TikTok Ads offer unique opportunities for brands to engage with a vast and diverse audience.
Explore how to drive TikTok engagement effectively with our complete checklist of TikTok Ads, campaign setup, best advertising practices, and expert tips for successful TikTok campaigns.
Key takeaways
- With almost a billion users worldwide, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps for organic videos and offers some of the best advertising solutions in the world.
- TikTok Ads offer immersive and tailored experiences with a wide range of ad formats and app activity. This is great for campaigns aimed at engaging a specific user base or niche.
- Powered by an algorithm with precise targeting options and reliable performance metrics, TikTok Ads Manager makes it easy to set up and optimize ad campaigns.
- TikTok Ads provide a competitive cost structure, with CPM and CPC rates that are accessible even for smaller advertisers.
- The platform’s emphasis on creativity and its algorithmic preference for popular content offers the potential for viral success with organic TikTok posts.
Understanding TikTok Ads
TikTok Ads are a valuable tool businesses use to access engaged audiences primarily aged 18 to 24. These ads can help TikTok lead generation by increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, or boosting sales. Here are some useful TikTok user statistics:
- In 2024, TikTok is expected to have a total global user base of 900 million people.
- The largest TikTok audience is in the US, with 150 million active users.
- 43% of surveyed marketers consider TikTok a priority for future advertising efforts.
- 97% of TikTok advertising campaigns for video broadcasts contribute to higher traction.
TikTok Ads: Pricing
TikTok advertising costs vary based on the ad format, target audience, and other factors, making it a versatile platform for different budget sizes.
Here’s a breakdown of the costs:
- Budget requirements: TikTok requires a daily minimum budget of $50 at the campaign level and $20 at the ad group level.
- Average CPM: The average Cost Per Mille (CPM), or cost per thousand views, is around $10, which is relatively competitive to other platforms.
- Average CPC: The average Cost Per Click (CPC) across TikTok Ads is about $1, but this can vary based on the engagement and relevance of the TikTok Ad content to the target audience.
Cost variability is a big factor depending on the TikTok Ad types you choose. While in-feed ads can start as low as $10 per CPM, TopView ads can be quite costly, requiring a budget ranging from $50,000 to $150,000 per day due to their prominent placement and high reach potential.
To help you make an informed decision, let’s take a closer look at each TikTok Ad type.
Types of TikTok Ads
Explore the wide range of ad formats designed to meet various marketing needs and campaign objectives. You can also use the TikTok Ad Library to see distinct business ads independently.
1. In-feed Ads
In-feed ads are the standard ad format on TikTok and appear between user videos while scrolling through the For You Page. These ads can be up to 60 seconds long, supporting full-screen and sound-on formats, as well as customizable call-to-actions and website links.
2. Branded effects
Branded effects allow brands to create interactive and shareable custom filters, stickers, and special effects lasting up to ten days on the platform. They increase user interaction, encouraging people to create content featuring the brand’s custom effect.
3. Hashtag challenges
Hashtag challenges are a unique ad format where brands can involve the TikTok community by encouraging them to create content around a campaign theme marked with a specific hashtag. This increases engagement and virality as users participate and share their videos.
4. TopView Ads
TopView ads capture attention as they appear at the very top of the TikTok feed when users first open the app. These ads can last up to 60 seconds and play with sound and full-screen video – particularly effective for achieving maximum visibility and a high number of impressions.
5. Branded takeovers
Branded takeovers are full-screen ads that appear when a user first opens TikTok. These can be 3-5 seconds of static or dynamic content, including videos or GIFs. This format helps capture user attention immediately with branded elements and the option to include a link to drive traffic.
6. Spark Ads
TikTok Spark Ads allow brands to boost organic posts by others or their own content as native ads. This format helps increase the authenticity of TikTok Ad content since you can leverage existing posts that users may have already interacted with or shown interest in.
7. Carousel Ads
Carousel Ads enable showcasing a series of images and videos in a single ad, each with its own clickable call-to-action. This format is excellent for businesses that want to highlight multiple products or various features of a single product in a compact medium.
8. Video shopping ads
Video shopping ads are tailored for eCommerce businesses that want to drive sales directly from the app. These ads link directly to product pages where users can complete a purchase. This seamless integration can significantly increase conversion rates.
