The three ways to buy
Every Spotify campaign arrives through one of three doors.
Self-serve through Spotify Ads Manager
You build and manage campaigns yourself in Spotify's own platform. It is the fastest route to live, gives you Spotify's full native targeting, and has the lowest entry point. It also means somebody on your side has to actually own it week to week, which is where most self-serve campaigns quietly stall.
Direct with Spotify or through an agency
A managed buy, placed through insertion orders. This unlocks sponsorship formats such as homepage takeovers and sponsored playlists, and negotiated rates on volume. It suits larger commitments and campaigns where the format itself is the idea.
Programmatic through the Spotify Ad Exchange
Since April 2025, Spotify's logged-in inventory has been available through its own exchange, bought in real time through demand side platforms including The Trade Desk and Google Display and Video 360. This is the right route if you already run programmatic and want audio governed centrally alongside everything else.
What you can run
The format list is longer than most brands realise.
- Audio ads. Up to thirty seconds, served between tracks, with a clickable companion image.
- Canvas for ads. A looping visual that accompanies the audio placement.
- In-stream video. Full screen video during active browsing sessions.
- In-feed video. Video placed within the browsing experience.
- In-feed and leaderboard display. Static units in the app interface.
- Carousel ads. Multi-image units.
- Podcast ads. Delivered through streaming ad insertion, up to thirty seconds.
- Sponsored playlist and homepage takeover. High-visibility sponsorship formats bought directly.
Choose the objective before anything else
Spotify Ads Manager offers four objectives: brand awareness, engagement on Spotify, web traffic and app installs. The objective changes how delivery is optimised and it should change your creative too.
A brand awareness ad that ends with a website address nobody will remember is a wasted second. A web traffic ad that never gives a reason to visit is a wasted thirty. Decide which job the ad is doing, then write for that job.
Set targeting wide, then narrow with evidence
Spotify offers demographic targeting on age, gender, location and language, contextual targeting on music genre, playlists and podcast episode topics, interest targeting, and frequency capping.
The instinct is to use all of it. Resist that. Start broader than feels comfortable, let the campaign gather data, and tighten based on what delivered rather than on what you assumed. Over-targeting at launch is the most common reason a first Spotify campaign produces results too thin to learn from.
What to have ready before you launch
- A written objective with a number attached to it
- Audio mastered to minus 16 LUFS stereo, under thirty seconds, in MP3, WAV or OGG
- A companion image at 600 by 600 pixels or larger, under 200 KB
- Video in both nine by sixteen and sixteen by nine if video is in the plan
- The Spotify Pixel installed and firing, if web traffic or conversions matter
- At least three creative variants, so the first fortnight teaches you something
- A frequency cap decided deliberately rather than left at default
- UTM parameters agreed with whoever owns your analytics
Platform figures and specifications quoted across this site come from Spotify Advertising and Spotify's published quarterly results. They change, so treat them as a starting point and check the current documentation before you plan a budget.