Advertising on TikTok

By Dimitri Bistekos & Laurance Giguère

Published in

re:VERB

9 min readMay 18, 2021

Curious about advertising on TikTok? Wondering if it’s right for your brand, and what the requirements are? Read on for best practices, examples, and a step-by-step guide with everything you need to know.

Why Advertise on TikTok ?

After explosive user growth in 2019 and 2020, TikTok will reach a pivotal milestone with respect to its youngest users. By the end of this year, the video app will have a larger number of Gen Z users in the US than that of Instagram.

TikTok has incredibly strong engagement and loyalty among Gen Z. The members of this generation are using it not only to be entertained, but also increasingly to learn about and discuss weightier issues such as climate change, politics, and news. Other social platforms also offer such content, but TikTok is strongly appealing to young people for its unique video style and aesthetic. In addition, 64% of TikTok users are older than age 20 so it’s no longer just Gen Z using the platform.

Nearly half (49%) of TikTok users said they purchased something after seeing it “advertised, promoted, or reviewed on the platform. Though TikTok is newer to the game than established platforms like Facebook, it has more of an effect on its users’ purchase habits — for comparison, 41% of Facebook users said the platform influenced them to make a purchase. (eMarketer, 2021)

That could simply be because of TikTok’s younger user base, as Gen Z and millennial respondents were far more likely than Gen X or baby boomers to say they purchased something because of social media’s influence. But it could also speak to the power of video for ecommerce advertising. While Facebook has a range of content formats, all content on TikTok is short-form video, and video ads on social media are more influential in getting US adults to make a purchase (16.3%) than regular posts from brands users followed (13.4%) or sponsored posts (9.0%).

On top of that, users spend a lot of time on the platform. On average, they open the app eight times a day and spend 52 minutes per day on the platform. TikTok users span 150 countries worldwide.

Ad Formats

TikTok offers several options for advertisers to reach their target demographic. You will need a TikTok ad account manager for most of these options. The exception is the first: In-Feed Video ads.

In-Feed Video: Ads appear in the native news feed—TikTok calls this the ‘For You Page’.

Brand Takeover: Ads appear upon opening the app and completely take over the screen for a few seconds until turning into an in-feed video ad.

Top View : Similar to Brand Takeover Ads. The only difference is that TopView Ads appear 5 seconds after the user opens the app: the videos are full-screen with sound and auto-play

Hashtag Challenge: Ad appears on the Discovery page encouraging users to participate in user content creation challenges. Includes shoppable component.

Branded AR Content: Ad appears as 2D/3D/AR (branded lenses) content for users to add in their videos.

Custom Influencer Package: Ad will appear as sponsored content created by a user with influence in your market.

How to Set Up Your Ads

Set up your TikTok account
To start advertising on TikTok you will need a TikTok advertising account or account manager. You will first need to submit your info to TikTok Ads to see if your business qualifies.

Create new ad campaign
To create a new ad campaign, TikTok allows you to organize your ads using three levels: campaigns, ad groups, and ads. The top-level is the campaign, defined by one main objective and budget. Under a campaign you will find ad groups, defined by ad placements, target audiences, budgets, etc.

Choose your ad campaign’s objective. Depending on your country, you may have more options available.

Name your campaign and enter your lifetime or daily budget. Setting a lifetime budget would allow your ad campaign to reach as many people as possible. A daily budget allows your ad steady target market penetration.

Create new ad group
You can start creating a new ad group by choosing your ads group ad placement or, for best results, you can let TikTok choose placements automatically.

Custom audience targeting
TikTok lets you create custom audience targeting options in a few ways, you can use your customer’s contact data, website traffic, app activity, and ad engagement. Once your audience targeting is complete, you can configure the budget and schedule for your ad group.

Create new ad
After configuring your ad group, you can upload your first ad. Ads can be uploaded as video or as images. If you choose images, TikTok will group them into a video for you.

After creating an ad, you can use TikTok’s ad preview tool to see how your ad will look on mobile devices.

Submit campaign for review.

Monitor ad
Once TikTok approves your ad campaign it begins to run, now you can monitor your ads performance on your ads dashboard. (Hootsuite, 2020)

Budget

TikTok Ads Manager provides you two budgeting options: daily or lifetime. Your budget can be changed anytime throughout your campaign, and the system will not spend more than the budget you set. You will need a minimum campaign budget of $500 to get started.

