How to Make a Sponsored Ad on Tik Tok: A Guide to Using TikTok Ads
If you want to create international campaigns for a predominantly young audience, TikTok is an excellent choice.
Tik Tok is one of the most popular and most downloaded apps in recent history, which makes it valuable as an advertising platform – especially if you want to reach a target audience.
While sponsored TikTok ads are still a relatively new advertising medium, the self-serve platform TikTok is making it easy for brands to try.
Who Should Advertise on TikTok? In this guide, you will learn how to make a sponsored advertisement on TikTok, how much budget you will need, and which companies you should use. Plus, you'll get a list of best practices and see some inspiring examples of TikTok ads in action, so you can start building powerful campaigns for 2022 and beyond.
Anyone targeting a younger audience can and should advertise on TikTok.
But Tik Tok is no longer just for teens. Here is the basic demographic information for TikTok:
25% of users are between the ages of 10-19 and 22.4% are between the ages of 20-29. Only 11% of users are over 50 years old.
People in most places have a positive opinion about Tik Tok, even if they are not active users of it.
Women make up more than 60% of monthly active users.
Tik Tok is used all over the world and is currently one of the most popular social networking sites in the world.
TikTok has been downloaded more than two billion times as of this year, and it doesn't look like the platform's expansion will slow any time soon.
As a result, the list of brands spending money via Tik Tok ads is growing, both in terms of numbers and the breadth of products they advertise.
Types of ads in TikTok
There are several different types of Tik Tok ad formats that advertisers can use. Let's take a closer look at all of them.
1. Top View Ads
Top view ads will appear at the top of the user's feed. It's the first video they see when they open the app.
This format provides massive visibility, and is great for attention-grabbing brand awareness campaigns.
According to TikTok, this ad format ranks first in engagement and has 67% higher sales effectiveness than other ad types.
2. In-Feed Ads
These ads are played as users scroll through the For You feed. They are full screen ads that play with sound and blend with local content. Your audience is already interacting and watching videos, so this is just one on the list – if you make your ad fun and engaging, you can get the same amount of attention as successful organic content.
This is one of the most popular types of Tik Tok ad formats.
3. Branded Hashtag Ads
Branded Hashtag ads are also a popular option. They are designed to spark engagement on the platform, offering a “TikTok Challenge” centered around your branding hashtag.
These ads can be exceptional to create brand name recognition and user-generated content on the platform.
4. Branded Effect Ads
Branded influencer ads work a bit like filter ads on other platforms. Brands create a branded AR “effect” that users can apply to their videos.
This is another campaign that can generate engagement, brand awareness, and user-generated content. Awareness is usually the primary goal of these campaigns (not visits).
5.Spark Ads
is a relatively new ad format that allows advertisers to take advantage of organic content and UGC in their ads. It works similarly to the enhanced functionality on other platforms. You can put an advertising budget behind your free content, or use user-generated content (with the consent of the content creator).
These ads direct users to your account page or a landing page outside the TikTok platform.
Steps to make a sponsored advertisement on Tik Tok
In order to create your sponsored ad campaign on Tik Tok, you will first need to create a business account.
Create a business account on Tik Tok
Before you start creating a sponsored ad, you will need a business account.
Go to the TikTok for Business landing page, click Get Started, and enter your region and type of business. Then click Next.
Fill in your details and click Register
You will be asked for some additional details about your business, including contact information, the legal business name and a description of your business. After that, you will have to enter your information.
Run an advertising campaign on Tiktok
In the TikTok advertising system, you follow a hierarchy by first creating a campaign, then an ad group, and finally an ad.
1. Go to the “Campaign” tab in the top menu of the Ads Manager dashboard and click on “Create”.
2. Choose your goal. Depending on your marketing objective, you will choose one from one of three categories: awareness, purchase consideration, or conversions.
Each category includes goal-specific advertising objectives:
The awareness category includes reach. Choose this goal to prioritize showing your ad to as many people as possible.
The “Thinking” category includes three goals: traffic (sending traffic to your site), app installs, and video views on the platform.
