The Essential 2024 TikTok Advertising Guide for Businesses and Creators
TikTok’s global ad revenue is estimated to reach $17.2 billion in 2024, in which thousands of brands strategize their quarterly campaigns and paid actions. Why would a brand advertise on TikTok?
Before launching any social media campaign, it’s crucial to understand if it’s the right space to target your ideal audience. This guide will cover how TikTok advertising works, which formats are available, how much ads cost, how to create your ad strategy, and best practices and examples to get you started on the right food.
Why Advertise on TikTok?
TikTok ads can reach 13.6% of the world’s population and is the third most popular social media platform behind Facebook and Instagram.
The platform’s fast-paced, high-energy environment receives the highest average engagement among social media channels and is prone to attracting younger audiences motivated by inspiration, entertainment, and influencer advice.
The seamless in-app shopping experiences generate a powerful social-selling channel. As mentioned above, influencer marketing is very successful on TikTok, which can help boost a brand’s view-through rate by 193%.
TikTok can be a pivotal channel for your brand to invest in, but before committing, I highly recommend you continue reading to learn more about this channel’s advertising platform.
TikTok Advertising Formats
TikTok offers a variety of ad types for brands to diversify their content and placements.
In-Feed Ads
When scrolling through TikTok’s For You page, In-Feed ads appear as native videos embedded in the feed. Users can like, comment on, and share In-Feed ads. These ads include a CTA to lead potential customers to a shop, website, or sign-up form.
Source: TikTok
TopView Ads
When opening the TikTok ad, TopView ads are full-screen 3-second video ads. Considering this is the first thing users see when opening the ad, this placement can be very effective, and great for a product launch or new release.
Source: TikTok
Branded Mission Ads
If you’re looking to partner with a TikTok creator for advertising, Branded Mission ads connect a brand’s product with TikTok creators to share authentic video content. Based on your brand requirements and incentives, creators can choose to opt into this partnership.
Source: TikTok
Branded Effect Ads
Access advertising tools to create a custom filter on the app. This ad can last up to 10 days, helping boost engagement and brand awareness. A great example of this was Colgate’s Kiss campaign:
Source: TikTok
Spark Ads
Spark Ads is a native TikTok format, allowing brands to turn organic either their content or another creator’s original content, into paid ads. The likes, views, shares, and comments will be attributed to the organic post.
In this example, you can see the original content on the right, posted by creator Danielle Pheloung, which was turned into a Spark Ad, on the left:
Source: TikTok
Shopping Ads
If you have a TikTok Shop or own an E-commerce store, shopping ads are perfect for showcasing products directly in the app. Link your products directly in the ad to boost sales and conversions.
There are three types of ad formats to showcase your products:
- Video shopping ads
- Catalog listing ads
- Live shopping ads
TikTok Promote
TikTok Promote allows you to boost your organic content in just a few clicks. When boosting your post, you can select your objectives and promotion pack to leverage your content: videos, LIVES, or carousels.
Source: TikTok
How Much Does TikTok Advertising Cost?
Another element to consider before launching a campaign is advertising costs. The saturation and competition of a platform like TikTok can make paid campaigns costly.
The minimum budget for TikTok ads is $50 at the campaign level and $20 at the ad group level. While you can allocate any amount of money to TikTok campaigns, understanding the average investments helps your brand budget accordingly.
Our 2024 TikTok Ads Study analyzed over 5,000 ad campaigns to understand how marketers and social media managers build their TikTok campaigns. Our findings show that:
- Average CPC per campaign: $0.22
- Average CPM per campaign: $1.56
- Average campaign length: 26 days
We also concluded the most used and successful campaigns by campaign objective. For example, ad campaigns aimed at increasing video views are the most popular, representing 26.1% of the total. However, traffic campaigns weren’t far behind, comprising 21.3% of the study.
In terms of success, traffic campaigns receive the highest clicks and conversions, while video views receive the most impressions.
When looking at average investments per campaign objective, video views have the highest average investment of $2,537.94 per campaign. Engagement and traffic campaigns, on the other hand, have the lowest average investments at $302.91 and $330.19 respectively
Source: Metricool
How to Advertise on TikTok
Now that we’ve covered ad placements and formats, where do you start, and how can you set up your first TikTok campaign?
