Wren Hollis is not a real person. Well Made Plays invented this artist so we can show a complete deliverable at full size, with nothing blurred out, without putting a real client's career on the internet. The structure, the depth and the level of detail are exactly what you would receive. The name, the songs, the venues and the numbers are made up.
Well Made Plays · Meta to Spotify Ad Setup
Wren Hollis · County Line · release 9 October 2026
Not a creative or content document. What the ads say is out of scope; what they optimise for is the whole of it.
One per flight, and the only page you need open at the Ads Manager keyboard. Conclusions only; the reasoning is further down and you do not need it while you are typing.
surface: smart-link page, pixel + CAPI$12/day, ad-set levelnever view-throughexpect 24 to 48/day≥ 7$0.50 at day 7 [ASSUMED]$0.25 for 3 days, raise 20% per steppre-save ceases to exist on release day$12/day, ad-set level≥ 7$1.00 at day 7 [ASSUMED]a save is a deeper event than a click; the cited band is for clicksThree gates, each with how it is checked. Event Match Quality is deliberately not one of them: a fresh setup cannot show an EMQ score before it has spent anything, so using it as a launch gate would block a launch that is fine.
The go-live date is conditional on all three boxes.
Every link Wren has ever posted goes straight to Spotify, so Meta has never been told what a good outcome looks like. There is no pixel, no custom conversion, and no audience that has ever been built. A campaign run today would optimise for the cheapest tap available, which is exactly the traffic worth nothing.
One optimisable event on a page we control, fired by someone taking a library action rather than a click. Success for this cycle is 400 or more pre-saves and saves combined, at or under $0.40 per event, and a retargeting pool large enough that the January single starts warm instead of cold.
Tier is assigned by arithmetic, not by ambition. The gate is a daily budget at or above the ten-dollar floor, and that budget divided by the expected cost per event landing near or above seven and a half events a day.
The solvency check, shown
$12 a day against an expected $0.25 to $0.50 per pre-save gives 24 to 48 events a day, which clears the seven-and-a-half threshold several times over and puts the ad set past the fifty-events-per-seven-days learning exit inside the first week. Tier 1 is therefore the correct assignment and Tier 2 would be leaving signal on the table. No collision: nothing else is live in the account, so no mid-flight collision handling applies this cycle.
| Setting | Spec | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Sales | The only objective that can carry a custom conversion. Traffic and Awareness are never used here; they optimise for the tap, which is the thing that is already cheap and already worthless. |
| Bidding | Lowest cost, automatic | Manual bid caps at this budget starve delivery before they save money. |
| Attribution | Shortest click window offered; never view-through | The seven-day-view and twenty-eight-day windows were removed in January 2026. A view-through window at this budget would credit the campaign for listens it did not cause. |
| Daily floor | $10/day, running at $12 | Below ten dollars a day, delivery is too thin to learn stably even when the event arithmetic looks solvent. |
| Placements | Advantage+ placements, automatic | Restricting placements at this spend reduces the auction pool without improving anything measurable. |
| Geo | United States only | Default is tier-one countries. Narrowed on artist data: 81% of existing listening is Texas, and there is no reason to pay for auctions in markets with no draw and no tour. |
| Creative rotation | 6 slots minimum | Creative is now effectively the targeting layer. Fewer than five or six slots and the system has nothing to choose between. |
| EMQ | Checked day 3 and day 7, target ≥ 7 | In flight, not at launch. Below seven, fix the match keys being passed rather than the ads. |
Benchmark bands used for planning, and the one place they are stretched
The cited band below is for a click through to Spotify. Both flights optimise for something deeper: a pre-save on the landing page, then a save or follow after release. A deeper event costs more per event than a click, always, and no published band for either one held up when we went looking. So the pre-save threshold carries the click band forward unchanged, which is deliberately strict, and the post-release save threshold is set at double it as a labelled assumption. Read both as a line to beat, not as proof of failure: after Flight A closes you will have your own cost per event, and that number replaces these.
Cost per Spotify click-through: $0.25 to $0.50 is the acceptable band and $0.15 to $0.25 is a well-run campaign. Planning here assumes the upper end. On cost per thousand impressions the sources conflict, roughly $8 to $15 against about $20 in the US, so this plan uses the higher figure until that is resolved. Planning with the pessimistic number is why the budget above is solvent rather than nominally solvent.
