Benefits of TikTok Ads: 9 Things You Should Know

We believe you all know what TikTok is: a social media platform that allows users to create, edit, discover, and share videos. We also think you know that advertising on the TikTok platform has been possible since August 2024 in Croatia. This blog post will discuss the benefits of TikTok Ads and reveal nine things you should know when advertising on TikTok. With TikTok marketing, you use TikTok to promote a brand, product, or service. You can use tactics like creating viral organic content, leveraging user-generated content to boost authenticity, collaborating with influencers, or using ads to increase your brand.
TikTok marketing can help your business with:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Building engaged communities
- Sell products or services
- Get feedback from your community and customers
- Advertise products and services to your target audience
#1 How popular is the platform?
TikTok is the world’s 5th most popular media platform. It has almost 1.6 billion active worldwide users monthly and positions itself at 5th place after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Also, it is the fastest-growing social media platform thus far, reaching 1 billion users in just 4 years. In comparison, Facebook reached 1 billion users in 7 years.
Powerful algorithms, unique content, interaction possibilities, and short video formats that suit short attention spans contributed to TikTok’s popularity.
In Croatia, there is an estimate that there are around 1.1 million active users on the platform. TikTok is Croatia’s 6th most popular social media platform after Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Croatians spend an average of 34 hours and 51 minutes monthly on TikTok, ranking TikTok in first place in terms of time spent on the platform in front of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
#2 TikTok advertising
Before you start advertising on TikTok, you will need to set up your Business Centre, create an Ads Manager account, connect it with your TikTok profile, and set up a pixel on your website if you want to track conversions, make some remarketing audiences, etc. Before we dive into details and tips about TikTok advertising, we will start with the basic structure of TikTok Ads Manager.
TikTok Ads Manager organizes ads in three main parts:
- Campaigns – the first step to running ads, determining your campaign objectives or goals
- Ad groups – setting ad placements, audiences, schedules, bids
- Ads – content presented to your target audience.
Creating a campaign is the first step to running ads, and on the campaign level, campaign objectives or goals are determined. Ad placements, audiences, budgets, schedules, and bids are set up on the ad group level. Ads are the content presented to the target audience.
Contact us if you need help starting your TikTok advertising journey or want to begin making content on your TikTok profile.
#3 Campaign objectives
Let’s say you have already done all the prerequisite actions and are ready for advertising. The first thing you need to do is to choose the campaign objective you want to use. Campaign objectives guide your ads to the specific outcome and help you achieve your goal. Every objective influences how the algorithm optimises the delivery of ads; each objective triggers a specific optimization mechanism. The campaign objective is set on the campaign level, a goal you want to set and meet to help grow your brand and business and engage with your audience.
There are three categories of campaign objectives in the TikTok Ads Manager Account:
- Awareness – Reach the audience and introduce them to your brand, product, or service
- Consideration – The audience becomes interested in your brand, product or service
- Conversion – The audience decides to buy your product or use your service
Three categories in TikTok Ads are very similar to Meta Ads campaign objectives. You can read more about them in our Meta Ads Campaign Objectives blog.
Every category has its objectives, but not everyone is available in Croatia. We will list them and explain them briefly in this blog.
Awareness
- Reach – Show your ad to the maximum number of people
Consideration
- Traffic – Send more people to a destination on your website or app
- Video Views – Get more views and engagement for your video ads from the audience most likely to pay attention
- Community interactions – Get more followers, profile visits, and page visits, or promote your live stream
- Branded Mission – Get more engagements through collaborative solutions. Not available in Croatia.
Conversion
- App promotion – Get more people to install and take desired actions in your app cost-effectively
- Lead generation – Collect leads for your business
- Website conversions – Drive valuable actions on your website
- Product sales – Sell products from your TikTok Shop.
#4 Targeting
It is not enough to create a campaign; determine which video you will use and start the campaign. You need to know your audience and to whom you want to serve your ads to reach your goal. Targeting is set on the Ad Group level of TikTok Ads, and it enables you to display ads to specific users based on their audience type, demographics, interests, behaviors, and devices. Once you determine these targeting options, the TikTok system will optimize ad delivery based on your campaign objective.
Audience Targeting
Create a Lookalike or Custom Audience. With a Lookalike audience, you will reach people who are similar to your customer base and are likely interested in your products and/or services. The system will show ads to people with similar characteristics to your targeted audience. With a Custom audience, you will target people who have already shown interest in your brand, product, or service by having already engaged with your brand, like visiting your web page, liking your profile, seeing, clicking, or engaging with your content, etc. This is an excellent option for remarketing, reminding people about your brand, product, or service.
Demographic and Device Targeting
TikTok Ads allows you to target your audience based on gender, age, location, language, spending power, and household income. You can select one or all of the demographic targeting options. If you have identified your buying persona, you are halfway there to start targeting the right people with your ads. You can target males, females, or both genders. Age targeting is segmented into age groups: 13-17, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, and 55+. Make sure you target the right location, you can use Country/Region, State/Provience and Citys. Location targeting is not as developed on TikTok Ads as on Meta Ads, so we can only target Croatia; this may change one day. Targeting spending power will deliver ads to people based on their purchase behavior through TikTik ads. Household income targeting is only available in the US. Device targeting allows you to deliver ads based on the devices people are using. You can target Conecction Type, Operating System, Operating System Version, Device Model, Device price, etc.
