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Mar 14, 2023 5:30:00 PM | Sell Your Products TikTok Ads Manager: A Guide to Advertising on TikTok

TikTok Ads Manager will help you increase traffic to your page and create optimized campaigns to boost your sales!

A white and light blue background with a blue rectangle in the middle with the words "TikTok Ads Manager" and the Shoplazza's red logo at the bottom.

Want to make the most of TikTok and make your business go viral? In this article, you'll learn all about TikTok Ads Manager, TikTok's paid ads tool.

What is TikTok?

You probably know what TikTok is and have probably heard something about it while talking with friends or have even watched a TikTok video. But if you don’t have the slightest idea what TikTok is, don’t worry, we’ll give you all the information you need about this successful player that’s changing the social media business game.

TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to share short videos and live streams with their followers. This social channel became popular among teenagers and boomed during the pandemic, becoming as big as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter.

As someone trying to pursue an ecommerce career, you must be aware of the changes in the digital market scenario. Social media is a hot topic and a great marketing tool that can really help you to improve your sales, brand awareness and traffic to your website.

Now that you’ve been introduced to TikTok, fasten your seat belt because we’re going to delve deep into what TikTok Ads Manager is and show how TikTok can help your business. Are you ready?

What is TikTok Ads Manager?

A office table filled with pens, glasses, papers, calendars and a computer with a marketing presentation on the screen. The image represent TikTok Ads planning

Building a community and using content as a conversion tool is a good social media marketing strategy. It’s a way to create a bond with your potential customers and make them behave as your brand advocates. 

However, building trust takes time, and sometimes your online business needs faster results to still be in the running to become successful in the market.

Aware of that need, all social media platforms started to act as paid traffic sources. By offering social ads, those social media use their huge daily audience and different posting formats to sell media spaces within their platform. This advertising method became widely popular among businesses because it’s cheaper than traditional methods like television or radio, and you can use technology to create personalized ads for an interested audience. 

TikTok is no different, and seeing its huge growth as an opportunity, ByteDance (the company that owns TikTok) created TikTok Ads Manager, a product that helps content creators and entrepreneurs improve their engagement rates.

TikTok Ads Manager is an advertising platform that allows users to create TikTok ads and manage advertising campaigns from within the platform, putting TikTok at the same level as other paid traffic sources. 

Social media platforms hold incredible amounts of data about their users, and TikTok is following their competitors’ footsteps. Through their algorithm, they can help businesses to target their audience based on their behavior, interests and demographics.

Advertisers can choose a variety of formats all over the platform, including in-feed ads and sponsored hashtags, to help create the most effective strategy to catch TikTok users’ attention during their time browsing social media. 

Thinking about advertisers and how to make a creative ad measurable, TikTok ads dashboard has its own reporting and analytics tools, allowing businesses to track their campaigns’ performance and improve results in order to achieve their goals faster. You weren’t expecting to become a pro in TikTok analytics, were you?

🤔 I think you’re gonna like it:

Who can advertise on TikTok?

Two hands holding a celphone with the screen displaying the TikTok logo on a black background, representing TikTok Ads Manager

TikTok Ads Manager is open to businesses of all sizes and types, as long as they meet certain requirements. Advertising with video ads has similar implications as offline ads that you must follow in order to start your first campaign and display your ad creatives, like:

1. Have a TikTok account

If you want to display a TikTok ad, you can’t escape this one. You must create a TikTok account and verify the account details before you can start using the ads platform.

2. Age and location

You can’t run a TikTok ad campaign anywhere in the world since TikTok Ads Manager is only available in select countries, and advertisers must follow the local laws and regulations, meeting age and other requirements in their region.

3. Compliance and policy

When you’re creating an account on whichever social media platform, you must mark a checkbox confirming that you read all the terms and conditions of the website. While nobody really reads it, that text explains the social platform’s specific advertising policies for content, which include certain types of content prohibition rules, such as gambling and adult products. If you don’t follow those rules, TikTok will probably take your ads down and they can even ban your account if your violation is really serious. 

4. Budget

Nothing in this world is free, right? In order to get a TikTok ad, you must have an ad budget to spend on advertising. How much TikTok ads costs will depend on which formats you want to invest your money in, the region you want to target and how you qualify your audience. It’s accessible, but as a business owner or paid traffic manager, you have to understand the campaign objective you have and the results you need to increase your return on investment.

Are TikTok ads worth it?

A brown-skin girl wearing a yellow t-shirt, conecting a celphone to a ring light, representing users creating their own TikTok Ads

Do you still doubt it? Of course TikTok ads are worth it! However, you need to keep in mind who your target audience is and if they are actually present on the platform, so your strategy using TikTok ads will make sense for your business. In addition, you need to focus on how your campaign budget can directly impact the progress of your campaign.

