TikTok strategies for success: How to adapt to an evolving ads ecosystem

As the consumer journey becomes more complex and regulatory changes continue to shape the industry, businesses must ensure they can continue to drive marketing performance in an uncertain advertising landscape. Future-looking strategies need to look beyond browser-based technologies, including third-party cookies, as the availability of these tools continues to be uncertain.

The good news? TikTok is prepared with the right solutions to help your advertising strategy adapt to this new reality, including new and innovative privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). By embracing your direct relationship and interactions with your customers and leaning into the power of TikTok technologies, you can ensure your campaigns remain effective, understand which ads drive conversions, reach the right customers, and optimize ad delivery.

Review and modernize your data strategy

Preparing a data strategy for the future starts with building a solid foundation today. The most important action advertisers can take is to make sure they are leveraging their own first-party data and a diversified data strategy through adaptable solutions on TikTok.

Data Connections (such as an integration via the TikTok Pixel, Events API, or a partner) allow businesses to measure ad campaigns, optimize for specific outcomes, and build custom audiences on TikTok.

Making the most of your Data Connections

If you already have a Data Connection in place, here are some simple steps you can take to ensure consistent and predictable performance amidst the ongoing changes to the advertising ecosystem.

1. Lean into your own customer data

With a decline in third-party data, marketers will need to rely more heavily on their own first-party data and customer information to power performance campaigns and unlock personalized advertising experiences.

To make the most of your data, it’s important to invest in data collection strategies at every step of your funnel. For example, you may offer exclusive features, services, and rewards for logged-in shoppers. This data can then be used to power various tools, such as Advanced Matching, through TikTok's reliable Data Connections, and enhance performance outcomes.

Steps you can take today

Advertisers with Advanced Matching enabled saw a 37% lower CPA, and a 103% lift in conversion rates when compared to advertisers using the TikTok Pixel or Events API without Advanced Matching enabled.¹ Visit this resource to learn about implementing Advanced Matching for your Data Connections.

2. Diversify your data strategy with additional data sources

Rather than exclusively depending on a single event source, find ways to diversify your data strategy to capture the entire shopping journey. Passing back offline conversions (e.g. store visits), increasing the number of events shared, and building a holistic omnichannel approach can help with this.

As an added bonus, the TikTok Events API has an updated feature that allows your technical teams to manage Web, App, and Offline conversions with a single end-point. Your developer teams can configure Events API for omnichannel use during initial setup or can also add new event sources later if Event API has already been set up.

Steps you can take today

For advertisers that have an omni-channel strategy, our Data Connections Toolkit remains essential for your campaign and measurement opportunities across web, app, and offline on TikTok. Consider adopting our Events API to seamlessly manage your omnichannel efforts on TikTok.

3. Strengthen your connection

If you already have the TikTok Pixel, consider adopting Events API to mirror your pixel setup.

Events API, as a server-to-server connection, helps maximize performance and allows you to not solely rely on browser-based technology amidst changes in the industry.

Steps you can take today

Advertisers that combine both the Event API and Pixel, have seen a 19% increase in incremental events and a 15% improvement on CPA, compared to advertisers using the TikTok Pixel only.² Visit our Help Center article to learn more about the Events API.

Expanded options to measure conversion lift using privacy-enhancing technologies

TikTok continues to develop innovative solutions to help advertisers unlock insights using their first-party data, including investments in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). Privacy-enhancing technologies help businesses analyze and learn from patterns in data while keeping their own inputs protected using third-party data clean rooms or advanced cryptographic and statistical techniques.

As part of our innovation with PETs, TikTok is expanding options for advertisers to measure Conversion Lift using trusted execution environments, data clean rooms and secure multi-party computation.

Some benefits include:

• The same experimental design as TikTok's Conversion Lift Study, with limited data movement and transfer.

• Pre-built query templates to speed up the time to receive Conversion Lift results from a clean room or trusted execution environment.

• An advanced environment for advertisers to protect valuable business data such as customer value, sales profit, and lead quality.

TikTok is in limited beta testing with three privacy-enhancing technology service providers, including:

Anonym Trusted Execution Environments

Anonym's system delivers measurement and audience tools to understand and improve marketing campaigns while securing user data. Anonym reporting deploys differential privacy, and its Trusted Execution Environment limits access to unencrypted personal data. Anonym’s pre-built private measurement and optimization applications are seamlessly integrated with TikTok so advertisers do not need significant data science and engineering resources to implement and scale.

For more information on Anonym Trusted Execution Environments, you can visit the website or talk to their team of experts here.

AWS Clean Rooms

AWS Clean Rooms helps companies and their partners more easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets—all without sharing or copying one another's underlying data. With AWS Clean Rooms, you can create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with one or more partners to generate unique insights to help inform campaign planning, lookalike targeting, measurement, and optimization.

AWS Clean Rooms supports stringent data-handling policies through a broad set of privacy enhancing capabilities including fine-grained analysis rules, differential privacy, and cryptographic computing with query logs to understand and audit how your data is queried. AWS Clean Rooms offers native entity resolution matching techniques so collaborators can prepare, match, and resolve related records across collective data sets before collaboration.

For more information on AWS Clean Rooms, you can visit the website or talk to their team of experts here.

LiveRamp Clean Room

The LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu, maximizes the value of first-party data within a secure framework. It facilitates seamless collaboration across walled gardens, publishers, commerce media networks, and other data globally, and is interoperable, orchestrating collaborations across many combinations of cloud and platform. This interoperability and versatility helps to accelerate data collaboration, further unlocking the value of data collaboration for TikTok and its advertisers.

Additionally, the comprehensive clean room solution streamlines access to partner data and insights, bolstering marketers’ ability to tailor metrics and make informed, data-driven decisions efficiently. By connecting to LiveRamp’s Data Collaboration Platform, advertisers are able to achieve the greatest scale, accuracy, and ROI from their campaigns.To learn more, visit this resource for a LiveRamp Clean Room demo.

Secure Multi-Party Computation

TikTok is also offering an open-source solution that integrates secure multi-party computation and differential privacy (additional details are available on GitHub).

This solution employs advanced cryptographic and statistical techniques to safeguard data privacy while calculating Conversion Lift. By combining the strengths of various privacy-enhancing technologies with engineering optimization, it advances the frontiers of efficiency, accuracy, and privacy.

TikTok continues to invest in a robust portfolio of products to navigate an evolving environment. From Advanced Matching, new options to understand Conversion Lift using trusted execution environments or data clean rooms, to improvements in foundational Data Connections and data partnerships, TikTok is ready and able to help advertisers maintain performance.

Sources

1. TikTok Internal Data Analysis, May 2022

2. TikTok Web Events API Incremental Performance Benefit Analysis, Nov 2022 - Feb 2023