The conversion category has only one goal: it allows you to optimize for certain types of conversions such as sales or email subscriptions.
That's all you do to create a funded campaign. TikTok will automatically keep you going to the ad group section.
Create your ad group
1. Choose the type of promotion (application or website installation) and enter your URL. Next, enter your display name, add a profile picture, and select how you want users to interact with your ads.
2. Choose the position of your ad. Auto placement is easier for your first ad, as TikTok will test different options and see what fits your audience at the best price.
3. You can then set up different ad options. Brand security features can be used to prevent your ad from appearing on certain sites. You can also allow users to comment (or not) and decide whether or not you want users to be able to download your video ad on TikTok.
4. Decide if you want to use automatic creative optimization for TikTok. This is one of the tools that TikTok created for small businesses. It creates ad variations using images, videos, and text, then continually tests them for you.
It's worth testing, although some brands benefit more from manual control and segmented test designs.
5. Define your target audience. You can target audiences based on demographics, location, interests, device type, and in-app behavior.
You can include and exclude audiences with different characteristics. If you only want to reach users from a specific region, for example, you can target users who fit your ideal demographic but exclude users who have purchased from you before.
You can also create a custom audience from customer files, website visits, app activity, or past ad engagement.
To build a custom audience from website visits, you will need to install a TikTok pixel on your website. Pixel also helps you optimize ads and correlate the success of your ads with customer behavior on your website.
6. Choose from daily or lifetime budget.
7. Prepare your bidding plan. You can choose to cap your bid in the auction, which means you'll never spend on a specific action (such as a click or video views) more than the cap you set.
8. Click Next. You are now ready to create a new ad on Tik Tok.
Start your own Tik Tok ads
Upload your ad creatives. This can include video files or images. TikTok will turn your still photos into a video for you. Make sure you follow the Tik Tok ad design guidelines.
Fill in your ad text and a call to action.
Click Submit to submit your campaign for review.
TikTok will check each ad according to its guidelines. Here is a checklist to help make sure your ads are approved at the first review.
The cost and prices of Tik Tok ads
There is no one simple answer to the question of how much TikTok ads prices, because the truth is that costs vary depending on the type of advertising you choose, your bid and the market itself.
Like most paid advertising platforms, Tik Tok ads run on a bidding system. This means that the market is competitive, and you are betting on other advertisers for certain placements and audiences. In simple terms, if one person is willing to pay $1.50 and the next person is willing to pay $1.51, then the second person gets the placement.
TikTok helps advertisers improve bids, which means that they can manipulate bid settings to increase the visibility of ads. The only downside to this is that the ads may cost you more than you'd like. To prevent this, you can set a bid cap or improve “lowest cost” results. However, the latter may result in lower quality clicks or placements that are less likely to produce the results you want.
You can also set a daily or lifetime budget. If you never want to spend more than $100 on an ad campaign, setting that as a lifetime budget will prevent you from going over it.
However, we do have some criteria for the cost of TikTok ads.
AdAge states that high-cost ad formats such as Branded Hashtag Ads and Branded Effect Ads can be exceptionally expensive. Brands can cost up to $100 a day.
The cost of self-serve ad options like Top View Ads or Feed Ads is more in line with what you would expect from traditional social ads. You should spend at least $20 per day per ad set, and we've seen costs range from $0.20 to $2 per given action.
Notes for designing an advertisement on TikTok
These are the TikTok ad specs you need to know for standard TikTok in-feed ads and top-width TikTok ads
The video must be between 5 and 60 seconds in length.
The maximum file size is 500MB (except for Spark Ads, where the file size limit does not apply).
The horizontal aspect ratio is 16:9 (recommended file size is 960 x 540 pixels).
The square aspect ratio is 1:1 (recommended file size is 640 x 640 pixels).
16:9 vertical aspect ratio (recommended file size is 540 x 960 pixels).
It is recommended to stick with .mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .avi, or .gif file types.
Make sure to leave the margins at the top (at least 130px), the bottom (up to 484px), and the left side (44px) of your designs to account for profile images, the buttons to make a purchase, and more that will appear above the ad.