TikTok's revenue exceeds 100 million yuan. How can sellers use this platform to advertise? (Part 2)

4. Control advertising spending, scheduling, and goals

Next, you should set the TikTok advertising budget, schedule, and goals.

Set budget and schedule

Set the budget for your ad group in the Budget & Schedule section. Similarly, you can also choose a daily budget or a total budget for your ad. The minimum budget for an ad group is $20, regardless of whether it is a daily budget or a total budget.

Next, select the ad schedule. You can choose to run your ad at a specific time of day or week.

Set the budget spending rate.

The standard ad delivery option will evenly distribute the budget spending rate, while the accelerated option will spend the budget as quickly as possible within the ad schedule.

Set an optimization goal.

The optimization goal is the key indicator you want to achieve through your advertising campaign. You can choose to optimize the ad group conversion rate, click-through rate, or impressions. Based on your optimization goal, the bid will also be adjusted accordingly.

If you choose to optimize for conversions, your ads will be delivered to the audience most likely to purchase your product or service. To track all possible actions that lead to conversions (for example, downloading an app or submitting a form), click [Library] and select [Conversions] to create an optimized conversion rate objective.

Next, you need to decide whether you want to track app installs or conversions for certain elements of your landing page.

To track app install conversions, you need to enter the name, enter the link to Google Play or App Store, and then measure conversions for your ad.

The pricing of conversion goals follows the oCPC (optimized cost per click) bidding method, which ensures that your ads are displayed to users who are most likely to achieve your advertising goals. With oCPC bidding, you bid according to the expected cost per conversion and then pay according to CPC. TikTok will automatically adjust the bid based on your bid settings to keep it within the target cost of the ad.

If you choose click-through rate as your ad objective, you will be charged on a CPC basis, and the system will optimize your ad to attract as many clicks as possible.

If you choose impressions as your objective, your ad will be charged on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.

Smart Optimized Bids

TikTok also provides the option of smart optimized bidding. If you enable smart optimized bidding, your bid will continue to adjust and optimize itself to improve conversion rate. If your goal is to optimize click-through rate or impressions, it is recommended to turn off the smart optimization option.

5. Design ads using video creation tools

Designing ad creatives is actually very simple. TikTok ads can be horizontal, vertical, or square videos and pictures. The ad platform provides a tool called Video Creation Kit for users to create videos. In addition, this tool provides custom edited video and picture templates, as well as more than 300 free BGMs.

TikTok currently has the following three ad types:

• brand takeovers ads

• in-feed ads

• tag challenges

1) Brand Takeovers

Brand Takeovers are a type of splash screen ad, which is an ad that appears when a user opens TikTok. Clicking on the ad will lead to a target link, which may point to other TikTok videos, websites, or other apps. As shown in the figure below, a Brand Takeovers ad placed by the food delivery brand Grubhub on TikTok:

2) In-Feed

In-Feed ads are native content ads that may appear in the user's video feed or after the video the user is browsing, depending on the product category. Clicking on this type of ad will redirect to your website or APP. Generally speaking, the CPM cost of in-Feed ads is $10, which is more affordable than Brand Takeovers.

The following is an in-feed ad that appears when viewing a video on the platform, with the goal of downloading the app:

3) Hashtag Challenge

You can work with TikTok’s marketing team to launch a brand-sponsored hashtag challenge to encourage users to tag your brand and share relevant content on TikTok. This challenge usually lasts for 6 days.

6. Optimize TikTok ads

When creating splash ads or native ads, make sure the image resolution is high, because the ad will take up the entire screen and be very eye-catching. If the image resolution is low, it will affect the ad effect.

It is best to use one CTA button for each redirect link. For example, if you ask users to download your app and get a coupon code through your website, but the redirect link is the download interface of the app, it will confuse users.

As for the ad copy, TikTok does not provide much space for you to describe the product, and the ad description can only contain up to 80 English characters. Therefore, if you are selling a more complex product or service, you can use the Video Creation Kit tool.

All product descriptions appear at the bottom of the screen, so make sure to position your key creatives front and center. As with most ad formats, it’s best to try a range of targeting options and creative elements before narrowing your ads down to the combination that performs best.

Recommendation: In addition to the video creation toolkit, you can also take advantage of other tools. At the ad group level, you can use the creative automatic optimization tool (as shown below), you can upload up to 10 pictures or 5 videos, 5 ad copies and 1 CTA button, and then combine your creative assets into multiple ads. It will automatically test these creative combinations in the campaign, and finally select the best creative combination and display it to the target audience.

In addition, you can use the Landing Page to Video tool to directly enter the landing page link to capture high-definition materials, and then combine these pictures and music materials to automatically generate video ads.

In summary,

TikTok ads provide sufficient materials and automation tools, and are easy to set up and master. For now, its shortcoming is that the platform is too new and the information is not sufficient. Sellers who want to try can create a TikTok ad campaign according to this guide.