What Artists Should Know About SubmitHub Ads
Facebook and Instagram ads, hereafter referred to as Meta ads, are the centerpiece of my music promotion efforts.
I recently wrote about two excellent services that create high quality Meta ad campaigns on your behalf: Southworth Media and Members Media.
Pricing starts at $750 and $1095 respectively. They’re absolutely worth it, but what if you don’t have that kind of cash or aren’t willing to make that kind of up-front commitment?
SubmitHub Ads offer the same sort of service at a fraction of the price. They recommend a minimum daily budget of 5-10 credits, which works out to $120-$200 per month. The minimum spend is 70 credits (5 per day for 14 days), which is as low as $35 if you also happen to be a SubmitHub curator like me!
They estimate you’ll get 200-300 conversions (clicks to a music service) for every $100 spent, but if you’re not happy with how things are going, you can pull the plug.
Are the ads as polished? No, at least not yet. But just like the pros, they create them for you and run them on their own account (newmusiclinks on Instagram) unless you specify otherwise.
As I’m typing this, the service is in beta, so all of this is subject to change.
SubmitHub Ads Creation
I launched my campaign a little over a month ago, and captured plenty of screenshots along the way.
First you need to create a smart link if you don’t have one already. I did and it looks like this:
It directs to my self-managed This Is playlist which contains 27 of my best tracks, with my latest release on top.
Link creation couldn’t be easier. Paste a link, import an existing one from another service, or roll your own if you’re ready for a good time.
Now we’re ready to create an ad that directs to said link.
Choose your genres and list three similar artists. They’re the same genres used throughout SubmitHub, so if you’ve already used the platform, you’ll know what to expect.
Next, select which countries to target. You don’t have to select them individually, but you can if you want!
I went with the default, which is fairly balanced but in retrospect, perhaps a bit heavy on Poland and Hungary.
Then set a budget. Mine comes out of my curator earnings, which means it only costs $0.50 per credit = $5 per day = $70 for two weeks.
Finally, give them some idea of your aesthetic so they can select stock video footage to match.
Alternately, you can upload your own videos! Maybe you’ve already made a music video you can draw from, or a live performance video, or something that did well on socials.
Hit submit and you’re done!
You’re then taken to your dashboard page, which is rather uninteresting at this point.
And that was the entirety of my interaction with the platform!
The rest takes place in my email inbox, but first, a short detour to mention…
SubmitHub Ads Studio
As I was preparing to publish this post, Jason Grishkoff, the mastermind behind the entire platform, let me know that he just launched a beta of SubmitHub Ads Studio.
At the moment it’s a barebones video creator for simple video ads that you can download and use as you see fit, on or off SubmitHub. They’d certainly do the job for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
Start by searching for a video to serve as your background. From what I can tell, they’re the same ones that come up in Canva, which are free to use from Pexels.
After choosing a video, I pasted a Spotify link to my latest song and it imported the audio automatically, which no option for me to select a start time. If memory serves, it starts at the time I specified in DistroKid when I uploaded the track.
Finally, add a little text if you want and click “Create Video”!
Here’s the result:
As you’ll see, it’s the same tool the SubmitHub team is using to create your ads. So if you think you can do better, have at it!
SubmitHub Ads Performance
The next time I checked email, which happens approximately every 10 seconds, I found a confirmation:
The very next day we were off to the races:
The key points here being:
- They submitted 16 different ads to Meta(!)
- The ads are starting their learning phase, so conversions will be relatively expensive until optimized
- If the cost per conversion after optimization isn’t looking good, they’ll make adjustments
I suppose that means they’ll make more ads if needed, or maybe prompt you to pick a different track?
Fortunately that wasn’t the case for me:
In the first week I got 4.2 conversions per credit = $0.12 per conversion. A conversion is defined as a click from the landing page to a music service, most often Spotify. If you’ve followed any of my past campaigns, you’ll know that’s pretty great.
It’s even more impressive when you look at the actual ad, which is decidedly low tech:
I suspect it works because it looks like something a blogger or Mixcloud DJ would post, completely free of hype.
