How To
Test with TikTok: Optimize Your Brand Campaigns With Reach & Frequency
About Test With TikTok
Test With TikTok is an initiative to encourage experimentation amongst marketers. It helps advertisers in SEA achieve more with TikTok solutions and enhance performance of your marketing campaigns. We work with you to deliver returns on your investment, and prime audiences for your messaging on other platforms. We'll be offering tips and tricks for boosting your brand, driving sales, and growing your business on TikTok.
How can you measure the success of your branding campaigns?
For campaigns with a clear, quantifiable objective -- such as driving sales or attracting new users to download your app -- proving the exact return on investment (ROI) is relatively straightforward. Brand campaigns, however, can be a different story. A brand campaign puts your company's key messages in front of the target audience, with the goal of increasing brand awareness and improving brand equity in the mind of the consumer. Measuring those results is usually more complex.
Thankfully, the world of marketing has developed a variety of metrics that indicate the effectiveness of branding campaign. For example, media cost, cost per click (CPC), cost per mille (CPM), and return on average spend (ROAS) are all designed to provide insights on this question.
In this blog post, we'll discuss two of the most common, and also most important, metrics you can use to determine your branding campaign performance: reach and frequency.
What is reach?
Reach is also commonly called coverage. It is the percentage of your target audience who have been exposed to your ad at least once. Aiming for the widest possible reach is a good option for most campaigns, because wider awareness is a sure-fire way of growing your brand.
What is frequency?
Frequency is the number of times viewers see your ad. It is usually expressed as 1+, 2+, 3+ etc. indicating users saw the ad at least once, twice, three times and so on. The optimum frequency will depend on a variety of factors such as:
Whether your campaign is about brand building or activation
How appealing your value proposition is
The duration of your ad
The buying cycle of your product.
How TikTok supports Reach & Frequency campaigns
At TikTok, we have developed a wide range of industry-leading ad solutions to support marketers along the entire marketing funnel. That includes for reach and frequency campaigns. In fact, we have a dedicated buying type just for this type of campaign. Let's dive into the details. TikTok's Reach & Frequency campaign buying type is available on TikTok Ads Manager. It enables you to control the audiences you reach, as well as the number of times they are exposed to your ad messaging, before ad delivery. Compared to Auction ads, where ad delivery is determined by factors such as bid or bid strategy, with Reach & Frequency you'll schedule campaigns with predictable reach and controlled frequency at a set cost.
Why choose Reach & Frequency
Reach & Frequency is an ideal choice if you want to pre-book your campaign in advance and guarantee results. Here are some other major advantages of running a Reach & Frequency campaign:
More control Transparent media planning and frequency control
Predictable performance Guaranteed delivery as early as 255 days ahead
Unique features Including interactive add-on and multi-creative delivery strategies, to convey your brand story in true TikTok style
Engage your community Bundle Reach & Frequency campaigns with and drive traffic to Branded Hashtag Challenges, Brand Effect campaigns, TikTok Profile pages, and TikTok Shop Product Detail Pages
Build smarter campaigns Generate audience groups, and retarget or create look-a-like audiences for lower-funnel campaigns.
When to use Reach & Frequency
Reach & Frequency helps advertisers make a splash on users' #ForYou page. You can deliver sequential ads, lock-in premium ad placements early on in a user's For You Feed, and more, all with fixed pricing and predictable impressions.
Testing & Best Practices
Now we know how Reach and Frequency supports branding campaigns. Next, the question is how to maximize campaign performance. There are three key factors to consider here:
Optimal campaign period
Optimal on-platform reach
Frequency per week.
To dig into this question, and the various related factors, the team here at TikTok conducted a test across the whole of the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. We created a meta-analysis to determine the relationship between campaign length, reach percentage, frequency, and brand lift in the form of ad recall.
We analyzed 101 Reach & Frequency campaigns in APAC that had conducted a Brand Lift Study. The results showed that campaigns were much more likely to achieve significant ad recall uplift if they:
Ran for 3 weeks or more
Campaigns that ran for 3 weeks or more were 18% more likely to achieve a significant uplift in ad recall.
Targeted 50% or more of their target audience
Campaigns that targeted 50% or more of their target audience were 26% more likely to achieve a significant uplift in ad recall.
Set their frequency to 2x or more a week
Campaigns that showed ads to their audiences twice or more a week were 40% more likely to achieve a significant uplift in ad recall. In fact, the higher the frequency of the ad delivery, the higher the overall ad recall uplift.
Out of all the campaigns that ran for more than 3 weeks and also targeted 50% or more of their audience, 55% of them saw a significant uplift in ad recall.
Remember to keep testing
The results from the meta-analysis are clear, but still, every campaign is different. Each campaign needs its own, optimized settings based on the campaign message, the product buying cycle, and the duration of the ad creatives. That's why we encourage advertisers to test out their Reach & Frequency settings often, to identify the best strategy for their brand. We hope these findings and best practices inspire you to get testing on your next TikTok campaign!
Stay tuned for more updates and advice from Test with TikTok.
Read the previous Test with TikTok blogpost here.
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