TikTok advertising: A long-awaited feature of a growing social network

What are TikTok ads?

Initially, we should explain what TikTok is if some people still do not know or have not heard of one of the most popular apps. TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to create, edit, discover, and share videos. Since its launch, TikTok has become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms. TikTok’s global monthly active users reached 1 billion in 2024.
It started as an app young people use to express themselves through dancing, singing, and lip-syncing. It allowed users to create videos and share them across a community. Over the years, it has become more than just a platform for creating and sharing short videos. It has also evolved into a platform for entertainment, news, marketing, social activism, a learning hub, and more.
Because of its fast and colossal growth, brands worldwide increasingly use TikTok advertising to reach their target audience. It is a smart place to spend your ad budget to get a large and highly engaged audience, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha members.
While creating organic content, investing in TikTok ads will further boost your brand’s impact on the app’s audience. Brands use various forms of advertising on TikTok to increase their visibility, user engagement, and sales.

TikTok Ads

TikTok ads are paid marketing campaigns that help businesses reach specific audiences on the platform. They are customizable based on particular advertising goals, audience demographics, budgets, and schedules. These ads appear between organic, user-generated content with a “sponsored” tag and a call-to-action button, which viewers click to reach the ad’s landing page. Most TikTok ads work on an auction model, where users specify a bid and daily spend limit for their campaigns. However, users can also use TikTok Promote to turn organic content into a paid advertisement.
You will see different ads when you use TikTok and scroll through it. As we mentioned, all of the advertisements that TikTok is paid to place in user feeds or the search page are marked with a “Sponsored” or “Ad” icon. You can interact with the ad in the same way as the content the user posts. For example, you can share, like, comment on, or replay an advertisement if the advertiser enables these features for a particular ad. You can also tailor your ad experience and mark “Not interested” if you are not interested in an ad and want to see similar ads less frequently in the future.
When it comes to TikTok’s advertising structure, there are three levels, just like on Meta:

• Campaign: A collection of TikTok ad groups. When creating a campaign, you must choose an advertising objective that aligns with your business goals. Each campaign can have multiple ad groups.
• Ad group: A collection of TikTok ads. An ad group is where you define your targeting, budget, schedule, bidding strategy, and placements for a collection of ads. Each ad group can have multiple ads.
• Ad: A single advertisement. The actual creative that users will see. Each ad group ad can have different formats, content, and call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

By organizing TikTok ads into these three levels, advertisers can effectively manage and optimize their advertising efforts, ensuring that each ad is tailored to meet specific objectives and reach the intended audience efficiently.

Is TikTok advertising for everybody?

TikTok is suitable for most businesses but not all. TikTok advertising is ideal for companies looking for large and engaged audiences, but you should remember that TikTok’s audience is primarily young people under 30. If you are targeting young audiences, you could run campaigns on TikTok. TikTok may not be your best platform if you are targeting an older audience or advertising a B2B product or service.
When deciding if TikTok is a good fit for your business, you can ask yourself: Are your competitors already advertising on TikTok? Is your targeted audience using TikTok? Is the product or service you are advertising trending right now, or does it have the opportunity to go viral? Does TikTok’s advertising solutions work with your marketing goals? If so, you can tap into your target audience and get in front of competitor brands by advertising on TikTok.
Whether to invest in TikTok advertising for your business depends on your business, your goals, and your target audience. Keeping ahead of the latest social media trends and knowing which platforms your audience will likely use will help you stay ahead of competitors and continue driving results for your business. You can always give it a try and see how it goes!

Why to use TikTok advertising?

Using TikTok advertising can benefit businesses and brands for several reasons. Like any other advertising channel, it has advantages and disadvantages.
Let’s go through some of the advantages and reasons why to use TikTok advertising:

• Reach a large audience: TikTok has a large and engaged audience, with over 1 billion active users globally, providing a huge potential audience (in Croatia, 1.1 million monthly users spend 90+ minutes daily on TikTok). The ability to customize your target audience by any other criteria makes it a great platform to reach new potential customers.
• The engagement rate of TikTok users is high.” TikTokers are a highly engaged audience, and you will likely get more attention and feedback to help you grow your business. TikTok users spend an average of 58 minutes per day on the app. The more engaged an audience is, the better the advertising outcomes are for brands.
• Viral potential: TikTok is known for its viral challenges and trends. Participating in or creating a viral trend can increase brand exposure.
• Precise targeting: It offers advanced targeting options based on user behavior, demographics, and interests, ensuring ads reach the most relevant audiences.
• Builds awareness and branding: TikTok is a good platform for building brand awareness due to its vast, highly engaged user base and creative ad formats that integrate with viral trends and user-generated content.

