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TikTok Fundamentals: Unlock the full potential of TikTok advertising

January 19, 2024

UPDATE: Ready to crush your 2024 marketing goals? Our new Web Auction Best Practices Guide lays out simple strategies and a handy checklist to maximize results each time you set up a campaign in TikTok Ads Manager.

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TikTok's advertising platform is built to drive performance at scale. According to studies, 1 in 3 people discover new products on TikTok from a video posted by a brand,¹ and over 90% of users perform an action after seeing content on the platform;² actions ranging from upper-funnel events, such as researching your brand or visiting your site, to lower-funnel events, like purchasing a product or downloading an app.

But to truly tap into the potential of TikTok's highly engaged audience and achieve the maximum results, you must first understand the basics of TikTok Ads Manager. This includes defining your objectives, establishing reliable data connections, varying ad creative, reducing the complexity of ad accounts and ad groups, building scalable audiences, and taking advantage of TikTok's powerful automation solutions.

To help advertisers better understand these core principles, we are excited to introduce TikTok Fundamentals, a powerful and easy-to-use framework for unlocking the full potential of TikTok and achieving reliable, repeatable performance at scale. Keep reading to learn more about TikTok Fundamentals and how to get the most out of advertising on TikTok.

The importance of defining your goals

The first step to a successful campaign is setting the parameters in TikTok Ads Manager to ensure it's optimizing toward your business goals. While choosing the right advertising objectives can depend on a variety of factors, the following optimization tactics can increase the effectiveness of your ad spend and reduce the time it takes to pass the learning phase (more on this later).

For new accounts or ad groups aimed at driving conversions, we recommend you start by optimizing toward higher funnel events such as 'view content' or 'add to cart' in order to help the system learn.
Advertisers looking to optimize for lifetime value (LTV) and return on ad spend (ROAS) should activate App Event Optimization (AEO) or Value Base Optimization (VBO) for app promotion and web conversion campaigns, respectively.

For more information about setting up your Ads Manager campaign and choosing the right parameters, click here.

What are the TikTok Fundamentals?

TikTok Fundamentals is an actionable framework for getting the most out of your advertising campaigns on TikTok. The framework consists of three essential components:

Fuel - Supply the system with the input it needs to deliver the output you need. This is the single most important factor in achieving success on TikTok.
Build - Build your baselines by starting simple. By reducing complexity, you can increase learning.
Automate - Ensure your campaigns work smarter and harder. TikTok's automation tools help maximize efficiency and reduce day-to-day decision making.

Now let's take a deeper look at how the TikTok Fundamentals work in practice.

Fuel conversions with reliable data connections and creative variety

Just like the For You Page, TikTok's ad delivery system is constantly testing, learning and optimizing toward your business goals through a process of machine learning. It's a powerful machine that performs better the more fuel you give it. For TikTok Ads Manager, data connections and creative variety are the fuel mixture that allows our platform to perform at its peak.

Ensure a safe & reliable data connection

The more you fuel Ads Manager with a safe and reliable data connection, the better it becomes at generating conversions. A real-time data connection accurately confirms which ads have converted with which people. This information allows our machine learning technology to accurately determine when and where to serve your ads, maximizing the chance of a conversion. Capturing all the events throughout the user journey also unlocks opportunities to leverage more enhanced solutions such as Video Shopping Ads, VBO and ROAS Reporting.

Ensuring a reliable data connection is the most important thing you can do to set yourself up for success on TikTok. And here's how you do it:

Web data connections: We recommend that our advertisers use TikTok's Pixel and Events API to maximize performance by deduplicating events and enabling Advanced Matching. Advertisers who combine both solutions see a 15% improvement in CPA.³ By capturing every event throughout the user journey and enabling relevant parameters, advertisers are able to enhance performance and unlock opportunities to leverage more enhanced solutions such as Video Shopping Ads and VBO. This allows our advertisers to further optimize towards the KPIs that matter most for their business.
App data connections: Work with a TikTok-approved mobile measurement partner (MMP) for the optimal setup. We recommend sending all attributed and unattributed conversions to maximize the data your campaigns can optimize with. It's also optimal to measure all key events, from install to monetization, and map these events to TikTok's standard events within the MMP's dashboard.
iOS campaigns: When running iOS campaigns, advertisers should be mindful of two limitations impacting post-install conversion data within Apple's SKAN (SKAdNetwork):
- User privacy threshold minimums: Avoid campaigns falling below threshold minimums and receiving 'null' values for post-install events by consolidating campaigns to just a few, larger audiences. Also, ensure that conversion schema is not used too granularly.
- Time limitations: Avoid the SKAN 48-hour post-install limitation on conversion reporting by focusing on priority events occurring within the first 48 hours post-install. No post-install data will be received after this period. If your app tends to have priority events outside of the initial 48 hours, we recommend a higher funnel event be used as a proxy correlation to later events, to avoid higher 'null' campaign values.

Win big with creative variety

Supplying TikTok Ads Manager with numerous creative options allows it to test more variations as it tries to figure out which creative is most likely to convert with which audience.

