Here’s the premise:
With Hypeddit’s ad campaign feature, you can grow your Spotify songs in five minutes using AI-powered music ads.
That’s the title of Hypeddit’s video introducing the feature. Sounds intriguing, right?
I mean, five minutes is literally less time than it takes me to peel and cut a medium-sized avocado. And every time someone mentions AI, an angel gets its wings. If Hypeddit can really put those two things together, I’d say it sounds pretty good.
Unsurprisingly, ever since Hypeddit rolled this “automated ads” concept out, I’ve had clients and readers asking me some variation of the following question:
“So does that stuff actually work?“
The short answer: Yes, it does actually work. The longer answer is what we’re going to cover over the rest of this email, based on $200 of my own ad spend and $0.02 of my own thoughts.
Let’s get into it.
I’ll start with a quick caveat:
I’m biased.
The primary service my business offers is Meta ads management for Spotify growth – so, naturally, I’d prefer to believe that I’m better at delivering this service than Hypeddit is.
In other words, you should probably take my opinions here with a grain of salt.
Okay, with that said…
Here’s how it works.
Inside of your Hypeddit account (which costs $9 per month), you click on over to the Ad Campaigns tab, then hit the button to create a new campaign.
From there, you’ll be shown a variety of different campaign objectives (including options to grow your YouTube channel, email list, and TikTok profile, which I’ve cut off in the screenshot below).
For reasons I won’t get into here, I prefer to run ads directly to tracks on Spotify. So I opted for that campaign objective, and was immediately taken to the campaign creation wizard, where I was asked to connect my Facebook account.
And here’s where we get into my first critique of this setup.
Hypeddit runs ads through artist ad accounts, which I think is great. But you can only run ads through an account if the ad account has been properly set up – and for most people, getting stuff properly set up is the most tedious part of running an ad campaign.
This is the hardest part of running an ad agency ha; I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit on Zoom calls, trying to figure out why a stupid Instagram account isn’t showing up in a dumb Business Portfolio.
My point is, if you don’t have your accounts in order, then this process will definitely take you longer than five minutes.
(It reminds me of those recipe blogs where they promise that you can make a meal in, I don’t know, 20 minutes. But then when you read the instructions, you realize that their 20-minute estimate assumes you’ve already baked and diced an entire butternut squash, smoked a pork shoulder for 10 hours at 225 degrees, and peeled 34 avocados. In actuality the recipe will take you six days to complete.)
Happily, though, I did have my accounts set up, so I was over that hurdle with the click of a button. From there, things are fairly straightforward. You need the audio file of your song and your cover art, and with that, Hypeddit will automatically create ads that look like this:
It’s basically your cover art with light and texture playing over it and the song playing beneath it. Those ads run on Facebook and Instagram at whatever budget you set (I went with $10 per day). When users click, they’re taken to a landing page where they’re asked to click again to Spotify.
From there, the streams pour in.
Kind of.
Here are my results from about $200 of ad spend.
Let’s take a look at the Meta ads side, first.
Apologies if that image is too small. I think you can click to blow it up, but if not, here are the key stats:
- 301 results (clicks to Spotify)
- $0.71 per result
- $213.84 total spend
That’s… okay. Honestly, it’s kind of bad.
But there are two sides to every ad campaign. If it costs you $0.71 to get a listener, but each listener streams your song 10 times, then that cost might be worth it. So for the full picture, here are the song’s Spotify stats over the same timeframe.
Those are also… okay. For a song that’s being actively advertised with Meta ads, they’re actually pretty bad. For reference, I’d expect a save rate above 10% and a Streams / Listener ratio above 2.
Two notes: First, this song is on a few active third-party playlists, which are boosting the number of streams but depressing the engagement stats.
Second, and more importantly, all of this can partly be chalked up to the quality of the song – and, in full transparency, while I think this is a well-written song, I do think that the production quality is sub-par. (I self-produced it. I am not a producer.) A better song would almost certainly perform better.
But also, I’d been running ads for the song myself using my own approach in the month prior. And on both the Meta ad side and the Spotify for Artists side, I was able to get better results that way.
Here, for example, was what the previous month of Spotify data looked like:
Not a huge, difference, admittedly, especially when you note that there’s still a week to go in the Hypeddit campaign. The total number of streams will probably end up being closer than it looks here.
But even with that, we’re probably looking at about a 10% increase in overall numbers using my own approach versus Hypeddit’s automated setup. If I ran these campaigns for three months, six months, or a year, that 10% difference would add up.
So here’s my overall take on these sorts of automated campaigns.
First, I think they’re slightly over-hyped.
I mean, the two main marketing claims (that you can set this up in five minutes and that it’s driven by AI) are a little misleading. Technically, you could set this up in five minutes – but if you’ve never prepared an ad account before, it’ll probably take much longer. And while AI is involved, I think it’s mostly on Meta’s side (their ad algorithm certainly uses AI). I could be missing something, but I didn’t really see any AI usage inside of Hypeddit itself.
Second, I think they definitely work.
The campaign approach that Hypeddit implements for you is solid. I didn’t dig into all of the settings they use in this email, but from what I’ve seen, the structure makes sense. And it led to real streams and listeners on Spotify.
Honestly, I think Hypeddit will get you between 50% – 90% of the results that you’d get if you ran ads yourself. Which brings me to my last point…
Third, I still think that the best way to run ads is to optimize your own campaigns.
And I don’t think this is likely to change any time soon; if anything, I think the gap between automated campaigns like this and custom campaigns will only widen.
To be clear, that’s not because of the campaign settings. Instead, it’s because the most successful ad campaigns are predicated on the best ads. And you will always be able to win there; cover art with the song playing underneath it works as an ad concept, but come on – you and I both know that there are far more engaging ads out there.
The best ads I’ve ever run have been videos featuring the artist, with some interesting angle into the song.
Now, maybe they’ll eventually let you upload your own creative to the Hypeddit platform. But I’m doubtful. To do that, they’d need to be sure that your content wouldn’t violate Facebook guidelines, which would take some real AI integration, or a bunch of real people reviewing each ad in detail. Both options seem like more trouble than they’re worth.
For the foreseeable future, I think Hypeddit ad campaigns are best viewed as an entry point into promo.
You don’t have to learn the ins-and-outs of ads manager to set one up, and you can potentially get 80% of the results you’d get from a custom campaign.
Not going to lie – that in itself is pretty cool. There’s definitely place for this.
But if you’re planning on really pushing into promo and potentially spending thousands of dollars over multiple months, then I’d recommend learning ads yourself. That 10% – 20% boost will make a difference over time.
