TikTok Media Buying Approach
Paul’s Approach to TikTok Advertising
TikTok, as a marketing strategy, can be a powerful and engaging platform that offers unique opportunities for creativity and connection with various audiences. Here’s an insightful look at how it can be leveraged and the types of companies that might benefit from it.
TikTok as a Marketing Strategy
Authentic Engagement: TikTok prioritizes user-generated content, allowing brands to create authentic and relatable content. By encouraging user interaction and promoting challenges or hashtags, companies can foster a community around their brand. This authenticity aligns well with the strategic vision that a marketer like you, Paul Mosenson, often emphasizes, creating meaningful connections between brands and consumers.
Influencer Partnerships: Collaboration with TikTok influencers can be a tactical move to reach specific audiences. Influencers have their own loyal following, and when aligned with the brand’s values and products, they can drive quality leads and sales, echoing your emphasis on analytics and results.
Ad Opportunities: TikTok offers various advertising options, such as In-Feed ads, Branded Hashtag Challenges, and Brand Takeovers. These avenues allow a strategic marketer to target audiences with pinpoint accuracy and analyze results to continually optimize campaigns.
Ideal Companies for TikTok Marketing
- Young and Dynamic Brands: If a company targets younger demographics, particularly Generation Z, TikTok is a natural fit. The platform’s youthful energy and focus on trends suit brands that wish to be seen as innovative and fresh.
- Lifestyle and Consumer Goods: Brands that have visually appealing products or tie into popular lifestyles can capitalize on TikTok’s visual medium. Creative storytelling around products can create a buzz and stimulate desire.
- Education and Awareness Campaigns: Non-profits or organizations aiming to educate or raise awareness around specific issues can leverage TikTok’s vast reach. Creative and engaging content can be strategically used to spread important messages.
In conclusion, TikTok’s marketing strategy involves a careful blend of creativity, authenticity, and strategic targeting. Much like the results-driven approach you employ at NuSpark Consulting, companies must align their TikTok strategies with their brand values and objectives to drive quality leads and sales. By understanding and leveraging the unique features of TikTok, various businesses can tap into new audiences and markets, reinforcing your belief in embracing both strategic and tactical methods to produce outstanding results.
If we do TikTok as part of your advertising campaign, we start with a guide for planning as below:
TikTok Audience Targeting Summary
It’s important to understand the difference between Interest targeting and Behavior targeting on TikTok. Below shows more detail. Click the images to enlarge.
Interest Targeting
TikTok Ads Manager aids brands in finding the right audience through Interesting Targeting. This type of targeting emphasizes users’ behavior when engaging and consuming different types of content.
TikTok ad algorithm understands users’ long-term interests and consistent platform activities. Interests and content interactions make TikTok Ads targeting more precise when reaching relevant audiences.
TikTok Behavioral Targeting
Behavior Targeting defines recent user interaction with organic and paid content, including recent engagement on creators’ following and profile visits. This type of TikTok ad targeting concentrates on how users consume and perform actions based on the content consumed.
- Video-related Behavior Targeting – Advertisers can reach audiences based on the most recent interaction with the video content category. Here is list of video categories for TikTok Ads Video-Related Behavior targeting.
- Followers Behavior Targeting – Marketers can target users based on certain types of creators’ followship and profile actions. Here is a list of video categories for TikTok Ads Followers Behavior targeting.
TikTok Campaign Tracking with the Pixel
TikTok Pixel Overview: TikTok Pixel is an HTML code snippet that tracks user actions and conversions on your website. It’s essential for understanding customer behavior and targeting relevant ads on TikTok, particularly to the younger audience (Gen Z) that makes up half of TikTok’s one billion active monthly users.
Benefits of Using TikTok Pixel:
- Track Conversions: Easily monitor sales and specific events like “add to cart” or “newsletter signups.”
- Optimize Campaigns: Feed the algorithm with customer information to enhance campaigns.
- Target Custom Audiences: Advertise to users familiar with your brand.
- Ease of Setup: Simple implementation with ongoing access to valuable data.
