TikTok Advertising Demystified (A Simple Guide for Beginners)

Within TikTok Ads Manager, businesses can utilize four tactics to achieve their marketing goals.

Each tactic has three levels that unlock additional advertising features.

Here’s more about each tactic and the different levels within them.

1. Attribution (Web + App)

Attribution means knowing where your conversions are coming from so you can make informed decisions about your campaigns.

Setting your business up on a solid attribution foundation is the first requirement to building a successful advertising strategy on TikTok.

TikTok offers multiple ways to attribute events from your website to your TikTok advertising.

First, you need to implement a web attribution tool — either the TikTok pixel or the events API.

When utilizing this tactic you begin at level one and unlock additional features as you move up the ladder.

Level One: Pixel standard mode for basic conversion tracking (best suited for businesses that don’t have a dedicated web development team).
Level Two: Pixel developer mode (a more advanced solution for businesses that have a dedicated development team).
Level Three: Events API — a server-to-server integration that lets you share website’s events directly with TikTok.

2. Targeting, Bidding, and Optimization

This tactic is all about analyzing and adjusting campaign parameters to hit your goals.

Targeting, bidding, and optimization are three levels in one, which all work together in harmony. Unlike the other advertising tactics that work in a hierarchy,

TikTok emphasizes the importance of having resources dedicated to the day-to-day running of advertising campaigns.

That’s because the TikTok advertising platform evolves quickly and is always introducing new tools to enhance campaign performance.

Having a dedicated resource in house, or via an agency, can help you stay up to date.

3. Product Catalogs

This tactic is exclusively for businesses that sell products, as it focuses on a suite of tools that will help get those products in front of the right audience.

The catalogs tactic helps your business create ads at scale.

Let’s say you have three products and three separate audiences. It would be easy to go into TikTok Ads Manager and create nine ads, one for each combination of products and audiences.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t be so easy to create ads manually if you have upwards of 100 or 1000 products.

Instead, you can let TikTok’s platform create ads for you dynamically using your product catalog.

All you have to do is upload your product catalog and choose the level in the three-step system that’s right for your business.

Level One: Upload products manually
Level Two: Upload product catalogue from a CSV template
Level Three: Upload a catalog feed

Again, this is a hierarchy. As you level up you will unlock additional ad formats.

So uploading a catalog feed will grant you access to the maximum amount of ad formats available.

4. Advertising Creative

Every TikTok video is a full screen, immersive, sound-on experience. This includes TikTok ads as well.

Greater ad immersion means higher engagement levels, higher brand awareness and a much higher propensity to buy.

But it also means constantly having to keep your brand message fresh in order to maintain a high level of performance.

It’s recommended that businesses have a steady supply of new advertising creative fed into their account, ideally on a weekly basis.

Here are the three levels to TikTok creative, with each one unlocking more advertising capabilities.

Level 1 – Repurpose Creatives: Creative tools available in Ads Manager will allow you to repurpose existing ad assets.
Level 2 – Dedicated TikTok Ads: At this level you engage with an ad agency to create a steady flow of spark ads (TikTok’s native ad display format).
Level 3 – Creative Partner Ecosystem: At this level you will have an ad agency on retainer feeding you ten to thirty new creatives per week.

TikTok Advertising Best Practices

Now that you’re familiar with the four TikTok advertising tactics, let’s quickly go over some best practices.

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