Stop Wasting Your Ad Spend: Why Cheap Meta Ads in Some Countries Aren't Giving You Real Spotify Streams
If you're an artist or marketer running Meta Ads to drive traffic to Spotify, you've likely seen some tempting results from certain countries. We're talking about those campaigns where the Cost per Result (CPR, based on the landing page’s pixel event) looks incredibly good, often sitting at a super-cheap $0.20 - $0.30.
Countries like the Philippines and South Africa often give the Meta ad algorithm exactly what it's looking for: high conversion volume for a low price.
But here at Its21Master, we've learned a crucial lesson through deliberate A/B testing: a cheap conversion on Meta does not equal a real, valuable stream or fan on Spotify.
📉 The Illusion of Cheap Conversions
We recently ran A/B tests to see what would happen when we included the Philippines and South Africa in our targeting, for 2 separate campaigns (1 included Philippines among Tier 1-2 Countries, 1 included South Africa)
What Meta Ads Manager Showed:
High Conversion Volume: Lots of clicks and "conversions" (users clicking through to the streaming link).
Low CPA: Extremely cheap costs per result, often around $0.28 (Philippines) or $0.34 (South Africa).
High Reach and Clicks: We saw thousands of people reached with a solid number of clicks. (See images below for evidence of the Meta-reported results).
Philippines: Over 84 conversions reflected on Meta Ads Manager within the time period 25 Oct - 29 Oct.
South Africa: Over 68 conversions reflected on Meta Ads Manager within the time period 25 Oct - 29 Oct.
What Spotify for Artists (SFA) Showed:
Near-Zero Impact: Despite Meta reporting dozens of conversions, our SFA stats showed only 2 or zero streams from these countries on the songs we were running the tests on.
Philippines SFA Data: A slight spike to only 8 streams on the last day, overall stream count remained extremely low over the period. The single point we checked showed only 2 Streams on one day.
South Africa SFA Data: Streams are barely registering above zero, with the country often at or below the line compared to other target countries (United States and Spain in this specific comparison).
The disconnect is jarring: tens of dollars spent for conversions vs. a handful of streams.
Our Theory: Why the Conversion Doesn't Actually Show On Spotify
The goal of a music conversion campaign is simple: get a stream or a save that helps build your audience and signals the Spotify algorithm, i.e we want to build a good active audience which actually engages your content purposefully. If Meta's conversion event fires, but SFA doesn't register a stream, your ad budget is wasted.
Here are the most likely reasons this drop-off occurs in countries with lower cost metrics:
Bots and Low-Quality Clicks: The most cynical but common theory. Cheap CPCs in certain regions attract click-farms or low-quality traffic that is designed to register a pixel event but never actually engages with the content.
Spotify Free vs. Premium: This is a major factor. If a user on the Spotify Free tier clicks on an external link to a single song, the Spotify app may skip the song and instead start a Radio or shuffled playlist of similar music. Your song never plays for 30 seconds (the requirement for a stream), and your ad is a bust. In these high-volume, low-royalty countries, the percentage of Free users is often significantly higher.
The Preview Drop-Off: The user clicks the ad, lands on the smart link page, clicks the "Spotify" button, and gets to your track. If they only listen to the 10-15 second preview available to some users or just land on the page and immediately close the app, it's a Meta conversion but not a 30-second stream on SFA.
Check Your Spotify For Artists!
For beginner music advertisers, seeing a $0.20 CPA is like hitting the jackpot. But if you see nearly zero traction or change on your Spotify statistics, that low cost is often an indicator of low-quality traffic.
DO NOT automatically target countries solely because they offer a cheap Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Result.
If your CPC is low, but you aren't seeing streams or saves on Spotify for Artists, here's what to do:
Stop the Spend: Immediately check your Meta Ad Set breakdown by Country.
Filter and Exclude: Identify the countries (like the Philippines and South Africa) that are eating your budget without contributing to streams in SFA.
Create New Ad Sets or Edit Existing Ones: Move your budget to proven Tier 1 (US, UK, CA, AU) and effective Tier 2 (like Brazil, Mexico) markets that have a higher concentration of Spotify Premium users and a stronger culture of streaming. We have seen the best results in these countries.
The entire point of a conversion campaign is to build an audience on the streaming platforms. Don't let vanity metrics on Meta fool you.
Hope this helps!