9. Image ads
Image ads appear in the news feed among user content. They are simple, static images that can include an embedded link to direct users to a landing page. This TikTok Ad type is suitable for campaigns focusing on high-quality visuals with less emphasis on video content.
10. Dynamic showcase ads
Dynamic showcase ads use real-time, performance-driven personalization to display relevant products to users based on their behaviors and preferences. This type of TikTok Ad is highly effective for retargeting and increasing relevance for a specific target audience.
11. Collection ads
Collection ads allow users to browse products without leaving TikTok. This format combines the power of video with the ability to showcase a collection of products – users open the app and have an immediate path from discovery to purchase.
12. Deeplinks
Deeplinks in TikTok Ads direct users to specific content or pages within an app or website, bypassing navigation barriers and streamlining the user journey. This is particularly useful for promotions where a specific landing page is crucial for campaign success.
13. Pangle Ads
Pangle ads are served across the broader ByteDance ecosystem, which includes other apps and platforms. This allows advertisers to extend their reach beyond TikTok to a larger, diversified audience, leveraging cross-app data for targeted advertising.
TikTok Ads: Getting started
Step 1. Log into TikTok Ads Manager
Access the TikTok Ads Manager, your central hub for ad creation and campaign management. This system provides all the tools necessary to design, manage, and analyze your advertising efforts on TikTok. We recommend starting by setting up with custom mode.
Make sure your TikTok business account is set up and linked to Ads Manager before proceeding.
Step 2. Pick an advertising objective
Define the goals for your campaign, for example, increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to a website, or boosting conversions. TikTok Ads Manager allows you to choose from various advertising objectives, so make sure to align them with your business goals appropriately.
Step 3. Create a name for your campaign
Create a new campaign on your TikTok account by selecting the appropriate campaign type based on your chosen objectives. Naming your campaign is important for later analysis and management, especially when running multiple campaigns simultaneously.
Step 4. Create and name your ad group
You can create multiple ad groups within each campaign to test different creatives, target audiences, or ad placements. Again, naming each ad group descriptively based on its unique focus will help you organize and track their performance more efficiently.
Step 5. Set a target audience
Identify and set your target audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. TikTok provides valuable tools to precisely target your ads to users most likely to be interested in your products or services, enhancing campaign effectiveness.
Step 6. Set an ad group budget and schedule
Determine the budget for each ad group and decide whether it will run on a daily or lifetime budget basis. Setting a schedule for your ads is also essential to ensure they are displayed at optimal times for engagement during high user traffic.
Step 7. Set bidding and optimization
Choose your bidding strategy based on what you’re willing to pay per impression, click, or conversion. TikTok offers several bidding options to optimize your ads for the best possible results, depending on your campaign goals.
Step 8. Upload an ad
Upload the creatives for your ads, including videos, images, or text. Ensure your content is engaging and follows TikTok’s Ad creatives guidelines to maximize user engagement and meet the platform’s standards.
Step 9. Set your destination page
Link your ads to an appropriate landing page that reflects the campaign’s message and encourages users to take your desired action, like installing an app or buying a product. This could be your website’s homepage, a specific product page, or a custom landing page.
Step 10. Submit your ad
Once your ad is ready and all settings are configured, submit it for review. TikTok will verify that the ad meets all advertising policies – format and functionality, prohibited content, and restricted content – before it goes live; otherwise, it might not be accepted or perform well.
Best practices, tips and tricks
Effective use of TikTok advertising requires understanding the technical aspects of ad creation and how to make content that can make money on TikTok from its specific user base.
Here are some strategies to optimize your TikTok Ads for maximum engagement.
1. Use music
Music is essential to the TikTok experience. Including popular or catchy tunes increases an ad’s appeal and makes your content stand out in a multi-sensory medium. Test out music that aligns with the brand message and ensure it’s in the public domain or commercially licensed.
2. Hook the viewer in 3 seconds
TikTok is naturally fast-paced. Start your ads with a compelling hook – be it an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or an eye-catching visual – to grasp and keep the viewer’s interest. This increases the chance of the audience taking action.
3. Update your ads
Regularly updating your ads with fresh content and new messages prevents ad fatigue. Trends on TikTok change rapidly, so by staying current, you ensure that your ad content remains relevant and engaging.
4. Collaborate with other creators
Partnering with TikTok creators and influencers can amplify your reach and lend authenticity to your brand. Creators already have established audiences who trust their content, which can be an organic way to introduce your brand to new audiences and make the ad feel more genuine.
