TikTok has become one of the most popular social media platforms, especially among younger demographics like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and is forecast to reach 2,05 billion users in 2024. With 36.2% of TikTok users aged 18-24 and 33.9% aged 25-34, along with its highly engaging video content, TikTok is increasingly attracting brands that want to reach their target audiences and utilize TikTok ads.
Brands can benefit from advertising on the TikTok app where fun, creative, original, and sound-on video format dominates and generates high engagement. Advertisers can employ a variety of TikTok ad formats and user-friendly tools to create ads and attract potential customers.
According to the latest TikTok insights, high entertainment value ads have 25% higher brand love among Millennials. 46% of Gen Z users have purchased a product because they saw it on TikTok in the past year. In addition, 72% of TikTok users agree that the brand is memorable, even 3 weeks after ad exposure on the social media app.
Let’s dive into TikTok advertising and explore various ad types, campaign objectives, bidding options, and tips for eCommerce brands to grow and thrive on TikTok.
Start with TikTok Ads Manager (Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads)
TikTok continuously improves its advertising options and adds more TikTok ad formats, helping you reach your target audience based on your advertising goals and campaign objectives. It also offers tools to measure and analyze your TikTok ads’ performance, allowing you to adjust your advertising efforts accordingly.
To advertise on TikTok, you will need to use TikTok Ads Manager. It is an all-in-one advertising platform where you can create and manage ad campaigns, and monitor their performance. TikTok advertising campaigns are structured into campaigns, ad groups, and ads.
TikTok Campaigns and Objectives
To run TikTok ads, start by creating a campaign, selecting a campaign objective, setting your campaign budget, and creating an ad group.
There are 3 funnel categories to choose your advertising objectives from in TikTok Ads Manager, according to your brand’s goals and audience. These are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
Each one offers various ad objectives that you can select. For Awareness, this is Reach, for Consideration, you have Traffic, Video Views, and Community Interaction, and for Conversion, these are App Promotion, Lead Generation, Website Conversions, and Product Sales.
Choose Awareness to increase brand or product awareness and reach users most likely to view and remember your ad. The Consideration can get TikTok users to think about your brand and seek more information. Use Conversion to encourage TikTok app users to perform a desired action, such as to purchase your product or service.
TikTok Ad Groups
Within your ad group, choose ad placements, set a target audience, set up your campaign budget and schedule, specify optimization goals and bidding method, and start creating TikTok ads. Know that each ad group can have a single ad or multiple ads, and each campaign can have multiple ad groups.
TikTok Ads
The next step is to set up TikTok ads in your ad groups. Start by naming ads, selecting ad format, and entering ad details, and finish by adding tracking. Use TikTok Pixel to connect your website events with TikTok, measure your campaigns’ performance, and implement optimizations according to results.
Now that we have covered the TikTok campaign structure, we’ll move on to various TikTok ad formats and available features.
Explore TikTok Ad Formats
TikTok ad formats are In-feed video, In-feed interactive, Non-feed placement, Interactive enhancements, and Industry ad solutions. Each comes with its set of ad options.
In-Feed Video
TopView: TopView is a video ad displayed when opening TikTok. It appears before any other TikTok video, providing a high-impact, full-screen, sound-on showcase of your brand.
Top Feed: When you use the Top Feed option, you can choose when your ad will be displayed in someone's TikTok feed. With Top Feed enabled your ad will be shown in the first in-feed ad slot on the user's TikTok feed.
Standard Feed: These include In-feed auction ads, such as Spark and Non-Spark, as well as TikTok Reservation In-feed ads.
Branded Mission: Branded Mission connects brands with TikTok creators by incentivizing them to create authentic video content. It’s an excellent way to promote genuine, creative content and encourage meaningful engagement with your audience.
Spark Ads: Spark Ads is a native advertising format that enables you to use organic TikTok posts and their features for your ad campaigns. You can utilize your posts or posts from other creators, as long as you have their permission. Views, comments, shares, likes, and follows gained from promoting the videos are credited to organic posts. You can have up to 10,000 Spark Ads in your account without limits on how many times you can use the same organic TikTok posts as ads’ creatives.
The chart below demonstrates where to use Spark ads and other available ad types in different funnel stages.
TikTok Pulse Suite: TikTok Pulse suite allows you to position your ad directly following the most premium content on TikTok. Your ads can appear after the top 4% of brand-appropriate trending content or after content from premium publishers that align with your advertising objectives.
In-Feed Interactive
Playable Ads: Playable Ads are interactive videos showing a preview of your app before someone downloads it. When TikTok users watch the video, they can interact with your ad in a full-screen playable experience.
Carousel Ads: Carousel is an image-based creative format, allowing you to have 2-35 swipeable images in the sequence. The two available Carousel ad formats are Standard Carousel and Video Shopping Ads (VSA) Carousel.
