TikTok Advertising
Marketing trick you wish you knew sooner.
Types Of TikTok Ads
TikTok provides you with plenty of options to advertise on the platform. So you can choose what will be most effective in reaching your target audience and getting your message across. Here are the different types of ads you can run with the TikTok ads platform:
- In-feed video: These are ads that appear among the native news feed of TikTok users on the For You page.
- Brand takeover: This type of ad allows you to dominate the conversation as your message takes over the whole screen for a few seconds. It then turns into an in-feed video ad.
- Spark adds: TikTok rolled out this ad type in 2021, giving brands the ability to sponsor popular organic content that relates to their products.
- The image adds: Brands can place image ads in videos that appear via TikTok’s news feed apps: Buzz Video, Top Buzz, and Babe.
- Video ads: These ads are full-screen videos of 5 to 60 seconds that appear in a user’s For You feed.
- Pangle adds: Pandle is a video platform integrated with TikTok to offer video, native, and banner ads, but this feature is available to only specific countries.
- Carousel ads: These ads include up to 10 images and appear in TikTok’s news feed apps.
- Branded AR content: Your ads can also appear as branded stickers, lenses, and other types of AR content so TikTok users can use them in their videos.
- Hastage challenge: This type of ad shows up in the Discovery section of the app and can encourage user participation.
- Sponsored influencer content: For this type of TikTok advertisement, you get your message across through sponsored content from an influential TikTok user.
How To Set Up Ads On Tiktok
Now that you know about the different types of TikTok ads, let’s take a look at how to set them up from your TikTok ad account.
1. Create Your Tiktok Ad Account:
The first step is simple: start by creating an account on the TikTok add manager. Choose your billing country or region and then select whether you’re using the account for a business or individual. Then click on Next. Enter some basic information such as your email address and password.
Then enter a verification code sent to your email. If you choose to sign up with your phone number, then you’ll need the verification code sent to your phone. Once your brand is approved, log in to your dashboard and finish the initial account setup according to the instructions. Then you can follow the steps below to create TikTok ads:
2. Create And Install The Tiktok Pixel:
Now you will need to install the TikTok Pixel a snippet of code on your website that gathers information about site events such as how users arrived on your site, what device they’re using, and where they’re located.
After selecting Standard Mode or Developer Mode, you will create your Pixel by first setting up a “Web Event” in your TikTok Ads Manager.
Remember to review your cookie consent setting before deploying your Pixel. Then download or copy the Pixel code and paste it into your website header.
3. Create A New Campaign:
Create an ad campaign under the Campaigns tab and click on the create button. This will give you the option to choose your campaign objective whether you want to drive traffic, conversions, or app installs.
Then give your campaign a name and set a campaign-level minimum budget. You can set a lifetime budget to quickly reach as many people as possible. But if you set a daily budget, you can gradually and steadily reach out to your target audience.
4. Create An Ad Group:
Create an ad group to define audiences, campaign budgets, and placements for your ads.
Choose the promotional type or goal: Select either App Install or Website as your promotion type.
Select the ad placement: Your choice of ad placement will determine where your ads appear on TikTok and its partner platforms. If you are just getting started with TikTok ads, you can choose Automatic placement to have TikTok place your ads for maximum reach and value. You can also manually place ads across TikTok and its news feed apps.
Select your creative type: Turn on the Automated Creative Optimization feature, and TikTok will create variations of your content and test its engagement. You can turn off this feature at any time.
Define your target audience: Choose the audience for your ad by selecting a location, gender, and age group. You can also specify user languages, add users with specific interests, and include people who have previously interacted with your content.
Select a delivery type: Choose either standard or accelerated delivery. Standard delivery ensures your ad will appear during high-traffic times throughout your ad delivery period, with your ad budget spread consistently across that time frame. Accelerated delivery means your ad budget is dedicated to getting the most eyes on your ad as quickly as possible.
5. Create A New Ad:
After setting up your ad group, you can configure your first ad. TikTok gives you the option to upload either a video or an image file as your ad creative.
For best results, make sure you follow the recommended add specs This will ensure that your ad looks great on TikTok and across all the partner platforms. After creating an ad to your liking, you’ll have the option to preview it and get an idea of how it’ll appear to TikTok users.
At this point, you can also find out whether your ad needs some tweaking before you submit it for review. You can further customize your ad by naming it so it’s easier to distinguish between different ads within the same ad group. Then enter your ad text using 12 to 100 characters to get your message across even more effectively. This text will appear above the ads.