Wren has a dashboard but no ads table yet, so this creates one rather than editing one.
| Where | Change |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Add a flight row to the release panel: flight name, dates, spend to date, events, cost per event. |
| Ads · Flights | New table. One row per flight, predictions pre-filled from the bands above, actuals columns left blank until day seven after the flight ends. |
| Weekly action list | Two recurring checks during each flight: day three and day seven. |
Pixel and CAPI setup, smart-link build, custom conversion registration and AEM ranking, campaign and ad-set structure, audiences and retargeting, the settings above, the two run cards, the flight log, and the day-three and day-seven checks.
Ad creative and content. Other paid lines, including Spotify Marquee, Ad Studio, playlist-pitch marketplaces and boosted posts elsewhere. The budget envelope itself, which is the artist's to set. Pay-per-stream services, which are declined rather than merely excluded.
| Item | State | Blocking? |
|---|---|---|
| Business Manager account | [ASSUMED] exists under the artist's own login | Yes. Confirm before any spend; an account created by someone else is a problem to unwind later. |
| Pixel installed | Not installed. Part of this build. | Yes, gate one. |
| Domain verified | [ASSUMED] not verified | Yes for AEM ranking. Half a day if the domain registrar login is to hand. |
| Smart-link tool | To be chosen. One known tool carries both a Meta and a Spotify pixel; the rest are Meta only. | Yes. Pricing is as advertised at time of writing and is not a quote. |
| Spotify CAPI second rail | Available only if the dual-surface tool is chosen. Optional this cycle. | No. |
| Lookalike threshold | Not reachable this cycle at this pool size. Revisit after the January single. | No. |
| # | Criterion | By |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | All three conditions precedent checked and screenshotted | 22 Sep |
| 2 | Six creative slots loaded, campaign built, not yet published | 23 Sep |
| 3 | Flight A live | 25 Sep |
| 4 | EMQ at or above 7, or match keys fixed | 28 Sep and 2 Oct |
| 5 | Flight A closed, pool saved as a Custom Audience | 8 Oct |
| 6 | Flight B live on release day with the retargeting layer attached | 9 Oct |
| 7 | Actuals entered against predictions in the flight log | 30 Oct |
| When | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| By 10 Sep | Confirm the Business Manager account is under the artist's own login [blocking] | Artist |
| By 12 Sep | Verify the domain [blocking] | Artist, with us on a call |
| By 15 Sep | Choose and set up the smart-link tool, install pixel and CAPI | Us |
| By 22 Sep | Walk the three gates together, live in Events Manager | Both |
| 25 Sep | Publish Flight A | Artist |
| 30 Oct | Enter actuals against predictions in the flight log. This is a named job with a date, not a hope that someone remembers. | Artist |
| Early Nov | Grade the flight together and decide whether January runs the same shape | Both |
Every number above traces to a source line, or is labelled as an assumption. Nothing is cited from memory.
| Fact | Used for | Verified this run | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
F-MIN-DAILY | The ten-dollar daily floor | Yes | Re-checked against current practitioner guidance |
F-META-LEARNING | Fifty events per seven days to exit learning | Yes | Unexpired, structural |
F-META-ATTRIBUTION | Removed windows, shortest-click setting | Yes | Fetch, Meta documentation |
F-META-OBJECTIVES | Sales objective, never Traffic | Yes | Checked against the current Ads Manager labels |
F-EMQ-TARGET | EMQ at or above 7, day 3 and day 7 | Yes | Unexpired |
F-BENCH-CLICK | Cost-per-click-through bands | Yes | Search, re-run this cycle |
F-BENCH-CPM | CPM planning figure | Yes, conflict unresolved | Two sources disagree; planned with the higher |
F-BENCH-SAVE | Cost-per-save kill threshold, Flight B | No published band found | Assumption, labelled in the run card: click band doubled, because a save is a deeper event than a click |
F-META-ANDROMEDA | Broad targeting, six creative slots | Yes | Search |
F-TOOL-* | Smart-link tool comparison and pricing | Yes | Fetch, vendor pages. Pricing as advertised, not a quote. |
Flight log handed over with both flights pre-filled: predictions from the bands above, actuals blank, and a dated row naming who enters them and when.
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