If you have experience with paid social media sites, making ads for TikTok will be a breeze. There are advertising campaign configuration options and organic content promotion tools, same like on other platforms. No matter what your eventual aim is, we advise starting with these steps.

First, sign up for TikTok’s Ad Manager.

Please sign up for an account if you haven’t done so previously. Due to the fact that this is distinct from a TikTok Business account and can take up to 24 hours to obtain confirmed, it is recommended that you do so well in advance of when you intend to launch your campaign.

Determine Your Aims

Choose “Campaign” and “Create new” from the available options in the menu bar.

If your account has previously run ads, you can select “Use existing,” but for the purposes of this guide, we’ll describe how to set up a new campaign.

The next screen you see is titled “Advertising Objective,” and it’s there that you can pick your campaign’s ultimate goal. Similar to Google Adwords or other sponsored social media channels, you can choose from:

Awareness

Reach

Consideration

Traffic

Amount of App Downloads

Video Plays

Generating Leads

Community Participation

Conversion

Conversions

Online Catalogue Stores (available on some accounts)

Acquisitions Made in Stores (available on some accounts)

Decide on a campaign’s moniker and budget.

TikTok assigns a name mechanically depending on your intention. In the example given below, when we changed the filter to Reach, we got the name for this particular advertisement. However, building up your own naming standards and data taxonomy (easily done in a platform like Mediatool) and using the name generated by your own tracking parameters is something we would advocate doing instead.

Find out how to establish naming conventions in Mediatool so that you can include TikTok Ad data into your reporting dashboards without any hitches.

TikTok currently permits you to activate or deactivate split testing in ad groups.

Campaign budgeting is another choice available to you. If you wish to establish a spending limit for the whole campaign, do this. You can disable the toggle and make the change at the ad group level if you choose.

There are three potential approaches to budgeting:

No Cap: Your ad distribution will be unrestricted at the campaign level, and your spending will be capped only by the ad group budget you set.

You can choose a daily budget or a total budget for the duration of the campaign. Campaign Manager on LinkedIn is very similar.

There are Campaign Budget Optimization choices for efforts that aim to increase conversions and app installs. TikTok teaches how to build up your campaigns in order to facilitate this feature.

Set up an Ad Group and Choose Your Targeting Options

After deciding on a spending limit, you’ll be directed to the Ad Groups page, where you’ll do the same things you would on any other paid social media platform:

Placements

Targeting

Original Thinker

Planned expenses and times

Method of Bidding

The default placements on TikTok are ‘TikTok,’ but the following advanced options are available for more discerning users.

Note that Automated Creative Optimization, which functions like dynamic advertisements by automatically rotating your creatives and copy to discover what works best, can also be selected here. You may want to enable this, but remember that separating creatives and copy that work well together can lead to confusing messaging.

Pick Your Ad’s Targeting

You may target users in a variety of ways, based on who they are and how they use TikTok, just like you can on other ad platforms.

Targeting Unique and Similar Consumers

Using the button shown in the illustration below, you can build up an audience for your account if one has not already been established.

Lists for remarketing and similar audiences can also be uploaded here. If you’re new to TikTok Ads or you just want to see what the platform’s targeting options can do for your business, we suggest making a new audience and keeping tabs on how well it does. TikTok lets you upload lists for subsequent use or do A/B testing on its targeting features.

This will bring up the TikTok audience manager, where you may choose the audience type you want to make. Then, you can choose from six distinct demographics when building an audience. There is a wide variety of input options to choose from. For this instance, we will choose for Website Traffic because it makes advantage of the TikTok pixel to target the most appropriate demographic.

After saving your new audience list, you’ll see it in the Audience Manager, where you may select it for inclusion or exclusion in your ad group as needed.

Population, Interests, and Activities

You can tailor your content to a certain demographic using the audience selector, and just like on other sites, you’ll see a summary of your target population to the right.

You can pick from a wide variety of topics and user habits. We believe this is a major reason why so many businesses are finding success with TikTok Advertising as it provides more in-depth analytics than other paid social platforms. To reach your ideal audience, you may now segment them based on their past engagement with your content (videos, hashtags, and producers).

To expand your ad targeting options, you may either type in or pick from a list of interests and behaviors. Keep in mind that some of the selections contain submenus where you can further specify your choices.