Next, you will have the option to choose between different calls to action depending on what you want your audience to do. So, you can ask your audience to Sign Up, Download Now, Contact Us, Book Now, Shop Now, Apply Now, or Learn More.
Then click on Submit to finish creating the ads. Use TikTok Promote to boost existing ads TikTok Promote is a paid feature that lets you choose a goal for video views, website visits, or new followers and promote your video content. Select an audience, define your budget, and schedule the duration of your ad, then start your promotion.
6. Measure Your Ad Performance:
The job is not done after launching your ad; you should also measure your performance to see how the campaign is paying off. TikTok provides native analytics that can show you how your ad is doing in terms of impressions, clicks, conversions, and more. You can even test and compare the performance of different ad creatives and placements to see what works best for you.
TikTok Adds Specs:
TikTok in-feed video ads must follow formatting guidelines in order to display correctly and generate engagement. Start by creating a video in TikTok’s suggested range of 9 to 15 seconds, that’s less than 500MB and one of these file types is .mp4, MOV, MPEG, .3gp. Then consult TikTok’s list of add specs for additional formatting guidance.
How Much Do TikTok Ads Cost?
TikTok closely guards its pricing algorithm, which is based on a bid model. At a minimum, campaign-level budgets should be $50/daily, and ad group-level budgets must be $20/daily.
Seven Examples Of Tiktok Advertising Done Right:
Besides learning the basics, it’s just as important to see how other brands are using TikTok ads. This will give you a few ideas on how to run your own campaign. Check out these four examples of brands that launched brilliant advertising campaigns on TikTok:
- Chipotle: Chipotle has been dominating the TikTok platform with fun and creative video content. It also nailed its influencer advertising campaign to promote its annual Boorito offer for Halloween. The brand roped in top influencers known for their creativity such as Brittany broski and Zach King.
- Kroger: Kroger was among the first companies to test out the TikTok “Hashtag Challenge Plus” feature. This allowed TikTok users to shop directly on the app for Kroger products tagged with the campaign hashtag. This not only encouraged user participation and brand visibility but also enhanced user experience by providing a smooth shopping functionality.
- Experian: Experian launched an in-feed TikTok ad that’s straightforward and easy to understand. It showed a simple text conversation between two friends to highlight the benefits of Experian Boost for your credit score. It also came complete with a “Download” button. Everything about this ad is great because it puts directness and simplicity at the center.
- IHOP: IHOP International House of Pancakes used TikTok ads to target millennials and generate buzz about its limited-time offers. It temporarily rebranded as the International Haunted House of Pancakes for its Halloween 2021 campaign, promoting Scary Face pancakes and other spooky menu items. The campaign reached more than 33 million users, and IHOP used behavior targeting to find the right audience. The result was a CPM that was 26% lower than TikTok’s national average.
- Party machines: Party machines began using TikTok marketing in 2019 to expand their reach and generate more B2B sales of its foam-generating machines. Entrepreneurs who buy the machines can then lease them to local customers. One of the company’s initiatives was to use Spark Ads to find popular content featuring their product. In at least one video, the company added a voiceover about their product and invited users to comment about how they would use a Party machine. Thanks to Shopify integration, TikTok users could click on the video, land on the Party machines website, and buy the product. The Spark Ads campaign increased website traffic from TikTok by 620%. And by using existing content, Party machines kept their advertising costs low just 10 cents per click.
- eBay: Online marketplace eBay is a go-to destination for sneaker enthusiasts, so it launched TikTok campaign to drive engagement with that audience. Using three different Spark Ads with Voting Sticker overlays, eBay’s Sneaker Showdown campaign invited users to pick the winning shoes in a bracket-style tournament. The campaign which coincided with the NCAA basketball tournament resulted in a 54% increase in eBay’s comment rate, and 1.2 million users participated in the poll.
- Koo apps: Koo apps wanted to increase awareness of its mobile game “Snake.io” and drive installs in the United States. It found two TikTok users who had created content showing how the game is played and partnered with them to produce Spark Adds.
To Do Best TikTok Advertising:
To get the best results from your TikTok ad campaigns, follow these best practices:
Stay on brand: TikTok users respect authenticity, so make sure your ad content is true to your company’s values and conforms with your branding.
Be direct: Yes, TikTok allows you 60 seconds to make your point, but videos of 21 to 34 seconds are best for boosting conversions.
