We ran a few TikTok campaigns for one of our clients as an experiment to see what we could learn about the platform and how it might fit into our marketing strategy.

We spent $450 on two different campaigns. One was a reach campaign and the other was a traffic campaign. Ad reach is an estimate of the number of people within a location target, based on signed-in users. You can use the provided reach numbers to get a rough idea of how many people your ads could reach within a geographic area. If your main goal is getting as much people to your website as possible, you want the Traffic campaign option. This type of Campaign will show your boosted posts to people, who are most likely to click on them and go to your website.

The videos being advertised were identical. The goal was to see if the Traffic style campaign actually generated more clicks than the Reach style campaign. Here are the results:

Reach campaign:
Cost: $229.50
Impressions: 113,555
Reach: 83,089
Clicks: 43
CPC: $5.34

Traffic campaign:
Cost: $219.54
Impressions: 69,159
Reach: 45,753
Clicks: 419
CPC: $0.52

tiktok ad trend graph

The Traffic campaign was the clear winner here for clicks and the reach campaign also did its job accordingly.

Here’s what we learned doing the experiment:

TikTok is only slightly less complicated to set up than Facebook

Initially, it seemed like TikTok’s Business Manager platform was going to be more straightforward than Facebook’s, and it is, but only the tiniest bit. There are still a lot of technological hoops to jump through and a lot of different pieces-parts that require connecting. Be prepared for that.

If your daily budget is too low, they won’t spend any of it

If your daily budget is under $100/campaign, TikTok won’t run your campaign or spend any of your money because the budget is just too low to do anything with. We realize that this sounds crazy, but we confirmed it with our TikTok rep.

Use Spark Ads

TikTok’s Spark Ads work sort of like Facebook’s Boosted Posts. It turns your existing content, with all of its organic engagement, into an ad that TikTok can push out to tons of people. Leveraging the current engagement gives the ad a bit of a jump-start and allows you to keep all of the ad’s engagement on your native content.

Don’t use the Shopify X TikTok channel

If you want the real experience of setting up proper ads on TikTok you will need to go through the TikTok Business Manager. Shopify’s TikTok channel is just too limited as of right now to do any real damage.

Get a TikTok rep

Our TikTok rep was extremely useful. If you start spending any amount of money with TikTok, talk to their customer service team through the Business Manager page and get a meeting set up with a rep. They are super friendly and will have all of the answers you need to get up and running quickly.

Or talk to us! We can help you set all of this up and get you up and running your next ads on the TikTok social media platform.