With that in mind, we prepared a list of reasons (you’ve already noticed that we like lists, huh?) to help you decide if TikTok really is a good choice for your business model:

Big engaged community: 

TikTok platform surpassed one billion active users around the globe and has a highly engaged audience that spends an average of 52 minutes per day on the app. Don’t you think that matching this high-potential audience with great campaigns smells like a great opportunity to drive sales and create brand awareness?

Targeting advertising options: 

We’ve already mentioned it, but you must keep in mind that the TikTok ads platform allows businesses to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests and behaviors, which means optimized campaigns for any kind of business, like start-ups that need app installs or retailers that need to sell jewelry or digital products.

Incredible organic traffic: 

This social media algorithm prioritizes content that is engaging and relevant to users. Creating great organic video content amplifies your engagement rates and the chances for you to reach potential customers.

Go viral anytime: 

Well, it’s not that easy, but it’s totally possible. TikTok's unique algorithm and features, such as hashtag challenges and duets, allow users to create with and participate in your content, making it go viral. As an entrepreneur, you can leverage these features to create viral content to drive traffic to your page while you get exposure from user-generated content!

How does TikTok Ads work?

A street with traffic lights and a bus stop with an advertising spot, representing TikTok ads different format

You already know that TikTok allows you to display multiple ads on the platform, but you must be asking yourself how you can do this whole TikTok advertising thing. 

As with other social ads sources, you can create different campaign objectives for your business, such as app installs, driving website traffic or boosting brand awareness. Through these goals, you will target your audience based on which action you want them to take after being impacted by your ad delivery.

More than objectives, while setting your own campaign goals, you need to define your target audience. That’s when you start doing market research, understanding who’s your potential customer, their habits, demographics, interests and other criteria that can ensure that your video ad will not only reach the right people but make them interested in what you have to offer. 

After that, you must choose the ad format that suits you better. TikTok offers a huge variety of formats, including branded hashtag challenge and in-feed ads. Choosing the best format helps you to use your budget better since you’ll need the right option to talk with your audience. 

The budget can be set up as a lifetime budget or as a bidding strategy, such as cost-per-click (also known as CPC, when you need to pay an amount for a click such as on Google Ads) or CPM, cost per 1,000 impressions (when you pay based on how many people saw your TikTok ad campaign).

Once you’re done, all you gotta do is publish your campaign (you can preview it before release, don’t worry) and start monitoring your results in order to optimize your ad spend and control your budget (it doesn’t matter if it's a daily budget or a lifetime budget). Later on, you’ll use this data to create a more accurate strategy to show your TikTok campaign to more people for less money.

What kind of ads does TikTok have?

An illustration of an Instagram post with people around using their cell phones. The image represents users of social media platforms such as TikTok.

Concerned with meeting the expectations of advertisers through different formats, TikTok has different varieties of ads that can be displayed. Your only job here is to find the most suitable one for your digital marketing strategy and use it! You can create more than one ad group for your ad campaign. Some of the options are:

1. In-feed ads

These are the full-screen in-feed video ads that appear in the “For You” page feed of TikTok users! They can be up to 60-seconds long and support a variety of call-to-action (CTA) buttons, such as “Learn More” or “Shop Now”.

2. Brand takeovers

These are full-screen video ads that appear when a user opens the TikTok app. Brand takeovers can be either a video or image and can include clickable links to an external website or landing page.

3. Hashtag challenge

These are sponsored challenges that encourage TikTok users to create and share content using a specific hashtag. On hashtag challenges, the advertiser can create a personalized hashtag challenge page to display branded content, which can be a powerful way to increase brand awareness and engagement on the platform.

4. Branded effects

These are AR filters, stickers and other visual effects that users can add to their TikTok videos. Branded effects can be sponsored by businesses and customized to include their brand name or logo.

5. TopView ads

These are similar to a brand takeover, but they are only available to one advertiser per day, ensuring maximum visibility.

6. Branded hashtag

This is a sponsored hashtag campaign that includes a custom banner on the Discover page of the TikTok app. Users can click on the banner to view all videos associated with the hashtag.

These TikTok advertising formats provide businesses with a range of options to reach and engage with the platform’s large and growing audience.

How do I sell on TikTok?

A table with a hand wolding a pen writing a to-do list in order to advertise on TikTok Ads Manager

Yes, this article is about how to sell more using TikTok paid traffic tool. However, you need to know that, to achieve good results on paid traffic platforms, you also need a good organic strategy to get more followers on TikTok and make your business look legit and professional!

