How To Set Up Your First TikTok Ad Campaign

Hey everyone. In this blog we’ll be showing you how to set up your first TikTok ad campaign step by step. 

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So we're giving away over $10,000 worth of contest prizes, meaning we're going to be giving away templates, swipe files, everything that's going on in our business internally that you could use to grow yours. 

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In the past, you may have heard us talk about our Sales Accelerator Program, which is a proven process to help business owners who sell products online generate more consistent sales every single day. Before we figured this out, we would pray that our clients got continued success with sales online. 

The goal of this video is that once you watch it, you'll be able to effectively use TikTok's ad platform to take advantage and be an early adapter in this really underpriced market. 

So first, you'll need to make sure that you install your TikTok pixel. Don’t worry, we have a video for that, you can watch it here. Make sure that you start with this, because without a pixel and without your business account, it's going to be very hard for you to create a campaign because you won't be able to tell TikTok the data that it needs to be successful and you have to have the ad platform to even create an ad.

So let’s get started. When you get into TikTok, make sure that you go to ads.tiktok.com. This is going to be your set up here. 

So pretty simple, we're going to walk you through exactly how to set up this campaign in a very simplistic way. There is no reason to complicate it. TikTok's ad manager is very new, but if you're familiar with something like Facebook or YouTube or Google or anything like that, you're going to see a lot of similar characteristics. We feel like TikTok copied a lot of stuff from Facebook, which we personally love because, to us,  Facebook has the best targeting. You'll see here that TikTok is getting better and it has an amazing reach for very low cost. So it's super effective for you to use, but we're going to walk through these step by step. If you guys have questions, make sure that you drop in the comments of our How To video here. We're happy to create new videos and answer those questions for you.

So once you're here in the dashboard, you want to create a campaign. So click this button at the top here that says campaign. 

On the next screen you'll want to click create. Again if you're familiar with Facebook ads manager, you'll recognize that create is pretty simple. We have our campaign level, ad group level, and ad level. So campaign is the objective meaning what we're trying to do, the ad group is the group of people that we're targeting and the ad is the ad creative that we're going to show to people specifically on TikTok we're talking videos. So click create. 

We’re going to start over completely. 

Now when you choose an objective, we're going to choose conversions, but when you're choosing an objective go for what you're looking to achieve, whether it's video views, whether it's reach, meaning you just want to get in front of people. Traffic, you want to send people to like a blog or a website. But if you're looking for conversions to either drive sales or get people to opt-in for something, then go for conversions. This goes for anything that you are using online, you want to make sure that you focus on the actual end result that you want to have happen.

So click conversions. 

We’re going to relabel this campaign as BitBranding Sales Accelerator Opt-In. 

For the budget we wouldn’t recommend choosing No Limit, that just means it's going to spend as much as necessary to achieve the amount of conversions you want. We aren’t Coke, so our budget is unfortunately not unlimited.

Daily is an option and lifetime is an option. 

Now, this says $50 is the minimum that you can spend here. 

So that's maybe something, some reason that people are like, I don't know. I don't know if I should test this. I don't know if I should try, because that's a good chunk of money. On Facebook, you can do a dollar and on Instagram you can do a dollar. So look at it and maybe do $50 lifetime. So we’re going to type in $50 lifetime. So we’re gonna spend $50 on this campaign. 

Then click continue in the bottom right corner. 

So the ad group name, again, this is who we’re targeting. So we’re looking for business owners and we’re looking for people who are at least 25-55+. You would eventually add some more details here of who you're targeting. However, there's not a lot to go off of yet. 

Make sure that your pixel’s installed, as we mentioned previously, you want to have that. So we have our BitBranding TikTok pixel. Obviously, we had the test once. You probably saw that in the video, BitBranding TikTok Pixel. 

Optimization Events. We want to have it do button click for a form. So we want people to submit a form here. 

Placements, we would leave it wide open. They do give an option for these other countries. Probably don't want to run for at least for us, we’re not going to run it in India or Taiwan or Vietnam, probably also not going to run it for feed apps. We just want to run it on TikTok. This is completely up to you. 

It does show here that like here's some other feed apps that you can use to go off of, but we're going to just run it on TikTok, because we feel like that's going to be the most effective for our business. 

Automated Creative Optimization. Again, this will automatically create generate combinations of your creative assets, images, videos, add text and deliver high-performance combinations once your ad has been created. 

Now, you can turn that on if you like. It's completely up to you on that part. This is something where we would say test it. Typically in the past, we wouldn't have done that, and this is early for TikTok, so we don't know if It's very sophisticated, but it's something to test. 

So, audiences to go off of. You can create an audience of people who visited your website just like what you would for Facebook, a custom audience of, say, people who purchased in the past. 

You can do a lookalike audience of people who were past purchasers. 

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We don't have those videos yet, and those will probably be videos that we will create in the future. So if you're interested in that, make sure you comment on the video here and let us know, “Hey, I want to know how to create a custom audience on TikTok. I want to know how to create a lookalike audience on TikTok.” We will do that for you. 

However, right now we're just going to focus on demographics. We're going after people in the United States, male and female. We like the option, they say no limit. So it's just male and female, no limit. 

We do want to focus on age. We don't really care about 13 to 17-year-olds. We do want 25, 35, 45, and 55+ because those are the people that are typically going to make the business decisions for the people we work with. 