Setting Up TikTok Pixel: A step-by-step guide is provided, including creating a Pixel account, installing the TikTok Pixel on your site, checking its functionality, defining your brand’s industry category, choosing the events to track, and creating and monitoring your TikTok ads. It’s intricate but we got this at NuSpark.
Best Practices for Conversion Tracking: Generally, we optimize TikTok conversion tracking by ensuring high-quality visuals (720P+), including clear CTAs, making visuals full screen, and running ads between 21 and 34 seconds. These practices can significantly lift conversion rates.
Once the pixels are set up we set up the specific conversion tracking based on the events we wish to track. The chart below guides us.
Creating and Managing Events
Event Setup Options: TikTok for Business recommends using custom code Pixel and Events API for web events. For those without technical resources, the Event Builder tool can be used for event setup, including the creation and addition of TikTok Pixel base code to a website.
Creating Events with URL or Click Methods: Events can be created using URL keywords or Click Events. URL Events count visits to specific pages, while Click Events count clicks on specific elements. Both methods allow for the measurement of actions like ‘add to cart’ or ‘complete payment’.
Utilizing Keywords and Web Elements: Keywords from the URL of the page you want to measure can be entered, and additional keywords can be added without duplication. Web elements like buttons or links can be selected and recorded as CSS selector code for Click Events.
Value and Currency Parameters: These parameters are essential for ROAS reporting and Value Optimization. They can be set up by selecting the value corresponding to the event and choosing the currency from the drop-down menu. Advanced setup tools are recommended for complex websites with multiple currencies.
Content Parameters for Video Shopping Ads and Catalog Management: Content parameters, including content id and content type, are required for specific ad types. These can be selected from the web page or extracted from the URL. After setting up events and parameters, troubleshooting support is available through Web Diagnostics or Pixel Helper.
Below are two screen shots on how we set up conversion events with TikTok. Click each image to enlarge.
Track events as keywords in URLs (i.e. Thank-you) or use the Pixel Helper to track custom events that do not have confirmation URLs.
A screen shot of an e-commerce purchase event that includes the “thank-you” confirmation page; a conversion.
Attribution Settings:
Attribution settings determine how credit is assigned for conversions, such as clicks, views, or other interactions.
Click Attribution: This setting attributes conversions to users who have clicked on your ad.
- Available Windows: Typically, TikTok offers various click attribution windows, such as 1-day, 7-day, or 30-day click attribution. This means that if a user clicks on your ad and converts within the selected time frame, the conversion is attributed to that ad.
View Attribution: This setting attributes conversions to users who have viewed your ad but may not have clicked on it.
- Available Windows: View attribution windows might include options like 1-day or 7-day view attribution. If a user views your ad and converts within the selected time frame without clicking, the conversion is attributed to that ad view.
Understanding and utilizing TikTok’s attribution and lookback settings can provide valuable insights into user behavior and campaign performance. By selecting the appropriate windows (part of our set-up process) we can align tracking with specific campaign goals and the customer journey.
Advanced Tracking: The TikTok Events API
Benefits of Events API
Events API provides businesses the opportunity to have a sustainable campaign set-up and adapt to the changing ads ecosystem, by allowing unobstructed marketing data sharing between your business and TikTok to reach your marketing objectives. Benefits of implementing TikTok’s Events API include:
- Improve ad delivery and targeting by capturing missing conversions
- Conversions reported via Pixel may be impacted due to connectivity issues and inconsistencies in how various browsers operate. When implemented with the Events API, more conversions will be reported and leveraged to better inform measurement, optimization, and targeting.
- Granular control over the data your business shares with TikTok
- Your Events API integration will give you more control to only share the data required to meet your marketing objectives enabled by TikTok’s optimization products.
- Enables resilient solutions as advertising ecosystems evolves
- TikTok Events API builds a dependable connection between the advertiser’s business and the TikTok platform, ensuring a more sustainable transition in response to changes in the advertising industry. By incorporating the Events API with an existing Pixel, advertisers are better positioned for changes in the industry while keeping their current campaign strategies and set-up in place.
It is intricate to add the Events API and we would use one of our analytics team members to help install it. But for short-term campaigns the pixel itself is sufficient. Here’s more information.