A few days later, I got a warning that I was about to run out of credits, and was now at 5 conversions per credit = $0.10 per conversion. I must have clicked through and added more credits, because…
At two weeks, my cost per conversion went up ever-so-slightly. At three weeks, it went up a bit more.
SubmitHub Ads Results
After 33 days, my campaign generated 1426 conversions at $0.11 per conversion (4.4 conversions per credit).
Here’s a pretty chart showing the growth of my promoted playlist:
At that cost, you’re probably expecting to see conversions from India or The Philippines, or at least Brazil and Mexico, but you’d be wrong! My top country is the US:
Like I said, a little heavy on Poland and Hungary, which I don’t normally target, but at least they’re not taking over the campaign. I’d consider them tier 2, but it’s debatable.
All in all, I’m very impressed with SubmitHub Ads and plan to continue my campaign indefinitely.
I mean, why wouldn’t I? It’s getting a lower cost per conversion than I can achieve on my own.
If you want to give it a shot, start here. And if you need to buy credits, I’ve got a link that’ll get you 10% off here.
Have you tried SubmitHub Ads, Hypeddit Ad Automation, or DIY Facebook and Instagram promotion? Share your thoughts and results in the comments!
This is great stuff, very easy, and it seems reasonable as well. I have started a campaign and the results remain to be seen, but this sounds amazing, especially the fact that there‘s no high „limit“ in money to spend. I bet some people would just want to try but they‘re not willing to pay 700 bucks right away. So here they can spend as low as 70 and see if it‘s what they were hoping for. However, on the other side it’s questionable if a 70$ ad can bring some substantial performance at all since most ads come into full effect only after maybe four or six weeks. ♂️
Thanks for getting the conversation started Rainer! Yes, it’s a great testing ground. I could even see testing a handful of songs to decide which one might benefit from more robust promotion. I’ve just launched another for my new track, just to see how it does, since my own campaign is struggling to settle below $0.40 per conversion.
Wow! That’s amazing. I’ve been following your ad things for years and despite wanting to run an ad campaign, I haven’t made the time to figure out meta ads. But this! This takes all the weirdness I haven’t waded through out and away we go! Yes please and thank you!! That’s way awesome! Thank you for sharing!
No more excuses! 😉 Definitely let me know how it goes!
Did the click throughs translate to actual streams on Spotify (in Spotify for Artists)? Sometimes they don’t, so I’d be interested to hear if that was your experience.
They did Emily! At first I had another campaign directing to the same playlist, but looking at the last 7 days I see 653 streams from 103 listeners. That should pretty much all be courtesy of SubmitHub Ads.
We have been running ads for years, and after reading your article, felt the need to give it a test. To say that this experiment has been a failure would be a bit of an understatement.
We have consistently run sub $0.30 conversions targeting US, CA, UK, and DE audiences only. The submithub targeting, which was broader and theoretically should have been a bit cheaper due to that, could not even break the 1 credit per conversion mark.
It is not too surprising, considering how poor the generated visual, audio* and primary text elements are. I say audio, because what Submithub uses seems to be based off of Spotify’s auto-preview function and has never been a section of the song that resulting in much lower conversion costs.
My initial take is that this seems to be geared towards someone who has no visual artistic direction, branding, or a desire to learn even the basics about anything other than music.
I am honestly shocked that their ads are outperforming the ones you generate on your own.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Sorry it didn’t work out for you.
I would imagine that if the default audio snippet isn’t ideal, the campaign will fail, full stop. In my case, I specified the “good part” with DistroKid and it seems to have worked out.
You could get around that by uploading your own videos with different parts of the song. That could also potentially tick the boxes for branding and artistic direction. Many (most?) artists find Meta’s Ads Manager overwhelming.
Also remember that as a curator, I get credits at half off. But even at full price I’d still be at $0.22 per conversion. You saw the winning ad and the countries breakdown, so I’m not sure what else to tell you! Maybe I just got lucky.