Types of TikTok ads

TikTok offers various video ad formats and placements to help brands reach their target audience effectively. Let’s review the types of TikTok ads.

#1 In-feed ads

As the name suggests, In-feed ads are video ads that appear between user videos when they scroll through their For You Page (FYP). Those videos can blend naturally with the native content feed. This ad format usually receives the most in-app engagement since users can like, comment on, share, or use the music to create content. This ad format is primarily dedicated to a successful branding process by increasing visibility and reaching a broader audience. Advertisers can include a call-to-action button that links to a landing page or other desired destinations.

#2 Spark ads

Spark ads are essentially in-feed ads, but this type of TikTok ad also allows brands to turn their own TikTok videos or a creator’s video (with their permission) into ads. Spark ads enable users to visit the brand’s TikTok account and use their audio for their video or visit a music page.

#3 TopView ads

TopView ad is a video format that offers prime visibility for your brand on TikTok. It is the first thing users see when they open the app. These ads grab attention with their positioning and can last up to 60 seconds. This ad format showcases your ads full-screen for the first 3 seconds, allowing you to attract users’ attention with a compelling combination of visuals and audio. Afterward, your ads will seamlessly turn into regular in-feed ads with CTA. It’s the perfect solution for boosting brand recognition.

#4 Brand takeover ads

The brand takeover is similar to top-view ads, allowing your ad to show full-screen. However, this ad format lets your ads appear on full screen for 3-5 seconds without transitioning to regular in-feed ads again. When viewers tap or swipe left, they go where you want them to, whether inside TikTok or an external link. TikTok only allows a brand to take over a category once daily, meaning that users can only see one brand takeover ad per day. And while brand takeovers are a great way to get your message across, they also come at a (very) high price tag.

#5 Branded effects ads

Are you a fan of trendy filters, stickers, and effects? Well, you might already be familiar with branded effects ads! Like Instagram and Snapchat, TikTok branded effects is an innovative advertising format that enables businesses to design customized filters, stickers, and AR effects that users can use in their videos. These interactive and entertaining effects are an effective way for companies to enhance their brand visibility and drive user engagement on the platform.

Branded effects let businesses create a fun and memorable experience that matches their brand, products, or services. That is especially effective on TikTok, where the audience is primarily young and loves new experiences. When users use branded effects in their videos, they promote the brand to their followers and maybe even to a bigger audience if the video goes viral.

#6 Branded hashtag challenge

The branded hashtag is another famous ad on TikTok. It encourages users to record themselves performing a dance or doing something related to the product and posting it with a defined hashtag. These ads appear at the top of the discovery page. When users click on the hashtag, they are led to the landing pages on TikTok and a collection of other videos from the same hashtag challenge. This ad type boosts engagement and brand awareness.

To conclude, it is essential to know what type of video ad your business needs, but remember, the key to successful video ads is to make them entertaining, informative, and relevant to your audience.

Cost and bidding

TikTok requires a minimum daily budget of $50 for campaigns and $20 for ad groups.
The cost of TikTok ads per month can vary significantly depending on your campaign objectives, target audience, ad creative, bid strategy, and competition within your industry. There isn’t a fixed cost for TikTok ads as they operate on a bidding system similar to other advertising platforms like Facebook Ads or Google Ads.
To run TikTok ads, you will set a budget for your campaign depending on your goals and resources. Your actual spending will depend on factors such as how much you bid for ad placements, the duration of your campaign, and how effectively your ads perform in terms of engagement and conversions. Your ads can reach millions by going viral with paid or organic content if adequately planned, designed, and executed.

Big strategies

Bidding strategies act as guidelines informing the system how to bid for you in the ad auction by managing parameters like cost per result and budget utilization.

