Setting up your first TikTok campaign

Setting up your first TikTok campaign

June 10, 2021

Best PracticesSmall Business

TikTok Ads Manager is a powerful yet easy-to-use tool for reaching audiences around the world. Once your account has been set up and approved, you’re ready to take the first step to run ads on TikTok: setting up your first campaign.

If you haven’t already done so, you may want to spend a few moments looking around TikTok Ads Manager. Browsing through the various features and functions will help you feel a bit more familiar with the platform. You’ll probably have lots of questions when you start out (most people do), but we’re here to walk you through the process step-by-step.

We’ll begin with two of the most important elements of your TikTok campaign: the objective and budget

Your campaign objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads. Do you want them to visit your website? Buy your product? Or do you just want to get your brand in front of as many eyeballs as possible? You’ll see three categories of objectives in TikTok Ads Manager: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

Here’s the breakdown of the objectives you can choose from:

👁. AWARENESS
Reach: Boost awareness by showing your ad to the maximum number of people.
🧠 CONSIDERATION

• Traffic: Drive people to any destination on your website or app, such as a landing page or blog post.
• App Installs: Send people to the app store where they can view your app’s description and download it.
• Video Views: Get more people to watch your video ads by maximizing plays from audiences who are most likely to watch them.
• Lead Generation: Allow your customers to share their contact information with you, directly on TikTok.

🛒. CONVERSION
Encourage people to complete a specific action on your website, such as adding items to their shopping cart, signing up for your newsletter or completing a purchase

Many business owners would like to choose “all of the above” for their objective, but narrowing things down is essential to get the results you want. There are no hard and fast rules, but you can help identify and fine-tune your priorities with the following questions:

• What are your business goals? Which objective matches these goals the best?
• Consider your target audience: Where are they on the customer journey? Are they familiar with your brand? If not, you might want to extend your Reach. Have they heard about you and want to learn more? You may want to drive Traffic, App Installs, or Video Views. Have they already considered your brand and are now thinking about making a purchase or signing up? Go for the Conversion.
• Do you want to showcase your brand’s personality and help customers get to know you? Video Views are great for communicating your brand’s style, mission, and unique selling points.
• Do you want to keep your brand at the top of people’s minds? Reach works well, even for well-established brands.
• Is your brand just starting out? Awareness and Consideration campaigns can lay the groundwork to optimize future Conversion campaigns.
• Last but not least: What’s your budget? Knowing what you want to spend on your campaign can help you make decisions about its objective.

Your campaign budget is the specific amount that you are willing to spend running ads. Setting your budget on TikTok Ads Manager helps you to better control your ad delivery, measure your ad performance, and allocate your marketing spend.
You have three basic options for setting your campaign budget:

• Daily Budget: The maximum amount you are willing to spend on your campaign per day. This number must be at least $50.
• Lifetime Budget: The maximum amount you are willing to spend on your campaign for its duration. This must be more than $50 multiplied by the number of delivery days.
• No Limit: If you're open to experiment, or if you’d rather set a separate budget for each ad group (instead of the entire campaign), you can select No Limit for your campaign budget. No Limit allows the system more flexibility in testing and optimizing your ad delivery.

Do you want to see results as quickly as possible? Or would you rather spread things out a bit?
At the Ad Group level, you have two basic options for delivery speed:

• Standard: Your ads will be delivered over a longer period of time according to the volume of traffic throughout the day. This helps to optimize the return on your budget.
• Accelerated: Your ads will be delivered in the shortest time frame possible. This helps to optimize your advertising results during the delivery period.

Example: You run an ad for one day with a daily budget of $1000. With standard delivery, most of your ads will be seen in the evening because this is when traffic is highest. With accelerated delivery, your ads will be delivered as quickly as possible, regardless of the traffic volume

Another important selection at the Ad Group level is to select your bid strategy in the Bidding & Optimization module. There are two main types:

• Bid Cap: You set a maximum amount that the system can spend to achieve a specific result, such as impressions.
• Cost Cap: You give the system an average cost per result that it tries to achieve.

Both Bid Cap and Cost Cap aim to control your cost per result. You can also select Lowest Cost, which doesn't require a bid; rather, it lets the system generate the maximum number of results that your budget can support. So for example, if you wanted to achieve a Cost per Click of exactly $0.15 or less, then you would need to use Cost Cap or Bid Cap. If you wanted to make sure you got the most clicks that your $1000 budget could support, use "Lowest Cost".

Deciding your budget can be tricky, especially when you’re just getting started. It becomes easier with more experience on the platform, but newcomers may want to follow these tips while they’re getting the hang of it:

• Set your budget at the ad group level instead of the campaign level by selecting No Limit on the campaign budget page.
• For your ad group budget, we suggest using a Daily Budget instead of Lifetime Budget.

There are many other ways to optimize your budget on TikTok Ads Manager that you can master as you go—after all, the best way to learn any new platform is to just get started using it. Once you’ve set your objective and budget, and you’re well on your way to connecting with a world of new customers on TikTok.