How Effective are Image-Only Ads for Music?

Think image-only ads for music can can promote your releases. live shows and more without fans ever hearing a note? This surprising experiment by Brian Hazard reveals why visuals alone may boost clicks, but…

How Effective are Image-Only Ads for Music?

by Brian Hazard from Passive Promotion

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but is it worth 15 seconds of audio?

Meta Ads Manager seemed to think so:

And so I tried it with a conversions campaign directing to a smart link for my latest single, “Undone.

I let the campaign run for a week and a half at $50 a day without touching anything, and the image ad of the cover art dominated.

And just like that, the hours I spent creating nine video ads went up in smoke.

You might be thinking $0.19 per conversion isn’t that great, but consider the countries:

The image-only ad did nearly as well in video placements as in feeds:

Here’s what the ad actually looked like on Facebook:

I want to reiterate that there was no sound. People clicked through to the smart link and then on to Spotify without hearing a note. The “80s Synth Revival” description was an AI suggestion that apparently beat out my own.

So, I thought, maybe I’m on to something here…

It seemed too good to be true, but I reminded myself of the days when I’d go to Tower Records and ask about an album, and sometimes even buy it, based on the cover art alone.

I mean, if someone is motivated enough to click the ad, then click the link to Spotify, they’re going to listen, right? Riiigggghhhhtttttt.

I decided to test things further by adding image ads to my playlist campaigns for Modern Synthpop and Vocal Synthwave Retrowave. 

I wasn’t convinced that their cover art would perform as well, so I reskinned them to match the single, which also happened to be the first track on both playlists.

The results? Very similar to the single campaign, with similar country spreads at $0.22 per conversion.

It soon became apparent that the single wasn’t doing so well, despite an auspicious first day (2.5K streams, which is a record for me). But then again, the Spotify Showcase campaign didn’t do so well either. Maybe it was the song.

A few days later, I sensed that the Modern Synthpop playlist (aka the co-op playlist) was underperforming. You can see where this is going, so I’ll cut to the chase.

The green bars represent new playlist followers, courtesy of artist.tools:

The listener and stream numbers in Spotify for Artists weren’t terrible, but you can clearly see a dropoff in daily followers after adding the image-only ad to the campaign.

It’s far more pronounced with my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist, which is more volatile with its lower daily budget of $15/day.

Follower growth essentially flatlined until I reintroduced an old winning ad, along with adding tier 2 countries to make up for lost time. 

The moral of the story is, all conversions aren’t created equal.

When it comes to image-only ads for music, don’t bother. Instead, hook them with the actual product: the music.

In retrospect, it seems obvious. But when it comes to advertising, intuition can only take you so far. You never really know until you test!

You may be wondering if I could split the difference and simply add music to an image ad. If that’s possible, I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Meta only lets you add music from its pre-cleared library, and when I used an existing Instagram post where I added my own music, the music was stripped out.

Brian Hazard is a recording artist with over twenty years of experience promoting a dozen Color Theory albums, and head mastering engineer and owner of Resonance Mastering in Huntington Beach, California. His Passive Promotion blog emphasizes “set it and forget it” methods of music promotion.
Catch more of his promotional escapades in his How I’m Promoting My Music This Monthemail newsletter.