Non-Feed Placement
Search Ads: The Search Ads Toggle enables you to target users looking for specific terms related to your brand. These ads will display as "Sponsored" content in various positions on the search results page.
Messaging Ads: TikTok Messaging Ads enable potential customers to start conversations with brands through TikTok Direct Messages and Instant Messaging Apps.
Global App Bundle: The Global App Bundle is a comprehensive ad solution that displays ads on ByteDance's apps such as CapCut and Fizzo.
Pangle: Pangle is TikTok for Business's advertising network, allowing you to connect with audiences through top local publishers. It covers over 100,000 global apps and can be accessed directly through TikTok Ads Manager.
Interactive Enhancements
Interactive Add-Ons: Use interactive add-ons to grab the undivided attention of your audience in a full-screen, sound-on environment. Improve your in-feed ads with standard or premium add-ons, depending on requirements.
Branded Effect: You can develop your Branded Effects or supply design materials according to the Design Template specifications.
Industry Ad Solutions
Showtimes: Showtimes is a format for movie studio advertisers to encourage people to look up movie showtimes and purchase tickets.
E-commerce: TikTok Commerce is a program of solutions, features, and advertising tools for brands to engage with consumers. You can showcase products in TikTok videos, TikTok live streams, and on your profile page's product showcase tab. Utilize Shop Ads and TikTok Shop to sell your products directly on the platform.
Set a Budget for TikTok Ads
Your budget is how much you are willing to spend while running ads on TikTok, and you can set it for your ad campaigns and ad groups. Two available budget types are the Lifetime budget and the Daily budget. TikTok recommends setting an appropriate budget based on the actual consumption you want to achieve. Too low or too high budgets are not suitable.
With Lifetime, you can choose the maximum amount you want to spend on a campaign or ad group during its entire run time. The Daily budget allows you to select the maximum amount you can spend on a campaign or ad group daily.
To ensure continuous delivery of your ad, a minimum budget is required for both Lifetime and Daily options. Daily and total budgets for campaigns must be over US $50, while ad group daily budgets must exceed US $20. Lifetime budgets are calculated as the minimum daily budget (US $20) multiplied by scheduled days.
Choose a Bidding Method and Strategy
Bidding methods help optimize your ad campaign to align with your marketing objectives. On TikTok, ads are ranked in the auction based on the bid price and relevance to the audience. A strong bid can expand your ad's reach and maximize the number of conversions. When creating your ad, you can select a bidding method that aligns with your brand’s goals.
There are four different bidding methods:
- CPM (Cost per thousand impressions): This is how much you pay for 1000 impressions.
- oCPM (optimized Cost per thousand impressions): It is the price you are willing to pay to create 1000 impressions by selecting people likely to take the desired action.
- CPV (Cost per view): You pay for what is considered a view when a person watches your ad for at least 6 seconds or interacts with the video within the first 6 seconds.
- CPC (Cost per click): This is the bidding price you pay per click.
Bidding strategies guide TikTok on how to bid for you in the ad auction. The two bidding strategies available on TikTok are Cost Cap and Maximum Delivery. Cost Cap is a goal-based bidding strategy where the system optimizes delivery to achieve a defined cost per action. Maximum Delivery is a spend-based strategy. It aims to deliver the highest volume of conversions within your defined budget.
We suggest using TikTok’s Suggested Bid option for custom bid recommendations.
Use TikTok Creative Center for Inspiration
Explore top-performing ads on TikTok and get inspired using the TikTok Creative Center’s Inspiration tab. You can research utilizing the search bar, the Top Ads Dashboard, and the Top Ads Spotlight.
Use the Top Ads Dashboard for more refined search results, since it allows you to choose a region, industry, objective, period, ad language and format, and the percentage of likes.
This is a great tool for analyzing your competitors on TikTok, getting creative insights, and implementing relevant findings into your brand’s advertising strategy.
Take Advantage of TikTok Symphony
TikTok has recently rolled out TikTok Symphony, a new suite of creative tools to support your content creation on TikTok. It is an AI-powered solution that can increase your brand’s productivity and provide valuable insights.
We advise you to test this new feature—a personal TikTok creative landscape guide and a place to brainstorm ideas, discover best practices, and get inspired. Supported by creative knowledge wealth, TikTok’s Symphony Assistant can help you improve your organic and paid content.
Are you ready to start advertising your brand on TikTok? Get in touch with our TikTok Ads specialists today! We have a proven track record of TikTok advertising success for various industry clients.
Anja Pendic is the Content Marketing Specialist at Blue Wheel, where she plays a key role in creating and managing content for the company’s website. With extensive experience in digital marketing, copywriting, and social media management, she crafts engaging blogs, case studies, and landing pages. Anja has worked across various platforms, including Amazon, Meta, and TikTok, delivering impactful content and strategies.
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