You can pick from a wide variety of topics and user habits. We believe this is a major reason why so many businesses are having success with TikTok Advertising, as it provides more insight than other paid social networks. To reach your ideal audience, you may now segment them based on their past engagement with your content (videos, hashtags, and producers).

To expand your ad targeting options, you may either type in or pick from a list of interests and behaviors. Keep in mind that some of the selections contain submenus where you can further specify your choices.

Device

Then, choose the available settings for your gadget. Again, this is more specific than competing networks since it allows users to specify details like the cost of their equipment.

Determine the Spending Limits and Timelines for the Ad Group

Ad groups can now have their own daily or lifetime budgets and schedules regardless of whether or not they have been awarded funds at the campaign level. Advertisements might run indefinitely, or between two specific times.

Bidding and Optimisation

Optimization Target and Upper Limit on Occurrence

An optimization target may be selected for you or left up to your discretion, depending on the initial objective you specified. In our case, we specifically targeted Reach, so all further optimizations would reflect that.

The frequency cap limits how many times an individual user is exposed to your ad in a given time frame. The greatest way to prevent viewers from becoming annoyed by ads is to limit how often they are shown.

Bidding tactic

There are three different bidding options available on TikTok.

Cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-view (CPV), and cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) ceilings (CPM)

Cost Limitation (Cap): The typical cost per outcome when CPM is maximized. The final price may end up being more or less than the winning bid, but it should at least be close.

Cost-effective: Produces the most total results at the lowest cost per result while staying within the ad group budget.

Please be aware that the available options may vary based on the goal of your campaign.

If you’re still confused about what these different bidding tactics entail, TikTok provides extensive explanations.

The next step is to head to the ‘Advanced Settings’ section, where you can be presented with the option between the ‘Standard’ and ‘Accelerated’ modes. Since this isn’t possible in order to achieve our goal, it just means that your advertising budget on TikTok will be depleted more quickly.

Brands who are just getting started on TikTok and would like to speed up their expansion or promote a new product launch may benefit from this.

Construct Your Ad

The maximum number of advertising allowed in a single ad group is twenty.

Here is where you’ll configure your Spark Ad (promote user-generated content) and select the account from which it will be shown. But for now, we’ll show you how to make a TikTok ad that doesn’t use Spark.

Identity

The first step is to give your ad a name and link it to your corporate account so that both share the same “identity.” Did you ever see a megaphone logo when browsing TikTok? In reality, there are a plethora of them available. This is due to the lack of a firm logo and name when the advertisement was initially created.

Put in your company’s branding elements like logo and user name.

This is useful for multinational corporations that maintain separate TikTok accounts for each of their regional or product markets, since it allows them to make advertisements for their regional or product-based subsidiaries while maintaining a unified corporate identity.

Publication of Commercial Messages

Step one is to settle on an ad kind. Here, you can see that we can only select “Single video” because we limited the ad group setup to “TikTok.” Only videos or Spark advertising can be used on TikTok itself. If, on the other hand, you go the News Feed or Pangle route, you’ll have the option of selecting images and videos.

Progressing to a video format. You have the option of creating a new ad creative from scratch, uploading an existing one, or selecting one from the ad library.

This launches TikTok’s editor, where you may convert photos to video, edit videos, add music and subtitles, and make use of their premade templates, among other things. TikTok simplifies the process greatly by providing users with hundreds of professionally-designed video templates that can be filtered by category, region, and movie length.

You should know that commercials only allow for video clips that are between 5 and 60 seconds long.

When you’ve finished making or uploading your video and adding text, you can preview your ad in this manner. Advertisements can be made more engaging by incorporating components such as inquiry box stickers.

Tracking and landing page

Choose between TikTok’s Instant Page and your own custom landing page. How you want your calls to action (CTAs) to appear, such as whether they are dynamic and TikTok decides for you or whether you do it yourself, is one of several options.

Finally, tracking assistance can be activated on an as-needed basis. However, we suggest integrating tracking links like UTMs into your campaign planning by using a tool like Mediatool. All of your links will be in one convenient location, and your entire team will be able to make changes and see the results without ever having to access TikTok’s Ad Manager.

When you’ve finished customizing everything to your satisfaction, look over the preview, and then hit the “Submit” button. If your ad passes TikTok’s assessment, it will be published immediately; if not, you’ll be notified of any problems and given the opportunity to fix them.

You’ll find an Add list over on the right hand side of this page. You can make duplicate ads, remove ads, and add new ads to an existing ad group in this section.