• Cost cap – Cost cap bidding is a spend-based bid strategy that allows advertisers to maximize results while maintaining control over their average cost per action over the campaign. TikTok’s systems will then optimize delivery so that the average CPA over the campaign is equal to or close to the target CPA.
• Maximum delivery is a spend-based bid strategy that allows advertisers to maximize conversions within their defined budget. This bid strategy does not require advertisers to set a target CPA and is ideal for those who prioritize the volume of conversions rather than managing cost per result.

Bidding options

While setting a bidding strategy tells TikTok whether to prioritize spending or maximize conversion volume, not every advertiser has the same marketing goal. Some want to maximize brand awareness, while others want to drive new app installs.
Bidding options are designed to tune a TikTok advertising campaign further to fit your marketing goals best. These are available bidding options:

• CPM (cost per mile) tells you how much you will spend per thousand impressions or times your ad is shown. This bidding option is a favorite among bigger brands, such as food and beverage or automobile companies, that seek to maximize top-of-funnel awareness for their consumer products.
• CPV (cost per view) – Advertisers pay for every view on a video or predefined interaction. Brands often use this to promote their videos.
• CPC (cost per click) – This bidding option is well suited for ad campaigns that seek to drive traffic to a landing page outside of TikTok, whether a brand site or an e-commerce page. Using a CPC bidding option, TikTok optimizes each click as a goal. So, for every counted click on an ad, the advertiser is charged.
• oCPM (optimized cost per mille) – This bid strategy will get you the best price per conversion. If you are an app advertiser looking to acquire new users, you will want to run oCPM campaigns.

How to set up a TikTok ad manager account

Now that you know about TikTok advertising, its benefits, types of ads, and bidding options, let’s consider setting up your ad manager account. To set up a new account, go to Advertising on TikTok sign up page.

Enter your email address and password, and the verification code sent to your email. In the next step, you must provide more information about your business, such as your legal business name, industry, country or region, currency, time zone, phone number, and billing and payment information at the last step. When you are finished, click Go to Ads Manager.

Your ad account will be automatically submitted for approval. You can create a new ad campaign in Ads Manager, but your ads will only run once your account is approved. Most account reviews take less than 24 hours. You can check your account approval status under Account Settings in Account info.

Tips and best practices for TikTok advertising

Let’s look at some tips and best practices for starting TikTok advertising.

#1 Hook

Start your video with a strong hook, communicate the central message of your ad early, and keep your audience’s attention with exciting hooks like suspense, surprise, and emotion. TikTok ads can last up to 60 seconds, but most people decide whether to swipe or watch an ad based on the first video frame alone or the first few seconds.

#2 Understand your audience

Knowing and understanding your audience and what they find engaging is essential. The audience insights tool in TikTok Ads Manager can help you explore user interests and discover aggregate audience information.

#3 Include a Call-to-Action

Include clear CTA (call-to-action) in your ads. You can choose from standard CTA buttons on TikTok ads or allow the system to recommend one. Make sure your CTA matches what you are promoting. If you are driving app installs, select “Download”. If you drive traffic to a product page, “Shop now” is a good choice.

#4 Use vertical videos

Most TikTok videos, and the successful ones, are shot in a vertical format. This has many benefits—it feels natural to the user, helps utilize the entire space, and, most importantly, doesn’t require the user to rotate their phone.

#5 Keep them short

There is a reason that TikTok has become so popular – the short video format. This strategy leans hard into the ever-decreasing attention span of the average internet user. This short timespan leaves no space for content that doesn’t immediately engage the user, which is why the first thing users see is so important.

#6 Don’t underestimate captions

Creative attributes that get people to read increase view time, drive recall, and make ads more likable. You can try the auto-captions feature to add subtitles automatically. Also, there are times when users won’t have their volume on, so if they watch your ad with the volume turned off, they might miss the entire point.

#7 Join TikTok trends

TikTok is known for its viral trends and challenges, which capture the attention of thousands and millions. Staying on top of platform trends is important for maximizing your content’s reach. Regularly explore and scroll through the For You Page to identify trends and popular content formats.

#8 Test different ad formats and content

The best way to see what works best for your brand is to test different variations. The Video Insights tool can help you pinpoint exactly which creative elements drive your ads’ performance.