5. Include CTAs
Clear CTAs guide users on what to do after watching your ad. Whether it’s visiting a website, joining a challenge, or following your TikTok page. Effective CTAs convert viewers into active participants and potential customers. Make it clear, compelling, and easy to follow.
Measure and analyze your TikTok Ads performance
Effectively measuring and analyzing the performance of your TikTok Ads is essential for optimizing your marketing strategies and achieving your business goals. Without it, you’re just generating empty engagement. Here are a few key steps and best practices to follow:
Determine your goals. Common aims include increasing brand awareness, growing engagement, driving traffic to a website, or generating sales. Concrete, optimistic numbers will help you know what to measure and compare your performance against.
Use advertising metrics for quantifiable goals and measured TikTok campaign performance:
- Impressions and reach tell you how many people have seen your ad and how widely it’s being circulated.
- Engagement rates, including comments, shares, watch time, hashtag performance, and overall interaction, help measure how well your audience is responding to the content.
- Click-through rate (CTR), or the percentage of people who clicked on your ad after seeing it, is a crucial factor for understanding ad effectiveness for large campaigns.
- Conversion rate, similarly, is a way to measure the effectiveness of ads to drive sales or have people take specific actions that benefit your business.
- Cost per action (CPA) measures how cost-effective your ads are in achieving specific actions, like downloads, sign-ups, or purchases relative to ad spend.
Now that we have the ingredients for tracking advertising on TikTok, let’s explore some favorite tools and strategies for analyzing TikTok Ad campaigns in the marketing system.
Use built-in and third-party analytics tools
The TikTok marketing system provides comprehensive analytics through its Ads Manager, which offers detailed reports on performance metrics like views, engagement, and user demographics.
In addition to TikTok’s own tools, consider integrating other platforms for deeper insights or third-party aggregate data. Tools like Google Analytics, Hubspot, or Sprout Social can offer additional layers of data analysis and cross-platform performance assessment.
Segment your campaign data
Break down your data by demographics, ad type, or placement to find which segments are performing best. This can massively help tailor your ads to target the most responsive audiences and is especially useful for long-term brand development and engagement.
Conduct A/B testing
Regularly test different versions of your ads (A/B testing) to see what content, formats, and messages resonate best with your audience. Since you’re using very similar content, A/B testing can help you zone into smaller details that affect the overall performance of your TikTok videos.
How to run ads on TikTok with A/B testing? Simply adjust elements like the CTA, music, visuals, language use, and even branded hashtag options to determine which variations perform best.
Set campaign benchmarks
Finally, just as you would set a goal, make sure to introduce performance benchmarks. These can be based on your industry standards if you can find them, or past campaign performances. This comparison can help identify areas of brand strength and opportunities for improvement.
FAQ
Costs vary based on ad format, campaign duration, and targeting specifics. Daily and total budgets for TikTok Ad campaigns must exceed $50. In the TikTok Ad group level, however, daily budgets must exceed $20, and lifetime budgets are calculated by multiplying the total days.
Still, you should prepare to pay more to compete with TikTok users’ feeds and other marketing campaigns. Some of the pricier ad types may exceed well into the thousands.
Given their unique format and broad reach, especially among younger, more tech-savvy demographics, TikTok Ads offer significant value for advertisers with a good marketing strategy. TikTok is a highly trending platform and carries a lot of cultural weight.
TikTok Ads use an algorithm to target and deliver content based on user behavior and campaign objectives. In turn, the marketer must specify their goals and target audience and set an appropriate budget and duration to maximize the reach and engagement of a TikTok video.
Effective CPM rates for TikTok advertisements vary widely, depending on targeting and competitive factors. The starting CPM price for TikTok paid ads is $10 per 1,000 impressions.
The approval time for TikTok Ads typically ranges from a few to 24 hours. TikTok reviews each ad submission to ensure it complies with their advertising policies before it goes live. If your TikTok video ads meet all the criteria, they can be approved relatively quickly.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a business looking to increase conversions or an influencer who prioritizes organic content, learn how to advertise on TikTok and start your first campaign with our comprehensive guide. Find all the ad types, best practices, and performance analysis strategies.
Make sure to check out Printify and our TikTok Shop integration as a great merchandising solution for any TikTok shoppable ads.