- Create your TikTok Ads Manager account
To create TikTok ads, you must have a professional account (Business or Creator) and set up an Ads Manager profile, which you can do here.
When walking through the campaign-building process, it’s essential to do this alongside your TikTok marketing strategy. Without a clear understanding of where you want to go, you can’t understand where you’ve been. This will align your campaign with your brand needs and goals.
- Choose your TikTok advertising objective
When opening your TikTok Ads Manager dashboard, you will see this page:
When creating a new campaign, you will first select your campaign objective. TikTok offers the following objectives:
- Reach: Show your ad to the maximum number of people. This is ideal for brands looking to increase brand awareness.
- Traffic: Send more people to a destination on your website or app, to drive traffic to a landing page or app.
- Video views: Get more views and engagement for your video ads, to maximize video ad plays and brand consideration.
- Community interaction: Get more followers or TikTok page visits to boost followers and profile traffic.
- App promotion: Get more people to install and take desired actions in your app.
- Lead generation: Collect leads for your business using your website or an instant form.
- Website conversions: Drive valuable actions on your website.
- Product sales: Sell products from your TikTok Shop, website, and app.
Keep in mind that each campaign-building process will look different per objective. For example, conversion-based campaigns offer instant forms, product sources, and app selection.
3. Select your TikTok ad placements
Next, it’s time to choose where you want your ads to appear on the app. Refer back to the ad formats to determine which placement aligns best with your goals.
Furthermore, placements vary by campaign, where some offer automatic placement and select placement, while others, like Reach campaigns only have the option for In-Feed and Search feed placements.
Source: TikTok Ads
Source: TikTok Ads
4. Define your audience targeting
This next step is essential to your ad reaching the right people. You must understand your ideal buyer persona to effectively target your audience. How can you do this on TikTok ads? Under Targeting, you can define your audience’s:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Languages
- Spending power
- Household income
- Interest and behaviors
- Devices
You can save audiences in Ads Manager for future campaigns. TikTok also recommends Broad targeting for some campaign types, automatically optimizing delivery based on your objective.
On the right-hand side, view your Available audience and Estimated results to see your projected impressions and reach.
5. Budget, schedule, and bidding
Advertising budgeting can be tricky because you want to keep costs as low as possible while yielding maximum results. According to WebFX, 63% of businesses allocate 5% – 40% of their overall advertising budget to social media ads. Before selecting a budget, consider all of your social media marketing investments. Follow this guide to create an effective social media marketing budget:
When budgeting on TikTok ads, the first step is to select a daily or lifetime budget. Daily budgets set a maximum spending cap per day, allowing advertising to control spending on a day-to-day basis. Lifetime budgets determine the ad spend over the entire campaign, letting TikTok automatically distribute funds as it sees fit.
After selecting your budget, determine how long the ad group will run. You can either select a continuous schedule, letting the ad run until all funds are allocated, or a set start and end date. TikTok offers a Dayparting option, in case you want to select specific times to show ads.
Finally, it’s time to choose a bidding strategy and optimization goal. This will depend on the campaign objective, whereas for traffic campaigns, the optimization goal may be clicks or landing page views. TikTok offers a few bidding methods to determine how much you’re willing to pay for specific actions, including:
- CPM (Cost per thousand impressions): Bid is the price you are willing to pay for one thousand impressions.
- oCPM (optimized Cost per thousand impressions): Bid is the price you are willing to pay for one thousand impressions, by selecting people who are likely to take an action you want. This is the default method for conversion and app install objectives.
- CPV (Cost per view): The bid represents the price you pay when a person views or interacts with your ad in the first 6 seconds.
- CPC (Cost per click): The bid is the price you are willing to pay per click.
TikTok also offers two bidding strategies, which focus on how your bid is optimized to reach your target audience. These include:
- Cost cap: This maintains your average bid cost, regardless of your budget. This supports App Installs, Conversions, and Lead Generation campaigns.
- Maximum delivery: This maximizes budget usage by driving the most results possible given a specified budget in a given period. This supports Traffic, Reach, Video Views, App Installs, Conversions, Lead Generation, and Catalog Sales objectives.
Keep in mind that costs per result may fluctuate based on the auction environment.