Pro tip: we recommend 3-5 creatives per ad group for the average advertiser. By supplying your ad group with a variety of creative options, you're giving it more ways to win and extend its lifespan. This has never been easier thanks to a suite of creative solutions:

CapCut: A free, all-in-one video editor that empowers anyone to create incredible video ads, regardless of video editing experience or expertise.
TikTok Creator Marketplace: Your one-stop shop for connecting brands with creators. Everything from branded content to custom creative production for your ad creative.
TikTok Creative Exchange: Scalable, high-performing ad creative delivered by a selection of the industry’s best creative partners. Provides end-to-end support from concept creation to video production.

Build your baselines by starting simple

Reducing the complexity of your account and campaign structure will help you pass the learning phase sooner. Your campaign enters the learning phase whenever a new ad group is created or a significant change is made to an existing one. During the learning phase, Ads Manager is testing and learning which people are most likely to take a desired action and which creatives are most effective at achieving that. As a result, performance is typically less stable and higher CPAs can be expected. Ad groups exit the learning phase when delivery and CPAs have stabilized, which usually takes place after roughly 50 conversions since any significant edit.

Ad account: The more conversions an ad account accumulates, the better our system becomes at predicting the click-through rate and and conversion rate, which in turn results in more reliable delivery and more efficient CPAs. As a result, advertisers should avoid having multiple ad accounts unless absolutely necessary for management or analysis purposes
Ad group: 3-5 diversified ad groups within a campaign is optimal for most advertisers. This helps the system to explore and scale and allows advertisers flexibility to A/B test different creatives, targeting options, bids and budgets. Note that simply duplicating ad groups, without any adjustment, will be counterproductive as they will compete with one another for impressions and conversions, making it harder for each ad group to pass the learning phase.
Bid & Budget Make sure you have enough budget for the ad group to accumulate sufficient (50) conversions and pass the learning phase within seven days. This means that, ideally, your budget should be 50 times higher than your target CPA. Avoid making frequent or large changes to bid and budget, as this will also make it harder for the ad group to pass the learning phase and result in delivery and CPA fluctuations. And remember, depending on your attribution window, conversion can take place several days after an ad is served.
Scalable audience targeting: Everyone's For You Page is unique to them. It serves them content they'd expect to love and content they didn't know they loved until that very moment. It's built for the future, recognizing that people have diverse and evolving interests which, all too often, don't fit within the constraints of tight demographic segmentation. This is why we recommend starting with either a broad or balanced audience if you're new to TikTok, and then refining it over time as you run your campaign or campaigns. This enables you to build your precision targeting or find new audiences to grow your consumer base.

Pro Tip: Get rid of the guesswork and leverage the TikTok Ads Manager audience size estimation tool to understand if your audience is broad, balanced, narrow, or too narrow.

Automate your campaigns to work smarter and harder

TikTok offers powerful automation tools to help advertisers improve efficiency and reduce decision making.

Smart Performance Campaign (currently in beta): An end-to-end automation solution designed to make running optimal campaigns easier by reducing the number of manual steps involved. All you need to get started is a marketing objective, budget, targeting country, creative assets and text, and SPC will do the rest.
Campaign Budget Optimization: Allows advertisers to set a campaign budget that acts as the unified budget for all ad groups within the campaign. This means that performance is maximized across the entire campaign rather than within each individual ad group. During testing, activating CBO was shown to drive 5.5% more conversions, and lowered CPA by 7.0% on average.⁴
Smart Creative (currently in beta): An automation tool that combines assets (video, text, CTA) uploaded by the advertiser to create high quality ads, which are then continuously tested and optimized for performance.

Measure and learn

Now that you've mastered the TikTok Fundamentals, it's time to measure the results and learn about the value your campaign is driving. TikTok offers a full suite of measurement solutions that fits your attribution model and solves for the fact that 79% of all conversions attributed to TikTok by users themselves were missed by last click attribution models.⁵

Conversion Lift Study: First-party solution that uses scientific hypothesis testing to determine how many conversions occurred as a direct result of your TikTok ad. Conversion Lift Studies are complementary to attribution models and help to identify “incremental” conversions—the conversions that actually resulted from your campaign.
Post-Purchase Survey: Complements your attribution model to provide you with a more comprehensive, rounded and nuanced view of your media budget effectiveness. This will help you connect with your customers, diversify sources of insights and attribution for optimization, and have a side-by-side analysis of last click and zero-party attribution.
Multi-Touch Attribution: Leveraging a third-party partner, Multi-Touch Attribution analyzes how customers interact with multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. It allows marketers to track these touchpoints and understand which are most effective in driving conversions and which ones need more attention.

Achieve performance at scale

The importance of the TikTok Fundamentals can not be overstated. Applying the TikTok Fundamentals will allow you to:

Pass the learning phase - Sticking to the Fundamentals will help you pass the learning phase on TikTok quickly so you can move forward with your campaigns.
Draw insights about what works on the platform - The system then has a clear view of who to show your ad to and optimize for your desired outcome (e.g., conversions). As a result, delivery and oCPM stabilize.
And finally scale Now is the time to put your learnings to the test and replicate the success you have seen at scale.

To get started on TikTok Ads Manager click here.

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