How to create TikTok campaigns for e-commerce

TikTok is one of the world’s most downloaded apps in the last few years. More than a long distance race, the TikTok trajectory can be understood as a top speed path. By launching a TikTok campaign, your ecommerce reach turns out to be worldwide. The app generates high levels of engagement through creative ad formats and precise targeting. Don’t miss this opportunity and monitor your ad’s performance to get detailed data about your users.

• Campaign: The whole setup, it determines the objective you want to optimize for. Your ad account can have different campaigns.

• Ad Group: You can have multiple ad groups in a campaign, for each one you decide the placement, the target audience, the optimization and bidding options.

• Ads: The creatives itself. The composition of video, images and texts that will be displayed to the users.

In this first step you have to decide the objective of your Tiktok campaign. Your objective is the action you want your users to take when they see your ads. In TikTok the objectives are collected into three categories.

After choosing the right objective for your TikTok ecommerce Ads, you have to choose a campaign name and budget.

The campaign budget is the amount you will spend. Setting it up will help your marketing team to take control of your ad delivery, measure the performance and leverage your marketing analytics reaching a better ROAS. In TikTok there are three options for your campaign budget:

• Daily budget: All the ads within the campaign are limited by a maximum amount you can spend on the campaign per day.
  
  
• Lifetime budget: All the ads within the campaign are limited by a maximum amount you can spend on the campaign. 
  
  
• No limit: Unlimited budget, no restrictions on your ad delivery. It gives your campaign flexibility in testing and optimizing.

Once the campaign is configured, it is time to take a look at how to create an ad group to set up the target of your TikTok campaign.

Setting up the target of your TikTok campaign

In this second step you will have to choose your ad placements, fill in ad details and set your audience, budget, schedule, bidding method and delivery type.

Let’s start for the placements and location. Is the moment to define where your ads will run, in which apps will be shown (placements) and in which countries/markets will be delivered (location). Not all placements are available everywhere, here’s a list of placements and locations.

After that, you’ll have to fill in the ad details related to the promotion type (app or website), the landing page of your ads, the displayed name and profile image and other among other ad specifications.

Also it is the moment to choose the target. Choosing the right audience your ads’ performance can improve significantly. There are two approaches in TikTok:

• Narrow targeting: You can narrow your audience by using the following targeting dimensions: demographics, interests and device options.

TikTok also allows you to create a custom audiences by finding people who have already engaged with your business. It is a powerful tool for re-marketing or  to create lookalike audiences. If you want to use this retargeting option, make sure to have the TikTok Pixel installed before launching your ad campaign.

• Broad targeting: The app will find the best target without any predefined parameters.

See how Nina Ricci got to TikTok to engage with a younger audience in Spain. Before moving to the next step, make sure to set your budget and schedule. Also keep in mind to choose the bidding and optimization options for your TikTok ads.

Designing your TikTok ecommerce Ads

Now that your campaign and ad group are ready, it’s time to create your ad. Use images or videos, include a copy and a strong call to action. TikTok Ads Manager includes video creation and editing tools to make it easier for your marketing team.

Firstly, add the creative. Check the Advertising Formats that the app offers to your e-commerce store and image and video specifications to create the content that will look best on TikTok. Discover how by using effective ad formats to hit their business goal, Stradivarius generated 12.000 new followers on TikTok in 2 days.

Then, enter ad details related to text and link that will be displayed with your ad: Display name, text, call-to-action, profile image and URL.

TikTok is super accurate with their Advertising Policies, don’t forget to review them. Let’s see some of them related to ad creatives and editorial:

• Ad creatives must not direct users to a non-functional landing page. E-commerce ads must display valid information on the landing page. 

• Ad creatives & landing pages must not display prohibited products such as drugs, political content, tobacco products and smoking…

• Lead Ads must contain a Privacy Policy on the landing page, and must not request sensitive personal information on the instant form.

• The ad creative (caption, text, images, videos, CTA), needs to be consistent with the promoted product or service on the landing page.

• In each country, TikTok supports ads only in some languages (check the full list in the Business Help Center) so the ad text must be one of the acceptable languages for the targeted region.

• Ad captions must not contain grammatical mistakes. Also ad images must not contain blurry, unclear or unrecognizable visuals.

Before launching the ad, you can use TikTok’s ad preview tool to see how the ad will look on mobile devices.

Monitor the performance of your TikTok campaigns

Once your TikTok ecommerce ad is created, it’s time to track its performance. You can use the Ads Manager tools like Dashboards to view the overall data across the advertising campaigns.

You can also use the tool of a TikTok Marketing Partner such as Adsmurai. Did you know that we have been the first spanish company to integrate its own technology with the TikTok API through our tool Adsmurai Marketing Platform?

Our Reporting & Monitoring tool allows you to obtain valuable information from your campaign metrics. 

• Analyze data grouped in pivot tables (line of business, country, platform...).

• Compare data across the different platforms you are using for your campaign.

• Measure the execution of your strategy with equivalent KPIs and attribution windows across all channels.