How to optimize your TikTok campaigns

To help brands drive performance and maximize their return on investment, we've identified several optimization levers and best practices to use in your auction campaigns.

Learn how to optimize your campaigns

Now that you have your TikTok Ads Manager account setup—or maybe you've even run a campaign or two—let's look at some of the optimization levers you can pull to improve the performance of your campaigns. 

The first step is to audit your account to determine where there is opportunity to improve performance. You can do this by examining your target audience, optimization events, creatives, and bidding to identify which part of your strategy you want to optimize. 

For example, when examining your ads, you could look at various metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, or video views. Based on this data, you can then focus on a specific lever, such as which creatives are doing well and which should be optimized by testing different copy, call-to-actions, videos, or music. 

What are the Levers?

There are a number of levers you can pull to improve the performance of your campaign. Whether you’re looking to scale awareness or optimize for specific key metrics, the following are some strategies that you may (or may not) have overlooked in trying to reach your goals.

Target Audience - Through TikTok, you can accurately pinpoint the audience groups that you want seeing your ads. These audiences can be targeted on multiple dimensions including gender, age, interest, location and more. However, trying to manually target audiences can be difficult and take time to test. Instead, try creating a broad audience and let our smart system find the audience that is interested in your product. 

Another method to optimize your targeting is to create lookalike audiences of your high-value customers. This means that TikTok will find audiences that have similar profiles as your current customers, increasing the chances of the audience engaging with your ad or converting.

Account Structure – Sometimes when targeting multiple audiences for a single campaign, it’s easy to end up using target audience criteria that overlaps. This means that you could be showing an ad multiple times to viewers that aren’t relevant or who are uninterested in your campaign. Instead, make sure you’re consolidating audiences that overlap with each other and are valued similarly.

Optimization Events – Brand advertisers should optimize their campaigns for either Reach or Video Views, depending on their goals, while performance advertisers should tailor their strategy to drive at least 50 conversions per week. Of course once you’ve reached this milestone, you can reassess and aim higher. 

Creative – On a platform where creativity thrives like TikTok, creative is your best friend. When building campaigns, make sure to develop native assets with a diverse set of five to six different creatives per ad group. By running multiple creatives, you’ll discover that it keeps your campaign fresh—without boring audiences.

Bid & Budget – If you’re looking to acquire conversions, your daily budget should be strategized around the 50 conversions-per-week threshold. As a benchmark, you can begin your campaigns with a 1.2x -1.5x your typical cost per acquistion (CPA) and optimize the bid price from there. Consider testing Standard Bid versus Max Conversion bidding .

How do I test if pulling one of these levers improves performance?

So you've finished adjusting your campaign, but how do you know if it's working? The easiest way is to perform a simple A/B test. That is, create two campaigns or ad groups and compare the performance. Utilizing experimental testing will allow you to identify improvement opportunities.

In order to get the most out of your test, make sure all other variables are constant so you can isolate the impact of the optimization variable. Also, run the test for at least two weeks. You need sufficient time to allow patterns to emerge. 

Another key is to spend enough budget to get through the learning phase. The system needs time to learn about your ad set and find the best way to deliver your ads. And finally, don't test during the holidays and other seasonal moments, as this can skew your test results. It's best to find a neutral timeframe that will give you the most accurate baseline results. 

Keeping these simple tips in mind, you should be well on your way to optimizing your TikTok campaigns.

For more information on how to manage your campaigns, visit the TikTok For Business Help Center .