To ensure that your ads have sufficient budget, the minimum budget at the campaign level is $50 and the minimum budget at the ad group level is $20.

TikTok Ads Manager offers you different bidding methods to select from:

CPM (starts at $10 per CPM)
oCPM
CPV
CPC

Benefits

What makes TikTok appealing to marketers is the platform wants your content to be seen by as many people as possible: they want you to stay on the app so they’re going to find your audience for you. Benefits to advertising on TikTok include:

Shopify merchants can install or connect their TikTok Pixel with the click of a button, making it quicker and easier to track conversions.
Ability to create native, shareable ads that resonate with the community with TikTok’s intuitive creative tools.
Ads Credits : Eligible merchants who spend $27 in 14 days will receive $132 in ad credits to jumpstart their first TikTok campaign.
Flexible budget (possibility to adjust spending at any time).
The “For You page” is personalized for each user: it only takes a day or two for the TikTok algorithm to learn what content people like to see and continue to serve it to them.
A lot of the targeting that is available relates the viral categories popular on TikTok rather than what you’d see on other platforms.

Potential Challenges

Unlike Facebook where you can start a campaign with as little as $1, TikTok can be a bit pricey (starts at $500).
While people will be able to interact and engage with your TikTok ads, they won’t be able to follow your ad account and the views you get won’t be saved.
Audiences don’t update, so every time you get more data, you have to create a new audience : TikTok recommends targeting for in-app events rather than pixel data.
Some advertisers would turn comments off after a bad ad, but TikTok wants transparency : TikTok users won’t respect your brand or who you are if you just turn them off.
TikTok ad platform isn’t sophisticated enough yet to classify those people into interests (currently, you can only target your ads to around 15 interests in 102 categories- an interest is broader and a category goes deeper into what the audience is).
The only way to find out who’s watching your TikTok videos and guess the relevant interests and categories to reach them is to read the comments and lead people through a funnel. Then you can get a sense of what categories and interests are the best fit.

Best Practices

Create visually-appealing ad content

Recommended aspect ratio of 9:16/1:1/16:9.
Ensure a resolution of greater than 720px x 1280px, 640px by 640px, or 1280px by 720px.
Use a description of your advertised product or service that is 12 to 100 characters.

Video length

TikTok ads can be up to a minute in length but the algorithm optimizes videos of 10 seconds.
TikTok users don’t want their experience on the platform to be a manufactured reality like on Instagram or Pinterest: they want content that’s authentic and relatable so the best ads look like organic posts.
Shoot video using your phone so the content looks like the footage people are accustomed to seeing in their feed.

Use creative tools

Use TikTok’s video creation kit, landing page to video, smart video soundtrack, and TikTok Ad Studio.

Test organic posts before you put any ad spend

Publish 10–15 videos to see which performs best.
Download the top performer without the watermark and re-upload it as an ad through your self-service ad account.

Optimization

There is no recommendation on how many different creatives should be active at the same time once your ad group is running, however, the limit is 16 per ad group.
Update the creative every 7 days at least. It is wise to continuously refresh them to avoid ad fatigue.
Use Smart Video to design new creatives.
To add new creatives, it is suggested to add them to an existing ad group to extend its lifetime.

Hashtags

The hashtags you select can have a significant impact on the “discoverability” of your video. You should try to choose hashtags representing your video’s theme or central ideas.

Follow current TikTok trends

Keep an eye out for trending hashtags/music: you can then create and share videos that relate to these trending videos

General Facts

The first three seconds of a video are critical. TikTok research finds that more than 63% of ads that showcase a product or message in the first three seconds get clicked on the most.
Almost 50% of the best performing ads on TikTok strike an emotional chord.
In a TikTok-commissioned survey by Kantar, almost three quarters of respondents ranked TopView first among TikTok’s ad formats for its format’s full-screen, sound-on capabilities and natural placement.
The main factors TikTok uses in ranking ads are relevance, ad quality, and bidding, it also considers engagement factors like shares, comments, and likes.

Examples

Wallaroo Media put together this list of 24 inspiring TikTok campaigns. We’ve included the top 5 below:

1. Spikeball

2. Chipotle

3. Vessi

4. Elf Cosmetics

5. Guess

Dimitri and Laurance are Digital Media Coordinators with VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.