Advertising on TikTok: everything you need to know

TikTok is one of the most important social media platforms for digital advertising. After all, more than two billion people use TikTok according to recent statistics, and that number is likely to increase over the next few years. 

Given that fact, it’s crucial to know how to succeed with advertising on TikTok.

Make a TikTok Account and Install the TikTok Pixel

You can’t advertise on TikTok if you don’t have a TikTok account. Make one by creating an account on the TikTok Ads Manager. You’ll have to choose a billing country or region, then fill out some basic information. Your brand should be approved in a matter of minutes. You can log into your dashboard and follow the remaining sets of instructions in no time.

Your next step is to then make and install the TikTok Pixel. In a nutshell, this is a dedicated bit of code that your website will use to gather information about site events and what ads your target audience views.

Set up a “Web Event” in the TikTok Ads Manager to begin creating your first Pixel. You can then download a copy of the Pixel code and paste it into your website header. 

Create Campaigns and Ad Groups

At this stage, it’s time to start creating dedicated ad campaigns. Fortunately, TikTok makes this easy from the Ad Manager page. Just go to Campaign, then click on “Create”.

You can pick a campaign objective for your ads, like conversions, app installs, or traffic, plus specify other elements of the campaign. Be sure to give each ad campaign a distinct name and an advertising budget. If you want, you can set a lifetime budget and reach lots of people quickly, or set a daily budget to more gradually reach people in your target audience.

Then come ad groups, which you can create in the Ads Manager to define your audiences, license for your ads, and campaign budgets. As you progress through this stage, you’ll need to choose ad placements and select your creative types. It’s important to define your target audience, as well – that’ll help TikTok place your ads in front of the people who are most likely to be interested in your brand.

Start Making Ads

Now comes the fun and creative part: making the advertisements. TikTok allows you to upload video or image files as your ad creative materials (just be sure to read through the recommended advertisement specs to ensure that your ads look great on this platform).

There are many different types of ads you can make on TikTok, including:

• In-feed ads
• Spark ads
• Brand takeover ads
• Image ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads
• Pangle ads

Of course, different advertisements might be better for different target audiences or needs. As an example, a video ad might be perfect for SEO purposes for driving sales or driving traffic to your site. This highlights the importance of learning SEO in general. Sites that have ‘rich content’ such as videos or infographics stand a higher chance of appearing at the top of search engine results pages. But a carousel ad could be even better for brand awareness or driving engagement to an upcoming promotion series you want to push. 

In any case, customize your ads by naming them, adding advertisement text, and choosing between different calls to action. TikTok offers several different CTAs you can choose from, ranging from download CTAs to calls for sign-ups and much more.

To max out your ads’ performance, use the TikTok Promote paid feature. You can choose a goal and promote your video content more directly.

Continually Measure Your Ads’ Performance

Advertising on TikTok isn’t just a matter of building advertisements and putting them out for viewers to see. It’s also a matter of continually measuring your advertisements and how well they perform by tracking key performance indicators or KPIs.

It’s a good idea to measure your ads’ performance over time so you can:

• See which types of advertisements do the best with your target audience members. Once you know that, you can make more of those high-performing ads
• Determine which elements of the ads are most successful and, once you do so, import those elements to other marketing materials 
• Learn even more about your target audience, their wants and needs, and how you can serve them

All of this information will help you refine and improve your marketing campaign across the board, bolstering your other digital marketing efforts. Don’t run ads on TikTok if you aren’t going to use the wealth of data your users will provide you with as they view and interact with those materials.

Conclusion

As you can see, a lot goes into advertising on TikTok wisely. But if you follow the above steps, you’ll be able to bootstrap an effective social media marketing campaign in no time. Remember to keep track of your KPIs so you can see which ads perform the best. Then, you can continually iterate on your advertisements and market more effectively on TikTok as time goes on.