TikTok Ads: How to optimize a TikTok advertising campaign?

Now that you've set up your TikTok Ads Manager account and your ads are browsing the ForYou page, It's time to optimize your advertising campaign on TikTok to improve performance.

Your first objective is to your TikTok Ads campaigns are effective and meet or exceed the goals you set for yourself. In this article, you'll find our tips for improving your TikTok advertising strategy, making the most of your campaign budget, and maximizing your return on investment.

We have identified several optimization levers and best practices that will make your ads a success on the platform. But above all, you should know that an advertising campaign on TikTok is divided into 3 main parts (as on Meta or Google for that matter):

• The Ad Campaign : to define the objective of your TikTok campaign;
• The Ad Group : to target your audience and manage your campaign budget (via an auction system);
• And the Ads : to launch your ads on TikTok, A/B test them, and optimize them as much as possible to obtain the best possible results.

For each of these steps, we will help you optimize your strategy as best as possible. This article will therefore follow the three parts that make up TikTok Ads in order to share with you an effective and easy to set up method.

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1. Define the right goals (Ad campaign)

First and foremost, your brand should define the goals of its advertising campaign TikTok.

On the platform, this is done in the Ad Campaign.

TikTok Ad Campaigns offer you to choose between 7 different campaign objectives. Each objective corresponds to a specific stage in your customer journey (Awareness, consideration, conversion, etc.)

It is even possible toaccess other campaign goals, in particular by being a whilestiler on betas, according to your target market or by putting you in direct contact with TikTok teams.

This part is crucial for optimizing your TikTok ads. In fact, one of Top mistakes brands make Is of not choosing the right objective for their campaign.

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Depending on the results you want to get, so you will have to choose one objective over another:

• If you want to attract traffic and convert new customers to your website: opt for The Website conversion objective ;
• To grow your community and gain new followers on the platform: choose The Community Interaction objective ;
• To promote your application, it's simple: choose App promotion;
• And to gain notoriety, choose the Video View lens. It will allow you to target an audience that specifically engages with video content.

In general, we do not recommend choosing the Reach objective, which does not give very good results and generates little commitment. The Website conversion objective is much more useful since, in addition to boosting your traffic,, it allows you to track conversions on your website and target a more specific audience.

Launch multiple campaigns to achieve multiple goals

To optimize your ads on TikTok, also remember that you will have to launch multiple campaigns in order to support your prospects throughout the customer journey. At the entrance to your sales funnel, for example, you can opt for campaigns that generate engagement on your account. At the bottom of the funnel, focus on the conversion objective.

2. Optimizing a TikTok campaign by effectively targeting its audience (Ad group)

Now that you've set your goals, you can target your audience. The TikTok Ad Group will help you target the users to whom your ads will be shown according to their sociological, demographic and also geographical characteristics.

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If you're not sure how to choose which audience to target with your TikTok ads, a good practice is to Expand your audience as much as possible. By analyzing the results of your first campaigns, you can more easily identify the audience groups that best engage with your content and optimize your future ads.

At the same time, TikTok's algorithm will also collect data that will allow it to automatically optimize your campaigns and therefore help you get better results.

Your targeting strategy can include audiences who have already visited the website from your brand, signed up for your newsletter, or interacted with your TikTok posts. You can also exclude certain audiences, such as people who have already purchased the product you are promoting in your TikTok ad.

The Lookalike audience option on TikTok Ads

The Lookalike audience feature is also very useful for optimizing a TikTok advertising campaign. The latter uses an algorithm that will study the attributes of the personalized audience that you created (such as their demographics, location, operating system, or interests). Next, the application will search for other users and groups that share similar attributes.

For this strategy to work, it is recommended that Define a fairly large source audience (at least 10,000 people) and to select the right attributes. Another factor that TikTok takes into account is the option you select for audience size (specific, balanced, or broad) The more accurate the audience size is, the more successful the model will be at targeting a similar audience.