6. Ad content details
The last step in building a TikTok ad campaign is designing your ad creative and messaging. This includes choosing the:
- Ad format: Single video or carousel images, depending on your objective.
- Ad creative: Upload, choose from library, or create new.
- Text: Enter up to 100 characters of ad text, summarizing your campaign message.
- Call to action: Select multiple CTA options to automatically show different text to users for maximized performance.
- Interactive add-ons: These help grab the audience’s attention and boost engagement. Some examples include Display Cards, Download Cards, Countdown Stickers, Super Likes, and Pop-out Showcases. Upon creation, select a selling points and product image to attract your ideal customer.
- Destination: Enter a URL or custom page to drive traffic to, with the option to build URL parameters for tracking capabilities.
- Tracking (optional): This step is optional, but included for those who want to track website, app, or offline events through impression or click-tracking URLs.
Once you have reviewed your campaign details, click Publish all to finalize your ad.
TikTok Ads Best Practices and Examples
We know that building a TikTok ad campaign can be time consuming. Rather than going through the motions, implementing these best practices can enhance your ad content to increase authenticity and audience engagement.
Structured videos for effective messaging
Effective campaigns capture their audience’s attention within the first few seconds. This is crucial to achieve your campaign results and drive audience action.
How can you do this? Structuring your campaign with a hook, body, and close can dynamically lead viewers through the video.
- Add a powerful hook: 90% of ad recall impact is captured within the first six seconds. Open your video with a powerful value proposition through suspense, emotion, or surprise.
- Storytelling-body: It’s important to follow your hook with sound reasoning, examples, or results. This can include success cases, customer satisfaction, and tangible results.
- Action-driven ending: Smoothly transition your ad with a clear CTA to drive action and results.
This ad example from Better Help does a great job of telling the client’s individual story, through a powerful hook, real-life examples, and a clear call to action.
Utilize TikTok’s native advertising tools and features
There’s nothing TikTok favors more than brands that utilize its native features. Adding features like text overlays, voiceovers, auto-captioning, and video effects can prioritize your content within the TikTok algorithm and reach a wider audience.
This also includes editing options like adding music, transitions, movement, and emojis to create high-quality video content. CapCut is a great option for easy-to-use professional editing and also includes TikTok templates for ready-to-use video structuring. TikTok’s Commercial Music Library is useful for brands looking to leverage their videos with royalty-free sounds.
Before repurposing another social media ad to TikTok, brainstorm how you can utilize the native features to enhance your videos and brand storytelling.
Leverage trends and cultural moments
While trends are fast-paced and ever-changing, brands can leverage growth by capitalizing on trends and cultural moments. Brands can use TikTok’s Creative Center to analyze top hashtags, songs, creators, and videos to see what is making the most impact.
Source: TikTok Creative Center
Hashtags can help boost your content’s rankings for increased reach and awareness.
Partner with influencers and UGC creators
Influencer marketing and UGC campaigns thrive on TikTok. Users value their favorite creator’s opinions and advice. Brands can utilize TikTok’s Creator Marketplace to find aligned creators based on their goals and industry.
The LA Rams joined the power of cultural trends, trending hashtags, and influencer marketing to leverage this campaign during the Ravens and Rams games.
Showcase products and services with exclusive offers
When showcasing a product within your ad, there’s nothing more exciting for users than a discount code or special offer. While this incites users to save on a sale, this also creates a sense of urgency.
Analyze your TikTok content results
If you’re wondering how to best reach your audience and know which content best resonates with them, analyze your top-performing organic content and paid campaign (if you have launched a campaign). This will help you understand how to enhance best-performing strategies for paid campaigns. How can you do this?
Metricool offers TikTok analytics for organic and paid campaigns, to understand which content has the highest impacts for your audience. Connect your TikTok account and TikTok Ads account to measure results in one single dashboard – for FREE!
- Measure your organic community growth, audience demographics, post engagement and interactions, video impressions sources and average views, and a list of top-performing content.
- Analyze your paid campaign impressions, clicks, conversions, CPM, CPC, CTR, cost, and best-performing campaigns.
The best part is you can do this for completely free, for life. Creating your Metricool account unlocks content planning, analyzing, and campaign building across 9+ social media channels for complete social media management.
So, if you’re looking to leverage your TikTok growth, alongside your other social media channels, Metricool is your go-to platform.
