Performance marketing
Ace the Auction: Best Practices for Performance
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.
All good marketers want to make sure their campaigns take flight, soar to great performance heights, and land successfully with their audiences. But how do you navigate the TikTok auction in order to hit your marks? Read on for our insider tips to optimize ad performance. We will walk through performance best practices in the following chronological steps, from setup to delivery:
Gear up: Signals
Set your sights: Targeting
Fuel your ads: Creative
Plot the flight path: Bidding and budget
Steer to your goal: Adjusting in-flight
The below represent our top picks for success, and if you want the full list with more details, check it out here. Now let's get ready to take off!
1. Gear up: Signals
The most important step before setting up your campaigns is implementing the right measurement solutions to send signals to TikTok. To power performance marketing, signals unlock targeting, optimization and performance measurement by building a picture of user intent and interaction data from various sources, including your own app and website. So make sure you:
Share signals with TikTok. For web marketers, choose between Pixel and API integrations based on your technical capabilities and business needs. For app marketers, we have integrated with leading mobile measurement partners (MMPs) and are testing direct Events API & SDK solutions. See more details on signals and attribution for web marketers and app marketers.
Share full-funnel events from your website or app to TikTok. You may have either upper-funnel or lower-funnel goals, but both can benefit from signals throughout your funnel. If you have lower-funnel goals, TikTok's machine learning system can use your upper-funnel events to better predict the conversion rate (eCVR) for lower-funnel events and optimize accordingly. If you cannot post back all your event data, post back at least three events from the upper, mid, and lower parts of your funnel.
Share all unattributed event data from your app and website to TikTok. This gives TikTok's system more signals to optimize ad delivery and also lets you create retargeting audiences.
2. Set your sights: Targeting
How should you hone your aim to find the right audience? Reaching the audiences that are most likely to take action is a key lever for improving performance. TikTok has tools for you to define your desired audience, but you want to first start broad, then narrow down, with the help of smart TikTok targeting features. Here's the order of operations:
Ensure scalable audiences. TikTok's ad auction needs to conduct an initial learning in order to begin discovering the best audiences for your ads. Therefore, an ad group with a broad or balanced audience size will give TikTok's system more opportunities to explore audiences and optimize targeting for your ads. You can also try TikTok's Automatic Targeting, which automatically and dynamically adjusts the audience targeting for you. (Take a deep dive to understand more about TikTok's Learning Phase)
Broaden targeting when it's hard to pass the learning phase, there is a drop in budget consumption, or the CPA is too high. Adjusting targeting will give the system more room to discover new audiences likely to convert. If you are unsure of how to adjust your targeting, try TikTok's Targeting Expansion to find new audiences.
Use TikTok's "exclude audience" function to remove people from your target audience who have already converted. Make the most of your budget by targeting people who haven't completed the action you are driving. For example, you should exclude people who have already installed your app from an ad group optimized against app installs.
3. Fuel your ads: Creative
Creative fatigue is a major factor that shortens an ad's lifespan. Of course, creative success is an art and science. To help you stick the landing, we have put together key tips for optimizing your creative for better ad performance.
Create engaging TikTok ads by leaning into current trends and leveraging creative partners. Ad engagement drives auction performance, and what better inspiration than the video styles and trends that are most engaging now? Check out TikTok's Creative Center to discover the latest trends, and find your next collab with TikTok Marketing Partners, TikTok Creator Marketplace, or TikTok Creative Exchange. App advertisers can leverage Dynamic Scene within TikTok Ads Manager to create ad variations based on existing ad creatives.
Refresh creatives to extend the lifespan of your ad groups before creating new ones. Fresh and engaging creatives are a top factor determining the lifespan of your ad groups. Don't rush to create new ad groups when you see creative fatigue start to set in. Instead, try reviving your current ad groups by adding new creative and optimizing current ad group settings. For App advertisers, try leveraging Dynamic Scene within TikTok Ads Manager to create ad variations based on existing ad creatives. If the existing ad group is still not performing as expected after attempts at optimizing the creative, then you should create a new ad group and upload new creatives into it.