3. Create successful creatives (ad)

If defining your goals and targeting your audience are key success factors for your TikTok Ads, the creative part is even more important. In fact, 70% of your advertising results depend on your creative people.

A TikTok creative is An advertisement in an image or video format that TikTok users interact with when they open the social network and scroll through their ForToi feed.

You will have the choice between multiple formats when creating a campaign advertising on TikTok, including:

• TopView ads: an immersive full-screen ad that lasts up to 60 seconds. This type of ad is displayed at the top of the PourToi feed as soon as the user opens their application.
• In-feed ads ; the ad will be placed randomly in a feed rather than being the first thing a user interacts with when they open the app;
• The Brand Takeover : your ad will be the only ad in your category shown at the top of the For You page for an entire day;
• Branded Hashtags : this type of ad allows you to challenge your subscribers.

In addition to choosing the right advertising format (based on your goals and your target audience), also consider Take good care of your creative people. Take the time to analyze videos from influencers and brands in your field. Identify the video formats that generate the most engagement and target content elements that you can use for your own TikTok ads.

A good TikTok Ads creative will also need to:

• Arouse desire by pointing out the problems that your product or service solves;
• Generate curiosity and capture attention with a good scroll stop. It is a short video (less than 20 seconds) with catchy content (attractive visual effects, a discount announced quickly);
• Boost your conversion rate by ending your ad with a good call to action.

Reducing ad fatigue on TikTok

Competition between brands has intensified enormously on the application in recent months. For avoid advertising fatigue, and better capture the attention of your audience, you must optimize your advertising campaigns as much as possible.

To do this, we recommend that you:

• Develop native content. Give your TikTok ads an organic look, by respecting the codes and the way in which TikTok videos are made. Produce vertical content, use text overlay and free music library.
• Collaborate with a content creator. Include TikTok creators to improve ad engagement.
• Use multiple creations. We recommend using at least 3 different designs for each ad group and alternating with copies.

4. Redefining your advertising budget

Another very important factor in optimizing your ads is to redefine your budget and your auction strategy.  

In general, it is necessary to provide A TikTok advertising budget enough for the application algorithm to optimize your performance. For fame, this should not be a problem. But to generate traffic and conversions, The daily budget recommendation is 50 times your target CPA. For example, if your objective is an addition to the basket worth €2, you will need to budget your ad groups of €100 per day for the algorithm to collect enough data.

Then you can Play on bidding. At the beginning, you will be able to use safer bidding strategies (like Bid Cap or Cos Cap). They will allow you to control your budget and collect data without your expenses exploding. Experiment with different approaches, giving each a few days to show results before moving on to the other.

After a dozen TikTok Ads campaigns, you can switch to manual bidding and optimize your ads on TikTok ads not according to your cost but the value you can get out of it. In fact, l'TikTok's algorithm is starting to know your audience better and refine its retargeting.

At this point, it is more effective for target the profiles that are most likely to convert into customers. So it will focus on the people who represent the most value for your brand (because they are going to buy more products/services or at higher prices).

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5. A/B testing to optimize ads on TikTok Ads

The last step in optimizing your ads is to test. To determine which objective, targeting, creative, or budget is the most effective, you need to do what's called A/B testing.

The idea is simple: you launch several TikTok campaigns simultaneously, by only changing certain elements. For example, you can change:

• The objective of your campaign;
• Targeting users;
• The visual of your creatives;
• The bidding option
• But also the schedule at which you launch your campaign;

For your A/B tests to give concrete results, Remember to show your ads well for at least two weeks. Avoid vacation periods or traffic peaks to avoid distorting the results.

Then all you have to do is analyze your metrics and monitor performance of your advertising campaigns on TikTok. This data will allow you to see areas for improvement, such as the quality of your content, the targeting of your audience, the amount of your bids, etc.

Need help optimizing your TikTok ads campaigns? Sleeq supports you in defining your strategy, the production of your creative people and the distribution of your advertising campaigns. All in direct partnership with the TikTok France teams!