Keep it vertical: Videos with vertical orientation outperform the square or horizontal format, with a 40% boost in impressions.
Promote At The Right Time:
The success of eBay’s “Sneaker Showdown” campaign was due in part to its timing in alignment with the NCAA basketball tournament. Look for trending topics or events that can help you generate buzz for your ad campaign. And don’t forget that TikTok Analytics will show you the best time to run your ads for maximum audience reach.
Use sound and text: According to TikTok, audio of any kind boosts and add impressions. Captions and text overlays also improve the impact of ads.
Incorporate hashtags: Help users find you by including relevant hashtags. You can see trending hashtags on the TikTok discovery page and choose the ones that make the most sense for your ad and your brand.
Incorporate interactive add-ons: TikTok’s interactive features encourage interaction with ads. For example, you can use the gesture add-on to encourage users to swipe or tap on an ad to reveal a reward. Or use the Voting Sticker overlay to seek input from your audience.
Partner with influencers: TikTok influencers already have a following, so partnering with them on an ad campaign can greatly expand your reach. Search for influencers that are either already using your product or are among your target demographic. You might be able to launch a new campaign with an influencer to build buzz for your brand or find an influencer with existing content that would work well for a Spark Add.
Test and optimize: Review your TikTok analytics often to see how your content is performing. Look at metrics such as views, interactions, and click-through rates, and adjust your content strategy if you’re not seeing the engagement you’d hoped for.
How To Set Up A Tiktok Add Campaign:
To set up a TikTok ad campaign, just head over to TikTok add manager. If you haven’t created a TikTok Ads Manager account, you’ll need to do that first. If you’re just looking to boost existing content, you don’t need an Ads Manager account. Instead, you can use TikTok Promote. Skip to the end of this section for more details.
1. Choose Your Objective:
To get started, log into TikTok Ads Manager and click the Campaign button. TikTok has seven ad objectives broken down into three categories that are Awareness, Reach to Show your ad to the maximum number of people in beta. Consideration, Traffic to Drive traffic to a specific URL. App Installs to Drive traffic to download your app. Video Views for Maximize video ad plays in beta. Lead Generation to use a pre-populated Instant Form to collect leads.
Conversions: Drive specific actions on your site, like a purchase or subscription. Catalog Sales: Dynamically adds based on your product catalog in beta, and only available to those with a managed ad account in a supported region.
2. Name Your Campaign And Set A Budget:
Give your campaign a name that is easily recognizable to your team. It can be up to 512 characters. If you have bottomless pockets or prefer to set the budget limits for specific ad groups rather than the whole campaign, you can choose to set No Limit on your campaign budget. Otherwise, choose whether you want to set a Daily or Lifetime budget for your campaign more on that below. Campaign budget optimization is also available for the App Installs and Conversions objectives using the Lowest Cost bidding strategy. For optimized Cost Per Click objectives, TikTok is beta testing a feature to provide a suggested bid.
3. Name Your Ad Group And Select Placements:
Each campaign includes from one to 999 ad groups. Each ad group name can be up to 512 characters. You can choose different placements for each ad group. Not all placements are available in all locations: TikTok placement: In feed adds in the For You feed. News Feed App placement: Ads within TikTok’s other apps Buzz Video, Top Buzz, News Republic, and Babe. Pangle placement: The TikTok audience network. The automatic placement allows TikTok to automatically optimize ad delivery.
4. Choose Whether To Use Automated Creative Optimization:
You won’t upload your creative until you get to the stage of creating individual ads. But for now, you can decide whether to let TikTok automatically generate combinations of your images, videos, and ad text. The ad system will then only show the best-performing ones. TikTok recommends that new advertisers turn this setting on.
5. Target Your Audience:
Like most social ads, TikTok allows you to show your ads specifically to your target marketing. You can use a lookalike or custom audience, or target your ads based on:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Device details
6. Set Your Ad Group Budget And Schedule:
You have already set a budget for your overall campaign. Now it is time to set the budget for the ad group and to set the schedule on which it will run. Choose a daily or lifetime budget for your ad group, then choose the start and end times. Under Dayparting, you can also choose to run your ad at specific times throughout the day based on your account time zone.
7. Set Your Bidding Strategy And Optimization:
First, choose your optimization goal: conversion, clicks, or reach. Your campaign objective may automatically determine this goal. Next, choose your bidding strategy. Bid Cap: Maximum amount per click CPC, per view CPV, or per 1,000 impressions CPM. Cost Cap: An average cost per result for optimized CPM. The cost will fluctuate above and below the bid amount but should average out to the set bid.
