my experience, it’s really hard to get Spotify clickers to subscribe to an email list. If you really want to build up a list, you might create a separate opt-in campaign with a bribe. I offer five free songs, but downloads aren’t exactly mainstream these days!
well idk if this will age well. he’s been super sketchy on his youtube the past couple days. There was some girl he appeared to be not servicing/providing email responses to, but he went some complicated and unneccessary escapade of asking the girl for her email, and then would delete it every time she posted. there were at least a few people watching it unfold, myself included. very sketchy. then he just deleted all the comments altogether. It was nice to see some indies try to help the girl he was gaslighting, but this was kind of disturbing. he was king of methodological about how he was psychologically terrorizing his own customer. if there werent people watching, he probably wouldve got away with it.
def seems like someone to avoid
In these sorts of cases, I always assume positive intent. John probably deleted the comment with her email address because once he had it, there was no need to it to remain public. Likewise with deleting the comments altogether, I would assume that he or the support team addressed the issue over email.
I’ve known John for years and he’s a good guy. I don’t know the specifics of this particular incident, but it certainly wouldn’t stop me from using the platform.
I have my FB Ads account set up. Including the pixel too. I can install the pixel into my Hypeddit’s account and as well my Conversion API into my Hypeddit’s account. Am I good to go running ads with Hypeddit Pro without going on my Facebook ad manager?
My Second question! If I am to buy the SGE course, do I have to register for Hypeddit Pro alongside? Or I can just register for the SGE course and subscribe later for Hypeddit Pro. Thanks alot.
You’re good to go! You shouldn’t need to access Ads Manager at all. Spotify Growth Engine and Spotify Growth Switch are totally separate. The former teaches you how to build your own campaigns from scratch, while the latter is streamlined and focuses on ad automation.
Hey Brian! Amazing article. Quick question for you – in your screen shots, it would appear that “Color Theory” is the owner of the playlist you created. How were you able to accomplish that?
I only seem to be able to make playlists from my personal Spotify account, which obviously is not ideal.
How do I create a playlist that is “owned” by my artist page?
Thank you so much,
Andy
Hey Andy!
The whole thing confuses me. You’ll notice that if you click on “Color Theory” it links back to my personal profile of the same name, not my artist page. That profile currently shows 741 followers, whereas my artist profile has 24K. Yet the playlists appear as “Artist Playlists” on my artist profile.
If I did anything to make that happen, it was many years ago. I wonder if it has anything to do with the blue “Verified Artist” checkmark, though I haven’t managed to find an artist profile without said checkmark.
One other oddity is that I’m able to add HMTL links in my descriptions, while many others can’t.
Ooh! I think I just figured it out. I realized one of my playlists isn’t appearing. If you go to the playlist on desktop, click the three dots, and select “Add to profile” – that might do the trick!
Let me know if that works or if the option is even available to you!