The TikTok Ads Strategy for Beginners

the starting point for Tik Tok is to First figure out who are you targeting and where are those users online our users are you know 13 to 24 year olds we started sort of posting organically and then we got on the Tik Tok ads platform and quickly realized that there are like six or seven variables what location to Target what age the interest the keywords the CTA description and like what the creative style should be we typically created three different ads in a single campaign and we put $30 a day behind each of those ads and then tested each of these variables in isolation after about a month or so we'd be able to figure out okay well you know download works better than install now and this creative style is better and you put this word in the description and it just performs better and then we put them all together and it started to work pretty well then we started putting around a few hundred

behind each ad group and then we found that our performance just like skyrocketed from there and that was just in Australia and then like cool well how would this look in the US or the UK or Canada and we started doing the same ads across those countries that we knew worked and the performance just continued to improve and the CAC was less than a dollar for our in Stall how long did you run it just to get some real good data you can probably get results that show a statistical significance within about a week and then that point we kind of cut those ads and test a new variable I think for me the hardest part is just creating the content how did you guys go about creating the actual ads I got a younger brother and I went I said hey do you know any of your friends who want to be paid 50 bucks to make Tik toks we would go on Tik Tok and we'd scroll through the hashtags and find new trends I'd

then create a brief for these young people to make and we just test all these different creatives and see what would work and we'd also post some of these organic on our own Tik Tok and be like cool these ones got thousands of views all right that creative resonated with followers and they're probably going to resonate with that Target user let's try them or let's try model around them and then once you start seeing what ads work or what creatives work work best you just kind of create that style every time when you're testing out the hashtags and looking for these creative briefs are you going for a generic hashtag or are you going for a specific hashtag that's more tailored to your Niche it's probably a mix search of a bit around you know for may be like Fitness or gym workouts then your feed becomes quite curated it's not necessarily like seeing a great Fitness video and copying it seeing a great

video and then applying the principles of what makes a good video to your kind of Niche you said creative is actually more important than targeting 100% sense if you can nail the creative then nailing you know things like location and interest and keywords and that sort of stuff will bring down your CAC a little bit but having the creative that you know that works that resonates with your user you know it's got a good hook clear CTA and brings them in the first kind of two seconds is where most of your viewers are going to drop off so it's really important at the end you have like a strong clear CTA talk to me about targeting then you set up your three creatives set it for about $30 a day for each creative performing how do that targeting look like for each ad let's say we want to test the the CTA so we're going to test install now download now and you know get fit today so every single variable the creative the

location the interest keywords is all the same within four or five days you're going to see okay this creative or this ad has a CTR of 1.5% and a CVR which is a conversion rate of 25% that ad that has download now is clearly the one that performs best so download now is the CTA that we're going to use going forward from my experience the more granular I can get the better it is in terms of CPA we had a sports app and we're taring the NFL American football and they're doing like $5 cost per installs when I changed the targeting to people who liked every single team that dropped the CPA to like a buck 50 if I'm going to start general is it better to have hashtags interest where should I start with that what we found is to like dump as much as you can in there as possible and then same with hashtags we'll put as many as we can there as well and we'll even turn on the targeted expansion which kind of lets

the ad pick more areas to go for if it thinks it's going to perform well so for Tik Tok I think going broad is really effective how you how have you been able to skill without sacrificing the performance of an ad you can't actually increase or decrease a campaign by more than 15% without it like kind of resetting so if you're going to scale something up either do it gradually or create a completely new campaign and the other thing that we found is if we created one campaign that had $500 into it and had ad group the performance would be pretty bad but if we created Five campaigns that are literally identical as that one with $100 behind each the performance remained you know really really good was the organic videos driving downloads at all some videos can go viral and that's a big hit and you'll get a bunch of downloads others you know can flop and at the moment organic Tik Tok is quite tough so

we use it as a platform to help us get a better gauge on what ads we want to be sending out so helps us test creatives also like all of the creatives that I get our Tik Tok team to make they go post they get posted online organically and then we use them as ads as well testing to grow your community or grow your following there's something called a community engagement campaign on Tik Tok so we put like 20 bucks behind this a day and just let it run for like months and what this does is it kind of brings the right people to your accounts to follow you to view your videos and it helps you kind of grow your community and your following I think we grew around 30,000 follows on Tik Tok just using this community engagement how did you pick the video to use for that Community engagement we pick two videos that perform quite well organically hey if it works on organic it's likely to work on Pete as well it more often than

