It’s time for your first TikTok campaign? Follow these steps to create an as optimized TikTok campaign for your Shopify store as possible.
Let’s start by setting up your campaign.
Step 1: Set it to Custom mode – we want to have complete control on what is happening and set up as good a structure as we can. It will take ten extra minutes of your time, but you’ll know exactly what is going on.
Step 2: Advertising objective – Website conversions – this is absolutely necessary to make it work. If you’re a Shopify store owner, you want to drive people with high intention to purchase to your website. Traffic optimization will bring cheap traffic with high bounce rate and low average session duration to your store. Read more about different optimizations.
Step 3: Additional details:
- Turn off Split test
- Turn off Campaign budget optimization
- Turn off Campaign budget
These are nice details to use in the future, but for our first campaign, this is not necessary. We want to create two or three ad sets and manually allocate budget to each one of them. CBO will just ruin our budget structure – we wrote extensively on why CBO doesn’t work for Facebook ads, and we don’t trust it (yet) to work better on TikTok ads.
TikTok Ad groups settings
To start with, you need to have the pixel implemented and active. Follow our guide on how to set up TikTok ads for your Shopify store to make sure everything is right. In addition, Lebesgue: Smarter Marketing will detect mistakes in your pixel setup – in case something isn’t working, you’ll see it in our Advertising Audit section for TikTok.
Step 1: External website conversions
Set up Conversions on External website, select your TikTok pixel and optimize for Complete Payment event.
Step 2: Automatic placements: ON
We wrote a lot about automatic and manual placement on Facebook ads and we suggest a similar setup on TikTok – until it’s proven different. Allowing users comments and video sharing is a must, and shouldn’t be turned off except in some extreme cases. Allowing this options will increase your CTR and get you closer to TikTok’s CTR Benchmarks.
Step 3: Automated creative optimization: OFF
A big question is “should I use automated creative optimization or not?”. This is a tricky one – we’d suggest you to go with “OFF” option, until your budget per ad group is around $1000/day. You don’t want to give TikTok the opportunity to create billions of ad variants, as you’ll end up in infinite loop of split test and you’ll never actually learn what works and what doesn’t.
Step 4: Demographics Targeting:
- Location: Target the whole country – don’t microtarget specific areas
- Gender: Whoever your customer is
- Age: Select based on your preferences. We’d suggest slightly broader then what you think is enough.
- Household income: All
- Audience: Exclude previous customers and website traffic
- Customer file: This is a good read on custom audiences written by TikTok. You can read more in Lebesgue’s blog on why you can’t upload custom audiences using the Shopify admin dashboard
Step 5: Interest Targeting
Find a couple of interests suitable for your store, but make sure the audience size in the upper right corner is either “Broad” or “Balanced”.
Step 6: Targeting Expansion
This varies from case to case. On Facebook and Google ads, its mandatory to use it – we’d suggest avoiding it here, unless your target audience is very narrow.
Step 7: Budget
Define a daily budget for your ads.
Step 8: Bidding & Optimization
Finally, we come to the bidding & optimization part. You should either select the Conversion or Value optimization. In general, “Value” works better on Google ads, and “Conversion” works better on Facebook ads. Since the billing event is oCPM, we’ll stick to “Conversion” optimization in this case.
You can also try Cost Cap approach. If you’re only getting started and want to test the platform, cost cap of 75% of your usual Blended CAC might be a good approach
TikTok wrote a good article on their bidding strategies, you can check it out for further understanding.
With this step, your campaign and ad groups are set up – time for some creativity with TikTok content.
Difference between Cost cap and Lowest cost, auto or manual bid
On TikTok, businesses have the option to set a “cost cap” or “lowest cost” bid for their ad campaigns. These options refer to the maximum or minimum amount that a business is willing to pay for a specific action, such as a click or a purchase.
- Cost cap: A cost cap is the maximum amount that a business is willing to pay for a specific action, such as a click or a purchase. When a cost cap is set, the TikTok for the Business platform will automatically adjust the bid for the ad campaign to try to achieve the desired action at the lowest cost possible, up to the cost cap. This can be an effective way to control ad spend and ensure that the cost of an ad campaign does not exceed a certain amount.
- Lowest cost: The lowest cost bid is the minimum amount that a business is willing to pay for a specific action, such as a click or a purchase. When the lowest cost bid is set, TikTok for the Business platform will automatically adjust the bid for the ad campaign to try to achieve the desired action at the lowest cost possible. This can be an effective way to control ad spend and ensure that the cost of an ad campaign is as low as possible.
Auto or manual bid
In addition to cost cap and lowest cost bids, businesses can also choose to set their bids manually on TikTok. This means that they can set the bid for their ad campaign themselves, rather than relying on the platform to automatically adjust the bid. Manual bidding can be an effective way to have more control over ad spend and targeting, but it can also require more time and effort to manage.
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