CeraVe

The goal

Taking Always-on to the next level

Maintaining an Always-on presence on TikTok, with fresh content and ads running continuously, is key to fostering a positive relationship with the community on the platform. More than that, it's also a strategy that can help generate greater brand awareness, expanding the audience familiar with your products.

But how can you get these people who have reached the top of the funnel to move faster through the purchase journey? That was precisely the challenge faced by CeraVe, L'Oréal's skincare brand, which was performing strongly in Always-on—and was looking for a way to optimize its strategy to generate more results from the middle of the funnel onward.

The solution

A focus on consideration

A performance strategy focused on website or app conversions might have been the most obvious solution to CeraVe's challenge. However, it overlooks an opportunity that advertisers rarely take advantage of: the middle funnel.

Audiences in the consideration stage of their journeys are key to building brand love and generating even more incremental ROI. They deliver better results in Brand Lift Studies and a conversion rate 14-16x higher than potential consumers who are still in the awareness stage.(1)

But engaging this audience isn't exactly an easy task. Or rather, it wasn't. CeraVe was one of the first brands in Brazil to test a TikTok solution designed specifically to help explore this topic of consideration: TikTok Market Scope, or TTMS.

TTMS can identify where a user is on the purchase journey and provide data and insights that show what influences audiences at each stage of the funnel. Yes, including the consideration stage, where the purchase intent is at its highest.

The solution also comes with a new ad objective to use in your campaign: Brand Consideration Ads. They are designed to grow these high-intent audiences—the consideration audiences—and drive future conversions. That's exactly what CeraVe was looking for.

An initial test of the solution has already shown promise. By combining TTMS and Brand Consideration Ads with the Always-on campaign that was already running, the brand saw strong initial results in branding metrics measured in a Brand Lift Study. The next step was to delve deeper into the platform's capabilities to understand whether it really made sense to direct efforts toward the audiences identified by it.

So, CeraVe decided to conduct a broader audience test. With scientific rigor, of course: the results would be measured using a case-control study, a Brand Lift multi-cell, pitting two strategies against each other. On one side, the brand’s “business as usual” strategy, with ads targeted at custom audiences and lookalike audiences. On the other, the TTMS awareness audience was included in the account.

In both cases, the delivered creatives would be the same, co-created with Spark creators. All other planning and execution would be handled by Mutato.

The results

Success in the middle funnel

Delving deeper into the consideration stage of the funnel had already yielded good results for CeraVe. But placing more bets on the TTMS awareness audience with Brand Consideration Ads paid off even more, generating a 33% incremental increase in preference—a metric that’s harder to influence.

Overall, the strategy targeting the TTMS audience delivered a 5.3 pp incremental increase in preference and a 14.7 pp incremental increase in ad recall. The strategy also brought in over 312,000 new customers to the consideration stage of the journey, all at a lower cost than the campaign that relied solely on custom and lookalike audiences.

See how some good planning combined with a comprehensive view of the purchase journey can help elevate your strategy?

Source:(1) Conversion rate: Consideration audience acquired through ads in the past 30 days / Total consideration audience, March 30, 2025, TTMS analysis.