not works we've run all of our Tik Tock ads once we know they work on Facebook as Instagram reals and this is almost transferable exactly so if you have a campaign that gets you 10,000 users at a CAC of$ one on Tik Tok you go say cool that campaign that ad is awesome that creative is really working let's go run that on Facebook through just Instagram reals and it'll pretty much work exactly the same so that's another way how we kind of were able to scale I know what Tik Tok you need an MMP because you can't Target iOS 14 and up users unless you have that you have one that you suggest we go with yeah so we use we use apps flyer my advice would be don't get locked into a contract until you like kind of know what your like how many units your your downloads you're getting per month and it's consistent otherwise you'll end up paying overs which is what happened to us I also want to talk to you about the key metrics you know that

really suggests a high performing ad is it the clickthrough rate is it the install rate what are you really looking for there's three key things to to look for when you're testing your ads the first is you want a CPM which is like the cost per th000 Impressions to be less than $6 typically then you want a CTR which is the clickthrough rate to be anything above 1% and then a CVR which is the conversion rate you want that to be anywhere above 25% if you have those three numbers your ads will be converting at less than a dollar is there anything like you would say don't do this when you're first starting out with Tik Tok ads cuz you made that mistake don't waste your money kind of unnecessarily start would like a plan and test everything over time I think that's the best way to go about it stay up to date with Trends reply to comments also get in touch with ti Tok and see if you can get yourself on a white list and

a white list essentially allows you to get access to new features allows you to hit new audiences what other Trends have you seen Jak I think the most important part about Trends is actually the music some of the best ads that we've had you know has been a bunch of pictures we put together and then like it relates to a song but everyone loves the song and the song goes viral so they're the ones that perform best so I would be looking at for trending songs more than kind of trending videos anything else on Tik Tok you want to make sure we cover although Tik Tok releases a lot of new like features don't fall for it all I mean it's always good to test but I think like you know they put up these things where like kind of page pops up when they're watching the ad we tested and people like hated it spark ads is another thing to kind of consider so spark ads are where you run your existing videos on your own Tik Tok

profile as ads so you can go to a Creator and say hey if you post this video on your account we're going to make it an ad and that's going to bring a lot of traffic to your profile you're going to get a lot of followers a lot of views and also that's great for you because people are going to download the app or download whatever they want you from that creative so it's a really kind of like mutually beneficial situation for you and the creators assuming the Creator is kind of related to what you're doing and the key for that is to get the video code the only other thing that I've found is we we kind of keep track of what we call our best performing creatives so we have like a list of all them and then we also have like struggler ads ones that are like ctrs a little bit lower the CVR might not be right and we kind of take those and we compare them to our best performance and say okay what are these

missing and then we often then kind of tweak the creative again and run the ad again so that's been really effective the last thing is you can't run Tik Tok ads with a watermark on it if you had to start again would you start with spark ads or would you start with just the normal ads that you started with spark ads are good because it brings people to your account as well so you would get a lot of followers for example like you need a th000 followers to put a link in your bio otherwise you can't do that but I think after that you get kind of more flexibility running normal ads through the ads manager normal ads versus Community ads yeah so Community ads they're not going to get you downloads so I would say not one or the other but do them both but the community ads I'm talking 20 bucks a day like minimum amount spend will get you a few hundred followers every day the spark ads you got to you tell the influencer to go to

their Tik Tok file Creator tools it's all within they got to get this ad scene turned on and then select the Tik Tok post that they want so this one and go into the ad settings with that little button and then you got to get this ad settings turn that on turn on ADD and then generate this code and you guys need this code and send it over to us we were tracking the search volume of our branded keyword for this client and you can see that after the Tik Tok campaign the scourt score for that brand went up are people just you know swiping up or tapping on the ad app or are they going to the App Store and searching for step in and downloading the app yeah I think it's probably like a 70 splits so 70% of people probably tapping on the ad 30% are searching we've seen when we've turned off ads and what it looks like when they're on so 100% like kind of it helps with your branding helps with like

your ranking of your keywords we actually found that a lot of people would find the ad and then they'd go to the app store and then misspell steppen so we had to create an app store Campaign which is like step it's like misspellings and it's just like a hundred different ways that you can spell steppen and that would capture everyone it was like super cheap but um that was kind of like an interesting find there