Running a Successful TikTok Ad
In this article I’ll be showing you every single step you need to run a successful TikTok ad. So this isn’t just going to be a little high-level hand-wavy article; this is going to be an in-depth tutorial where I start off by showing you how to connect to a store. I’m going to be using Shopify, then I’ll show you how to set up your TikTok ads account, and then I’ll show you a proven formula step by step exactly what to say in your video.
The Proven Formula for a Successful Ad
So I’m going to show you the proven formula of how to make a successful ad, and then we’ll talk about the future. What to do beyond that once you make an ad, how do you do AB testing, how do you look into the analytics, figure out what works, and how to actually optimize? Because ultimately, that is going to be the key element in being successful online when you’re selling something: making good ads.
If you think about it, if you go out there, you spend time, you spend effort, and you make like a not-so-great ad, it doesn’t matter how good you are at finding the right audience and targeting that ad. If it’s not a good ad, you’re wasting money. So the simple effort of just what we’re going to show you in this video and just structuring everything a little bit differently can drastically increase and improve your margins on your product.
Leveraging TikTok Ads for Free Money
Okay, running TikTok ads, number one, we actually have a way to get you some free money here, free ads that you can run. So we reached out to TikTok and they gave us like this nice little promotion. You can go through our link; you can’t find this elsewhere. If you go through our link, you’ll be able to get up to $1,500 in free ads that you can run. So if you spend $100, they give you an additional $100 to spend on ads. So again, doubling your money, free money if you go through our link below.
You can either copy and paste the link or you can just type in sandalmedia.com/TikTok, and that’ll bring you to this page right here. So we’re going to click on “get started”, we’re going to make our account here, so we’re going to enter our email. Now we can type in the industry, so I’m just going to say e-commerce, and we are selling… For this video, maybe like a little phone charger thing. So we’ll say maybe, see if there’s like electronics, for example, would be a good one. Electrical appliances, sure, we have to accept this little thing.
And now we can enter our state and then we’ll go to TikTok ads manager. Now we’re going to be connecting this to Shopify in just a second, but it helps if you set up your account here first. And now between these two, I like to go with custom mode. Simplified mode is going to kind of show you less but give you less control with that. And so custom mode, I’ll show you everything you need in this video and is not going to be overwhelming. So we’re going to click on custom mode.
Setting Up Your TikTok Ads Campaign
Alright, so then we get to our advertising objective and here you can see we have a lot of options. “Reach” might be great if you are running like a political campaign or otherwise just want to maximize the number of people who see this, you’re trying to create awareness for what you’re marketing. Then we have “consideration”, you’re trying to get people to go over somewhere and for example, “traffic” would just send them to your website. And then you’re optimizing for how many people actually go over there.
And then we have “conversion”. This is the one that we definitely want for this right here. So now, “product sales” is a great option if you have a TikTok shop already set up, but we’re going to go with “website conversions”. Just kind of keep it as generic as possible. So we are going to be selling products on Shopify, of course, website conversions are what we’re looking for. Now, smart performance campaign essentially skips the entire ad group section, you go right to the ads and then it’s using a lot of its own algorithm to really figure out and automate where those ads need to go and manage the audiences like that. I’m going to leave that set to off for this video, but feel free to play around with that on a different campaign in the future.
Who knows, maybe it’ll perform better for you. Then we scroll down to settings. Now the campaign name, everybody sets up their campaign ad group ad structure a little bit differently. For me, I’m going to name this campaign the product that we’re selling because that’s the only product on the site and then I’m going to have a dash and then I like to kind of describe what the objective is. So for this one, we’re just going to do Aurora Hub Conversion because that’s the goal here, right? Where our advertising objective is for website conversions and Aurora Hub is the product we’re selling on TikTok. And then we don’t have any special categories, it’s not credit or housing, I’m not going to have a split test.
And then we have campaign budget optimization or CBO and really explaining what this is essentially you can say my budget is $50 a day and you can have TikTok optimize based on the campaign level, the highest level and it can say, “Alright, $50, this ad group, this ad is performing really well. So we’re going to put more money there and a little bit less everywhere else and kind of rebalance according to what’s working best from the entire campaign.” The other option if you don’t have this on would be to optimize spend on the ad group level, which could basically say I want like $10 per ad group and within the ad group, TikTok can say, “Alright, this ad’s performing better than that ad,” and it can essentially optimize your budget based on that level.
So I’m going to leave CBO off right now and we could set an entire campaign budget if you wanted. I recommend doing that just so you have that anyway and I’m going to say at least $50 is what they recommend, so I’ll say $50 right now. I’m going to say continue. So this is a good point to pause here and open up a new tab and go to your Shopify store. We want to connect our TikTok account, but if you don’t have a Shopify store yet or if you have some other store that’s totally fine, if you have anything else, if you’re making this on Squarespace or Wix or whatever, WordPress, you can still connect TikTok and all we want to do is have a pixel embedded in our website so that the benefit there is that whenever somebody goes from an ad onto our website, they’ll be tracked with what they actually do.