Interests and Behaviour Targeting
Interest targeting allows you to target people based on their long-term interests and interactions with content on TikTok. This is a great way to reach a relevant audience for your ads. You can choose from a predetermined interests list in the Ads system, such as Vehicle & Transportation, Travel, Games, Pets, etc.
Behavior targeting allows you to show your ads to people based on their recent behavior on TikTok. Here, you can analyze how your audience engages with your TikTok content through two categories of actions: Video-related Actions and Creator Following Actions. Video-related actions are engagements that people perform on TikTok, like watching a whole video or just a segment of it, as well as people’s likes, sharing, and comments. Creator Following Actions is based on an audience who is following and has visited the home pages of specific TikTok creators.
#5 TikTok Ad Formats
There are many types of TikTok Ad formats you can use in advertising. Here are some of the most popular ad formats.
- In-Feed ads – ads that appear in users’ feeds
- TopView – prominent ads that appear when you open the app
- Branded Hashtag Challenge – encourages user-generated content
- Branded Effects – uses custom AR filters and effects
- Spark – boost your organic content to drive engagement and conversions
You can read more about ad formats in our other blog post-TikTok advertising: A long-awaited feature of a growing social network.
#6 Measuring TikTok Performance
After you create your campaign, determine the audience, select which video you will use, and start the campaign, you need to follow and analyze the performance of your ads. How well do your ads perform on the platform? You will analyze different metrics based on your chosen campaign objective and goal. The deeper you go in the marketing funnel, the more metrics you must follow and explore. We won’t go deeper in following the results and performance of the campaigns. If you want to increase your brand awareness, the most important metrics will be reached, such as impressions and CPM, but if you are a webshop and advertise your products, the most important metrics will be conversions, cost per conversion, and ROAS.
A very cool tool in the TikTok Ads is called “Audience Insights.” You can find it under the Analytics button in Ads Manager. Audience insights provide information about TikTok users who have been active in the last 30 days; it aggregates organic and paid data and is not based on campaign-level information. You can explore TikTok user interests, behaviors, and demographics to maximize your results and find a way to scale your campaigns. It has two tabs, Campaign Potential and Campaign Reach. Campaign Potential shows you your pre-campaign audience insights at the TikTok level, and Campaign Reach shows you a view of your post-campaign audience insights. It has many options, so it deserves a special blog post. Here, we will list what you can find in it:
- Audience Overview
- Interests
- Engagement
- Audience Overlap
Also, you can configure your audience with the filters and sub-filters:
- Locations
- Languages
- Demographics
- Interests & Behaviors
- Ad Interest Categories
- Video Interactions
- Created Interactions
- Hashtag Interactions
- Devices
#7 Budgets & Bids
TikTok requires a minimum daily budget of 50€ for campaigns and 20€ for ad groups. Also, you can choose between a lifetime budget and a daily budget. The lifetime budget is calculated as the minimum daily budget x scheduled days. Campaign objectives, targeted audience, video creatives, bid strategy, and competition impact the monthly cost of advertising. When you decide to start advertising on TikTok, start small and test. Test everything, from audience targeting to video creatives, campaign objectives, and bidding system. You can use different bidding strategies:
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
- Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM)
- Cost-per-views (CPV)
- Cost-per-action (CPA)
#8 Tips and tricks
Follow the Best Practices to drive better performance. Although these best practices are for making videos, they are also helpful in advertising. High-quality videos that follow these best practices will drive your performance. The recommended video length is 15-30, full-screen video, set to auto-play with the sound on. And try to be authentic.
- Shoot vertically – 9:16 aspect ratio
- Shoot High-Resolutions – 720p or higher
- Leverage sound – speech, music, voiceover, ASMR, sound effects
- Get your message out in the first 6s
- Include a strong CTA
Test different budgets and creatives, use TikTok Audience insights, analyze and leverage Pixel information to track conversions, and optimize ROI.
#9 Should you use TikTok Ads?
If you think you would profit from advertising on TikTok, try it out. It has a lot of excellent targeting options for reaching your target audience. As said before, it is the number 5 most popular platform in the world; several TikTok users are increasing each day, making it a perfect platform to send your message and showcase your brand, product, or service. Here are some advantages of using TikTok Ads. You can access a large audience, but not every brand needs to reach a large audience. TikTok offers precise targeting options based on user behavior, interests, demographics, or targeting based on users. It has excellent viral potential because of its viral challenges and trends. If you think you will profit from TikTok ads, don’t hesitate to try them out. If you follow the proper steps in creating the videos, know your audience, and choose the right goals in your campaigns, you can benefit a lot from TikTok ads. If you think TikTok is not for you or your business, try it out anyway. Maybe it will surprise you. But start small to test it out at first, and if you are happy with the performance, scale it up. Using your campaign results and Audience Insights, make data-driven decisions about investing more or less in TikTok Ads.