Most of the people we need to work with are English or Spanish so we’ll choose English. 

Next is interest. This is interesting here. So if you know your target audience, go through here and choose what would make sense. So this is chatting and messaging. OK, well, our audience may be interested in chatting and messaging. Financial services, can choose this. Food and beverage, games. 

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Again, there's not a ton in here. Tech and electronics, travel. These are all things that you can look at to target. But for us, there's really not too much yet. 

So if you're an e-commerce business, though, cosmetics, skincare, wigs, hairstyling, very nice there. Apparel and accessories. Absolutely, if you are a boutique or online clothing store, I would definitely be using something like this. 

So interest can't really get too much into interest yet. We want TikTok to figure that out for us. 

What we want to track, though, is people who watch to the end, liked it, commented and engaged and shared because those are of interest to us. We want to remarket to those people again, that may be another campaign that we create.

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So categories, alot here. First, go to 7 days. I want to track people within 7 days. Most people are going to make a buying decision within 7 days or the next step. Most people are not going to take 15 days to make a decision unless you're selling something like a car or a large purchase item. 

So here's where you get a little bit more detail. So we have creative and leisure, life hacks. Well, we may have people who are interested in life hacks. Entertainment, family and emotions. So a lot of our people will probably have family, they may have kids. Lifestyle, performance, society, sports and outdoors. So they're definitely interested in fitness. Transportation. So it's really important for you to understand your audience because, without understanding, it's going to be kind of hard to target here. 

So this is just really based off of previous knowledge. Again, if you know your audience, choose an interest here, but don't go too crazy because you want to test things. 

Daily budget, you have to spend at least $20 to do that so we would want to keep the ad running continuously. That's how the algorithm and platforms usually work, they need more data. So let it run continuously.

Again, we’re optimizing for conversion, not clicks, because we want people to take action. 

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Here under Bid Strategy, this is new depending on what you're used to before. You can see here, the suggested minimum bid is $1.48 per conversion. Well, that's amazing. So let's adopt it by clicking the “Adopt” button. We would love $1.48 for conversion. On Facebook, we're paying a lot more than that. 

We can then click on Show More Options. 

Under Billing Event you want to keep it here for impressions. So what this means basically is cost per thousand impressions. So you're getting charged per impression, not cost per click. Sounds counterintuitive, but really you want eyeballs on there. The algorithm has better chances of putting it in front of the right people to get more conversions.

Also, Delivery Type, leave it on standard. You don't want it to spend all of your money upfront. That means if you spent, let's just say we spent our $20, it could spend all of it within an hour. Which sounds great, but the longer that the data has to optimize or that TikTok has a chance to optimize it, the better we are. Maybe we can get lower than $1.48 for our conversions. 

So let's go and click next at the bottom right hand corner. 

Now that we've checked all that, the ad name. So this is going to be Sales Accelerator Opt-In.

We’re just going to pull in a random video. They don't have it yet, where at least that we’ve seen, where you can use the videos that you've had previously. 

Create is an option, so you could literally create the video inside of here, a video template, smart video, smart video soundtrack. So it's kind of like TikTok on your computer.

We’re just going to pull one from the library we already have uploaded. 

The thumbnail, you can create the thumbnail or choose the thumbnail or upload your own. We're going to leave it how it is. 

Ours is about booking more appointments online. But let's focus on Sales Accelerator, if you're looking to sell more online. Display name. So this should be your company name. Ours is  BitBranding. So it's going to show up down at the bottom. 

Make sure to put some text in the Text box. This is part of your ad created and will be displayed to your audience, clearly tell them what you're promoting, so you can do it here. Sales, completely up to you.

Click add here if you wanted to add another title but we aren’t going to do that.

The option under Call To Action is Learn More. We would keep it at that. If you're selling a product, though, you could do Shop Now. Test the Shop Now. Test those buttons.

The URL, just insert the URL for where you want to send them. 

Profile image. Go ahead and upload your logo. Makes sense to put your logo. 

We have our BitBranding tracking pixel installed. You could use a third party here for impressions. Click tracking. Again, you can add third party tracking, which is pretty cool. That will allow you to track conversions through Google tag manager if you're familiar to see if you can generate leads through this program through TikTok. 

You can preview your add on the right side of the screen.

Again, this says shop now, we left it there, but if we go back and change it to Learn More, that's how people will see it on the platform. 

After that, we will click Submit at the bottom of the page and it will go through the approval process.

We don’t have payment or anything like that, yet, but, depending on when you're doing this, TikTok is giving away $300 in ad credit right now for people. 

So our campaign is in review. 

Once it's approved, it will show up in the Status column and it will say active. 

We may do a video on exactly how to track it here, but from our understanding it does take a little time for the approval process, especially for a new account. 

Hopefully, that helps you figure out how to create your first TikTok ad campaign from scratch. 

If you're interested in our Sales Accelerator Program and to figure out how much you should be spending to make a profitable ad campaign online, click the link here and we'll see you on the other side.

Hopefully, you’ll find a ton of value on this video on exactly how to set up your first TikTok campaign step-by-step. If you would like to watch our “How To” video on this subject, you can watch it here. If you enjoyed the tutorial and found value in it, make sure to like the video as well as subscribe to our YouTube Channel and hit the bell so that you don't miss out on any of the content we put out every single week to help you guys grow your business.