To sell more on TikTok or other platforms, you need to settle on a social media marketing strategy that can help convert users into potential buyers. Here are our most important tips to help you make money on TikTok:

1. Set up a TikTok Business Account

You can change your profile from a personal account to a business account. Having a business account makes it possible for you to use different features from the personal one. You can create your TikTok for Business Account by going to your profile settings, selecting “Manage Account”, and then choosing “Switch to Business Account”. 

2. Add a link to your website

Your website or online store must be linked on your profile! This is an opportunity to make your followers know your business and to acquire traffic to your page because now they’re allowed to click through and purchase products.

3. Create high-quality content

Engaging content is the core of a great social media profile. With high-quality content, you’ll be able to build a community that’s interested in what you have to offer. It’s a way to add value to your brand and make people think about your business not only because they need a product, but because they believe in the same things as you! You can share product demos, tutorials, challenges or whatever your creativity can make to achieve your goals.

4. Use hashtags

TikTok's hashtags are stronger than other social media hashtags because of their algorithm. Users are constantly creating hashtag challenges, and brands are using it as a tool to drive engagement. Create your own challenge, share it with your community and use the engagement to increase your brand awareness.

5. Collaborate with influencers

Collabs are an easy way to create brand awareness for your business. Combining an influencer's audience with a clear message about your product or service will make more people know about your brand. Investing in influencer marketing to create sponsored content is a way to acquire more followers and build a solid and positive brand image

By following these steps, you’re on the right path to amplify your organic traffic and boost your paid traffic strategies. It doesn't matter the budget; if you don’t send a clear message to your audience, they won't stick to your brand and are gonna search for someone who understands their language.

🚨 How about learning a little more?

Creating my first TikTok Ads with Shoplazza

An Illustration of Shoplazza's partnership with TikTok, with the logos of Shoplazza and TikTok for Business and a woman buying online on a big celphone screen

Now that you’re a master of TikTok Ads Manager and have your business goals very clear, you can set your first campaign with Shoplazza!

TikTok and Shoplazza are partners, and together we’re creating solutions to help merchants and advertisers around the world.

With our TikTok integration, you can display your products with ads on TikTok.  To get started, you just need to follow these steps:

1. Sign up for a Shoplazza account:

If you’re not part of our community of merchants, I suggest you start your first online store today!

2. Create a TikTok Ads Manager account: 

The account can be easily created on TikTok Ads Manager website.

3. Install the TikTok Pixel: 

In order to synchronize your store with your TikTok account you must install TikTok’s Pixel on your Shoplazza store to track conversions and help you to optimize your ad campaigns based on your website traffic.

4. Set your product feed:

The product feed includes all the products you want to advertise on TikTok. You can create your product feed with Google Shopping, which is available on the Shoplazza App Store.

5. Create your first campaign: 

While creating your TikTok Ads Manager, don’t forget what we told you! Consider your campaign objective, budget and target audience in order to obtain great results with your investment.

6. Create an ad group:

Within your first campaign, you must add an ad group and choose what format you are going to use! Select the product feed you created in Step 4 as the source for your ad creative.

7. Create your first TikTok ad:

First, you must have your ad creative (TikTok mostly uses video ads). It’s okay if you don’t know how to use graphic design tools to build your ad content, but you need to make sure that the images and videos that you’re showcasing are high-quality. Your customers need to see your products clearly. 

During the creation process, you’ll need to set your budget and maximum bid for the ad placement, as TikTok uses a bidding system where advertisers set a maximum bid for how much they are willing to pay for ad impressions or clicks within the platform!

8. Review and submit:

Once you finish all these steps, you must review your ad to make sure that your campaign is meeting TikTok’s advertising policies and rules. When you submit your campaign for review and once it’s approved, your ads will be running on the platform and impacting users around the world.

TikTok Ads: conclusion

Following these steps, you can now navigate within the TikTok Ad Manager interface and create ads with TikTok and Shoplazza. Start reaching a wider audience on the platform with high-quality content, and we’re sure that you will be able to meet new customers and drive conversions to your business. 

As a merchant, you need to be aware of the newest trends in the market, and building a social media presence between platforms is a must. We’re sure that, by following these tips to create TikTok ads, you will reach the level of a successful merchant. Count on us to help you!

João Gabriel Freitas

About the author: João Gabriel Freitas

João Gabriel Freitas is a Content Marketing Specialist at Shoplazza. He's addicted to discovering new restaurants and loves to walk around the city. When he's at home, he's probably listening to music or trying to learn a new language.