Lowest Cost: The ad system uses the ad group budget to generate the maximum number of results possible at the lowest cost per result. Finally, choose your delivery type: standard or accelerated. Standard divides your budget evenly over the scheduled dates of the campaign, whereas accelerated delivery spends your budget as fast as possible.
8. Create The Ads:
Each ad group can have up to 20 ads. Each ad name can be up to 512 characters and is for internal use only it does not appear on the ad itself. First, choose your ad format: image, video, or Spark ad. If you’re sticking to TikTok itself rather than the family of TikTok apps, you can only use video or Spark ads. Add your photos or video, or create a video within Ads Manager using the video template or video creation tools.
Note that TikTok research shows using the TikTok video editor can decrease cost per action by up to 46%. Choose one of the default thumbnails, or upload your own. Then, enter your text and link. Check out the preview of your ad on the right of the screen, add any relevant tracking links, and click Submit.
How Much Do Tiktok Ads Cost
Minimum Budgets:
TikTok ads are based on a bidding model. You can control costs through daily and lifetime budgets for campaigns and ad groups. The minimum budgets are. The campaign level of the daily budget is dollar 50USD. The lifetime budget is dollar 50USD. Add group level is daily budget is dollar 20USD. The lifetime budget is calculated as the daily budget multiplied by the number of days scheduled.
TikTok is tight-lipped about specific ad costs, but they do reveal the following tips and insights. If using a Bid Cap or Cost Cap bidding strategy, set your initial campaign level budget at No Limit and the daily ad group budget to at least 20x your target cost per action CPA.
For App Event Optimization, set an initial budget of at least dollar 100 or 20x your target CPA, whichever is higher. For Conversions campaigns using the Lowest cost bid strategy, set an initial budget of at least dollar 100 or 20x your target CPA, whichever is higher.
TikTok Advertising Best Practices
Mix And Match Your Creative Styles:
Rather than using one type of creative, or very similar creatives, switch up your style. TikTok suggests updating your creative every seven days to avoid audience fatigue. Switch it up within each video, too. TikTok recommends varied scenes with B-roll or transition footage.
Get To The Point:
Video ads can be up to 60 seconds long, but TikTok recommends keeping them to 21 to 34 seconds. Make the first 3 to 10 seconds especially eye-catching and engaging to avoid losing viewers. The best-performing TikTok ads highlight the key message or product within the first three seconds.
Use Sound Plus Captions:
Ninety percent of top-performing TikTok videos use audio, and 73 percent of TikTok users said they would stop and look at ads with audio. In particular, fast tracks above 120 beats per second usually have the highest view-through rate. But captions and text are important too. In particular, use text to highlight your call to action. TikTok found 40 percent of auction ads with the highest view-through rate include text overlays.
Stay Positive And Authentic:
TikTok recommends that videos stay positive, authentic, and inspiring. This is not the place to test out your dark and moody content or use a heavy-handed sales pitch. You also don’t want a video that looks too produced. Try using user-generated content in your ads to keep them truly authentic.
For example, one in three of the top auction ads involves someone looking at the camera and speaking to the audience. The Australian brand Royal Essence used this strategy to get 2.2 million impressions and 50,000.
Final Words
In conclusion, after reading this section from start to finish you will have a good understanding of how you can use the TikTok platform to promote your business to the huge user base of more than 500 million users. It is important that you do not just jump onto the platform without knowing what you are doing.
TikTok users are looking for fun and entertaining content. Brands and organizations that have used the platform successfully for marketing know this and have posted creative videos that get the users involved in their brand in a fun way. If you want to succeed with TikTok marketing you must do the same. You need to be committed to marketing on TikTok.
Don’t make the mistake of posting a lot of videos at once and then doing nothing for a long time. The users will just forget about you. Get organized and create a content marketing schedule for TikTok and stick to it. We hope that you found TikTok Marketing to be informative and useful. Get started today with your TikTok marketing. We wish you every success in promoting your business on this rapidly growing platform.
More and more businesses are starting to realize the power of the TikTok platform but as things stand it is not saturated with marketing. This means that it is an ideal time for you to get started and establish yourself on TikTok while there is less competition. Now it is over to you.
While reading this guide will make you a bit smarter only by taking action will you be able to leverage the TikTok platform to increase the profitability of your business. Remember to download and install the app and play around with it so that you are familiar with the features before you start to post videos.