A short guide how to advertise on TikTok (2024)

It is no secret that video ads are on the rise today. And there’s nothing you can do to avoid this. The real breakthrough has become the social network, long mastered by teenagers. We will talk about it today. TikTok — full of short videos suddenly has become very attractive for advertisers. No wonder that it’s so popular with 300 million monthly active users.

Of course, the prospect to invest a significant part of your trimestral budget in one type of ads can seem risky. Especially if it’s your first time trying to run ads on TikTok. But let’s rely on statistics and bare numbers only. According to e-Marketеr research, by 2023, more than 209 million video ads in the US will belong to smartphones. Now this investment looks wiser, doesn’t it?

Pandora’s box is open, the process is running, in these conditions you can only adapt! What is the secret of TikTok’s popularity? Let’s try to figure out the following questions together:

• Why is TikTok worth your attention?
• How to run ad campaigns on TikTok?
• How to set up ads on TikTok?
• How to optimize your work on TikTok with a tracker and save time?

You will learn all this info in this article!

What is Tik Tok?

Do you remember Vine? It is a popular mobile app full of short, funny videos. In 2017 Vine was pulled out of the market by the bold and organic competitor — Musical.ly. The app has skyrocketed thanks to teens around the world. Unfortunately, Musical.ly hasn’t existed long. The app closed and was replaced by the Chinese analog Douyin. In fact TikTok and Douyin are the same application running on separate servers.

TikTok has inherited all the best from its predecessors. There are numerous filters, animation, masks and other special effects at the disposal of users. Especially popular among subscribers is lip syncing (synchronization of lip movements with sound). To create video with this effect, you should select a song fragment in the application database, which can be integrated into the video. TikTok users also dance, joke, play sports, or just record snippets from life. In general you can find completely varied content here.

TikTok Vs Youtube Vs Snapchat

One of the most common and reasonable concerns about TikTok is that it still lags behind other video-focused apps such as Youtube and Snapchat. But does this mean that it can be neglected?

Let’s go back to the numbers again. As of 2018, over 54% of users prefer video content to other types of advertising. The obvious leader here is Youtube with almost 2 billion monthly active users.

Another study shows that almost ⅔ of all users watch only up to 90 seconds of the video content shown to them. Considering the strong growth of mobile traffic, applications designed for short video content are coming to the top.

Snapchat is in the leading position here (301 million Monthly Active Users). In fact, Snapchat is a significantly stronger competitor for TikTok in comparison with Youtube. However TikTok manages to grow in volume quickly.

Who uses TikTok?

TikTok is one of the top ten mobile social networks with 300 million active users. TikTok users include celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Will Smith, and Jimmy Fallon. If you take into account TikTok’s Chinese sibling Douyin (625 MAU), the number will be almost a billion. It isn’t that far from industry giants like Instagram and Facebook. Not so bad! Moreover, TikTok is a new app. It means the ability to reach new geos, fewer problems with launching ads in the app and less bias from the audience.

TikTok advertising: what you need to know?

Based on the foregoing we can make several conclusions:

TikTok is extremely popular among Gen Z. So a large share of people hanging out on TikTok are users of the same age. You can clearly determine if this audience suits your advertising needs.

TikTok’s algorithms are easy to trace. Recommended videos on TikTok are based on location and users behavior (yes, there will be many privacy settings you have to accept before enjoying cats and pranks videos). The TikTok database is a haven for any affiliate looking for new ideas for their target audience.

Leading content marketers prefer the video format, which is a basic one on the platform. And this is great, cause you don’t have to worry about choosing the type of advertising!

Types of advertising on TikTok.

Nowadays many influencers consider TikTok as a great airstrip for gaining popularity quickly. After creating a large group of followers, these guys usually migrate to more respectable platforms (Instagram).

Advertising on TikTok is also interesting because it mostly falls into the “Advertainment” category — advertise while entertaining. This kind of content gives the highest engagement rate and finds a warm response in the hearts of users. Let’s find out what type of advertising is worth investing in. Currently there are 5 main types of ads available to TikTok users:

IN-FEED NATIVE VIDEO is a form of native advertising. Each ad must fit within the common theme of the channel. A 9 to 15-second video with a call-to-action option appears in the user’s feed when he scrolls the content page. It can be scrolled easily. It is not annoying and allows you to track your ads effectiveness quite easily.

BRAND TAKEOVER is a first thing the user sees when he opens the app. Brand advertising is displayed the first few seconds after opening the application (photo, video, gif-image with a direct link or a unique hashtag to go to the Brand’s landing page).

TopView is a hybrid between BRAND TAKEOVER and IN-FEED NATIVE VIDEO. These ads open as soon as the app launches, but it also easily fits within the user’s feed. Unlike IN-FEED videos, TopView is displayed in full screen. So promoted content is the only thing the user can focus on. No distractions.

BRANDED LENSES, MASKS, STICKERS are another way to increase brand awareness. A very creative format for interactive integration. Larger brands are investing in customized lenses and effects to inspire users to create their own branded content.

