The Basics of TikTok Ads

With 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok is currently the hottest social platform. These numbers are music to our ears. The short-form video platform seems to be taking over the world, one trend at a time. Filled with dances, lip-syncs, challenges and jokes, TikTok seems to attract more and more users every month. The rapid success provides us marketeers with a new channel to advertise on, and in this article we will cover the basics.

With the platform’s growth increasing month after month, brands have come to realize how powerful TikTok can be. Big brands tag along with trends, seeing the value of a more personal approach to advertising. So, how do you set up these ads?

Ad objective structure

TikTok Ads follow a very familiar structure to other advertising platforms. You start with defining Campaign settings and proceed through configuring Ad Groups and finally the Ads themselves. Based on the goal you have set for the campaign you can choose between seven different objectives when in ‘custom mode’. One thing that is advisable is for you to work in costume mode as it provides you more control over the ad settings. The advertising Objectives can be divided into three categories. Below, you can read about what you can do with each of the advertising Objectives:

1. Awareness:

- Reach - not to generate sales but to make a brand recognizable

2. Consideration:

- Traffic - bring people from TikTok to your website

- App installs - generate app installs within a specific demographic group

- Video views - promote a certain TikTok video

- Lead generation - uses lead gen forms to collect lead information

- Community interaction - attract interest to your page or profile

3. Conversion:

- Generate conversions in a data-driven way by assigning values to micro-conversions

Budget Optimisation

Another option within TikTok Ads Manager that you must know is Budget Optimisation. If you choose this option, TikTok will distribute our budget unevenly. It will invest more into better-performing ads. This way, you don’t waste money on paying for underperforming ads.

Decide the ad placement

When deciding where to place your ad, do consider that the placement setting cannot be changed after creating your ad group. These are the different ad placement options:

1. Automatic Placement lets TikTok distribute ads across its partner channels.

2. The Select Placement option is recommended to use initially. This means you manually choose the apps you wish to deliver your ads on. TikTok advises you to select more than one app for flexibility and maximizing results.

3. User comments and Video downloads are two other customization options. Definitely do keep both ON. These options will drive more engagement. You can later choose to hide negative comments.

Creative Type

Similar to Google’s Responsive display ads, TikTok has Automated Creative Optimisation. TikTok ‘shuffles’ our ad elements (text, videos, images) to find the best-performing combination. It requires uploading several versions of each creative element, to allow TikTok to ‘choose’ from them. It’s recommended for experimentation when there are multiple ad elements to compare.

Targeting options

Demographic - location (country), device language, gender, and age groups

Audience - include or exclude certain audience types

Interest & Behaviors - based on the content they’re interested in and the way they interact with the platform.

Device - target based on the user's device, this can be useful when you advertise an app.

Budget & Schedule

Decide on how you want to use your budget. In case it’s configured at the Campaign level with Budget Optimisation set to ON, you don’t get to configure this part too much. You’ll still need to decide on the running dates as well as (optionally) the hours during which your ads will be displayed. What you really should do is display your ads between the peak hours. Choose the criteria for optimizing the advertising cost. For example, Traffic campaigns can be set to Clicks and focused on achieving the lowest CPC. Bidding options will differ depending on the Advertising Objective.

So there you have it, these are the basics that you need to know to advertise on TikTok. This is a good guide to follow for beginners, but you may want to consult with a professional for more advanced tips and techniques to optimize your ads further for the best possible results. Good luck with setting up your TikTok ads! If you need professional help with getting started on TIkTok ads, you can always contact us!