Spotify Ads & Looker Studio: setup guide

Connecting Spotify Ads with Looker Studio

Spotify Advertising is the platform that allows you to create, manage and visualize all your Spotify marketing data. Additionally, it provides an API through which an authorized user can retrieve all those data.

Although using a reporting system like Looker Studio is not required to make advertising for Spotify, you may need to present and analyze the data or watch for different business KPIs not necessarily included in the base Spotify Ads metrics. Looker Studio provides some solutions for those cases. 

Looker Studio is a popular visualizing platform powered by Google. It is packed with a set of different charts and controls allowing you to present easily your marketing data.

In this introduction, we will learn how to integrate your Spotify Ads Data Source into Looker Studio with the Catchr connector, create and familiarize with your first report and explore a little bit of the Spotify Ads metrics. To finish, we will see some tips and best practices concerning those tools.

What You'll Need

Before we dive into the process, let's make sure you have everything we need:

1. Spotify Ads Account: A Spotify Ads account is required for this tutorial. If you don't have one, please check https://ads.spotify.com/ and signup.
2. Looker Studio Account: To use Looker Studio, you will require a Google Account. Please go to https://accounts.google.com/signup to create one if you don't already have one.

Integrate your Spotify Ads Data Source Into Looker Studio

The first thing to do is to setup your Spotify Ads Data Souce into Looker Studio. 

• Step 1: Open Looker Studio.

You have to be connected to your Google account and go to https://lookerstudio.google.com/. You can see here your Looker dashboard. 

• Step 2: Create a new Report.

On your dashboard, click on the top-left button called + Create and select Report. A new canvas appears with a bottom panel to add a new connector. 

• Step 3: Add a new Data Source.

On the search bar, search for Spotify Ads and click on the Catchr Spotify Ads connector. It will launch the connection configuration.

• Step 4: Connect Spotify Ads with Looker Studio

NB: We will use GIFs from Facebook Ads connection because Spotify Ads has the same way to do it.

Click Authorize to log in or create an account on Catchr.

‍

Click Authorize to connect Catchr and your Google Account.

‍

And click Authorize to link Spotify Ads to Catchr.

‍

• Then Select your account:

You can uncheck the Use report template for new report if you don't want to use it and start with a blank one. 

To finish, you can click on Add in the bottom-right corner of the Add data to report panel. 

Once created, you'll discover a new page. This is your data source. You can see the field list and some configurations at the top. If you want to learn more about this page, follow this link.

For now, remember that you have the list of all available metrics and dimensions and their descriptions here. You will need it while building reports.

Rename your data source (to find it later).

Rename your Report.

If you have any trouble with a Bad Request error 400, please refer to this article.

Create your first Looker Studio report for Spotify Ads

If you have followed this tutorial, you may have now your data source and a blank report. If you want to know more about this interface, you can check the annex we published about it.

It's time to make the report.

Metrics and dimensions

The Looker Studio data system is separated into two big data properties: dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions are properties through which you can break the global Data. It contains for example :

• Advertiser Name : The name of the advertiser
• Advertiser Id : the uniq identifier of the advertiser
• Campaign Name : The name of the campaign
• Campaign Id : The uniq identifier of the campaign
• Adset Name : The name of the adset.
• Adset Id : The uniq identifier of the adset
• Ad Name : The name of the ad.
• Ad Id : The uniq identifier of the ad
• Date : The date though the data is break.
• Campaign Status : The status of the campaign.
• etc...

the Advertiser name and Id, Campaigns Name and Id, the Adset Name and Id, the Ad Name and Id, the Date of the report, the Status etc...

Metrics are properties containing the values data that could be broken by dimensions. It can be for example :

• Clicks : The number of impressions in which your ad was clicked (#).
• Impressions : The number of times an ad has been successfully served (#) -- NOTE: The API reports on exact impressions, whereas the UI only reports impressions delivered within budgets.
• Completes : The number of ads served that was played to the end (#).
• Completion Rate : The percentage of ads served that were played to the end (%) -- NOTE: Applies to active audio/CPCL campaigns only.
• CTR : The percentage of ads that were clicked (%).
• Paid Listens : The number of listens for a CPCL campaign where a user did NOT skip the ad -- NOTE: Applies to active audio/CPCL campaigns only.

You can find a complete list of Metrics & Dimensions for our Spotify Ads connector here.

Report creation

Assuming those two cases:

1. You want want an overview of my principal engagement KPIs. Impressions give the total number of times an ad has been successfully served. Clicks provide the number of impressions in which your ad was clicked. CTR provides the percentage of ads that were clicked. Spend provides the total amount spent. ECPM gives the average cost per 1000 impressions. Those KPIs can be good starts.
2. You want to be able to monitor which campaign and ad set is the most cost-effective. You will monitor the same KPIs above but I'll be breaking it by Campaigns and Date. 

Prepare the report

At first, we are changing the global page style height and width to have enough space for all our data. For that, go to the menu Theme and Layout, search for the Canvas Size section, and change the height to 1400 and the width to 2200.

‍

Then, we add a Date Control in the top right corner of the page by clicking on the Add control button and Date range control.

Presenting KPIs

Now that our global report configuration is set, we add those 5 KPIs to the scoreboards by clicking on Add a Chart, then Scoreboard. We place it in the report and change the metric configuration to Impressions. Repeat the operation for the four other metrics.

‍

If you want, you can also change the scoreboards missing data style in the Style panel, Missing Data and select your preference (for me, it will be Show "-").

Add a comparison date range to all those components by right clicking on a scoreboard, Select > Scoreboards on page and select Previous period.

You should haves something like this : 

Let's add some style on it. 

• Create a rectangle by clicking on the shape tool on the top panel, Rectangle and click on the report. This rectangle will decorate our KPIs by add a frame on them. you can stye it by selecting the colour who fit the most your report.
• change the style of your scoreboards by right clicking on a scoreboard, Select > Scoreboards on page and clicking on the Style tab into the right panel. You should find a number of styling choices for the selected scoreboards. 
• When the style is selected, add all your metrics on the top of your rectangle. For that, Right Clicks on it and choose Order > Send to Back. 

Pro tips: You can distribute your selected scoreboards by right click on it and Distribute > Horizontally 

You should now have a report like this : 

Presenting breakable data

For presenting breakable data, we will add some Table. 

• Click on +Add a chart > Table and click on the report at the emplacement you want the table. 

‍

• Change the dimensions and metrics on the table by clicking on it and select Campaign name for dimension and Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Spend, ECPM for metrics. 
• Duplicate this table and dispose it in your report. On the second table, add Ad Set Name dimension below Campaign Name. 

As we did for the scoreboards, we can add some style to our tables.

• Add an identical color rectangle to the back of our table. 
• Change the style of our tables by right click on a table, Select > Tables on page and go to the Style tab. You can customize to your liking the selected tables. In this example we add some styles to my lines and enable Show header, Rows numbers and Wrap Text on the Table header and Table Body section, Show pagination on the Table footer. 
• Add some titles above each table for more comprehension and readability. For me the title will be ​CAMPAIGN PERFORMANCE OVERVIEW  and ​AD SET PERFORMANCE OVERVIEW.
• Resize your columns tables by right clicking on it and Resize column > Fit to Data.

If you correctly follow up this tutorial instructions, you may have a report looking like this : 

For finish, add a title and, if you have one, your logo.

‍

And that's all we have a fully functional report presenting the two use cases we listed previously.