HASHTAG CHALLENGE is the most effective ad format on TikTok. The brand finds influencers who launch a challenge with a branded hashtag and a specific music track. Successful examples of such videos get 500,000 views in average from each influencer and get included in recommendations in the users feed. Users start participating in these challenges for their part. The success of an ad can be mainly judged by the recognition among the users. It can gain incredible popularity or go into oblivion with a tidy sum of your money.

It should be mentioned that not all of these types of advertising will be useful for an affiliate.

TikTok for affiliates. How TikTok for business works

From June 2020, affiliates can place advertisem*nts on TikTok officially.

Previously, you needed a Pro account to advertise on TikTok. This is a special type of account for bloggers and businesses. It makes it possible to: increase popularity for free; select a profile category; view account analytics (views, subscribers); watch analytics for each video (number of views, likes, watching time, audience); run ads.

It is an ideal solution if you want to make money on this platform or promote your business.

Until recently, a Pro account was the only option for advertising. But now another one option has appeared. No one knows if all these crazy events of 2020 have influenced the TikTok decision but the platform finally decided to officially launch a new brand and a platform — “TikTok For Business”.

And that’s a great news for affiliates. As previously only product owners could advertise on TikTok. Thanks to TikTok For Business affiliates are back in the game.

TikTok for Business allows advertisers to interact with all of the video formats described in the previous part. In addition, there is a new AR advertising effect called “Branded Scan”. This is an improved version of the branded effect that was previously added to TikTok. It will allow you to add effects to the foreground or background of a video.

Additionally, TikTok is launching an online learning center to help marketers learn TikTok and its ad formats. The training participants will receive product guides and learn the best cases.

TikTok hasn’t revealed its ad tools pricing till the October 2019, when Ad Age has posted a social media presentation with ad pricing.

However, it’s still difficult to calculate the average cost of a TikTok ad campaign, so we have dug in different sources and figured out what you can expect:

The average CPM on TikTok is $10 and the platform requires a minimum investment of $500 to operate.

TikTok’s pricing policy is not transparent, but with the new business platform, you can expect a minimum daily ad spend of $50.

Quite expensive, isn’t it? But the access to a multi-million dollar platform where users are not tired of advertising is quite tantalizing too.

To reduce the cost even more, you need optimization. A powerful tracker will help you out here. We recommend PeerClick. It works great with TikTok and provides you with an opportunity to save on investment.

Knowledge from the Internet, ideas gathered on forums, and a good radar are all great, but not enough to make money. An affiliate cannot be successful without collecting and analyzing data. To achieve success, you need to track all your ad parameters: offers, creatives, browser versions, user device models, and much more.

This is where the tracker appears!

With the tracker you will not only get more information about your target audience, but also collect enough data to simplify your work with future advertising campaigns. I’m talking about automation, traffic distribution, A / B testing and many other interesting solutions.

You should also make sure that the tracker supports all the traffic sources and affiliate networks you will need in the future. For example, PeerClick has integration with more than 150+ affiliate networks. Moreover the list of integrators is constantly growing!

Working with PeerClick, you will also receive extensive analytics from various sources — not only TikTok, but also Facebook, Google and others!

Run ads to relevant audiences with advanced targeting and rules;

Optimize performance with automated A / B testing;

Protect your campaigns from fraudulent traffic;

Decide for yourself what to show to the user and what to the moderator

Track expenses and incomes simultaneously in multiple currencies.

You can learn more about the benefits of PeerClick here.

What’s more, PeerClick can work flawlessly with other third-party tracking platforms that TikTok works with too. Such as: AppsFlyer.

On top of that, TikTok offers advertisers a pixel-based solution to track what users usually do after clicking on an ad. This point is especially important for what we are going to talk about next.

It’s time to put theory aside and get into practice. We’ve developed a detailed guide with step-by-step instructions for setting up campaigns on both TikTok and PeerClick. Let’s get started

1. Let’s start by creating a new campaign in PeerClick. You will need to add an offer, a landing page and a traffic source (TikTok). Next, copy the campaign url as soon as it is created. The setup on the PeerClick side is completed. Let’s move on to setting up on TikTok.
2. In the TikTok Ads dashboard, go to the Campaign tab and click the Create button. Choose the advertising target. There are three of them: traffic, conversions and app installation. Select conversions. Go to the Ad Group, paste the URL copied in the tracker in the “Ad Details” section and make a test conversion.
3. At this step TikTok will prompt you to create a Pixel in a new tab. You can do it yourself or ask Google Tag Manager to install a pixel on your thank you page.
4. Be sure that you have set the pixel on all the items you are interested to track.
5. Go back to the “Ad Details” tab, update it to make sure all your changes are saved, and tweak the advertising campaign details. After that you need to upload the creative to the “Ad” section and replenish your account in the “Payments” section.

The setup is complete. Now, not only TikTok tracks all important metrics, but also PeerClick does. You can now analyze users behavior and industry trends. Not a single cent on expensive TikTok traffic will be wasted.

Moreover PeerClick gives you an incredible offer! Now you can get 100K LIFE-TIME EVENTS and set up one cloaking campaign! Hurry up and see how PeerClick can make your campaigns profitable.