Use TikTok Ads Manager's tools for optimizing creative, including Video Insights, Split Test and ACO. Video Insights surfaces the key frames of engagement and performance in your videos to inspire creative improvements, and TikTok Ads Manager's Split Test makes it easy to run scientific A/B tests. Then with Automated Creative Optimization (ACO), you can automatically create new ad creative and select the best-performing creatives as you scale your campaign.
4. Plot the flight path: bidding and budget
Your bidding and budget parameters impact ad delivery and scaling. So before your campaign takes flight, make sure you know how to optimize those parameters.
Always enter the maximum amount that you are willing to spend on conversions. This gives the system more opportunities to find the right audience for your ads and improve your auction competitiveness. If you are running campaigns that optimize towards conversions and you have selected Cost Cap as a bidding strategy, set the highest acceptable cost per action you can accept. If your campaign optimizes for Value, you can alternatively set the lowest ROAS value you can accept. (Learn more about Cost Cap and Minimum ROAS bidding strategies)
Use historical benchmarks to determine your bids. To determine a reasonable bid, try the following:
For Cost Cap ad groups: Refer to your actual CPA from ad groups targeting the same audiences, promoting the same products, and optimizing against the same goal.
For Minimum ROAS ad groups: Refer to your actual ROAS from the past seven days for ad groups targeting the same audiences, promoting the same products, and optimizing towards Complete Payment.
If you don't have access to these benchmarks, run ad groups using the Lowest Cost or Highest Value bid strategies. After they run for a few days, you can use the actual CPA and ROAS as references for your future bids.
Keep your campaign budget open and use a daily budget for ad groups. To avoid a sudden halt of your ad groups' delivery, set a daily budget for each ad group instead of on the campaign level. We also recommend a daily ad group budget over lifetime budget in order to maintain delivery on a daily basis. Use a daily ad group budget of at least 10 to 50 times your target CPA. You can leverage Campaign Budget Optimization to help optimize budget allocation between ad groups.
5. Steer to your goal: Adjusting in-flight
Optimal performance requires monitoring the ad campaign and making adjustments based on indicators and data insights. Keep your eyes on the metrics and adjust the "throttle" when you see certain signs.
Focus on tracking the metrics that matter most. By defining your goal metrics, you can identify when you need to optimize performance and what adjustments to make. For example, if your goal is to drive sales and your ROAS is strong, do not make adjustments based on high CPM results.
Only adjust one ad group or campaign setting at a time and wait at least two days before making additional adjustments. Making significant adjustments to your ad group can restart the learning phase, both during the learning phase and post-learning phase. Do not immediately decrease your CPA bid or increase your ROAS bid when the actual CPA/ROAS does not meet your targets. Decreasing your CPA bid and increasing your ROAS bid can lead to immediate drops in budget consumption.
Increase or decrease budget based on CPA and ROAS expectations. Increase your budget when the budget consumption rate is above 95%, AND your ads are meeting your expectations for CPA or ROAS. Reduce your budget to control CPA and ROAS when using Lowest Cost and Highest Value bid strategies.
The above are strongly recommended foundational guidelines for adjustments, but specific campaign adjustments can vary and highly depend on the performance metrics you are seeing while in-flight. Find more detailed tips and variations on adjusting bidding and budgeting in this comprehensive best practices guide.
Keeping your bearings straight to ace the auction
We hope these best practices can hone your navigation of the TikTok auction based on our observations from historical campaigns. But keep a 'test and learn' mindset and experiment with what works best for your specific performance campaigns. Understanding and mastering those best practices will help drive performance, but the top three things to remember are:
Signals are the foundation of performance campaigns in terms of both measuring and optimizing performance, so integrate the right TikTok signals for your campaigns to lift off.
For targeting, bidding, and budget, start broad to allow the TikTok Auction to learn, and then continuously monitor performance to refine and narrow in increments.
Creative fatigue is a top factor that shortens an ad’s lifespan, so explore and leverage TikTok’s creative optimization tools and best practice resources to keep your creatives fresh!
Connect with your TikTok representative or explore our comprehensive guide to performance best practices to learn more about how you can ace the auction!
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