These best practices are for you if you are a first-time e-commerce advertiser on TikTok with the goal of generating more sales on your website using the Website conversions objective. If you are using the Product sales objective, refer to About the New Product Sales Advertising Objective.

Before you begin: Make sure you've registered for a TikTok Ads Manager account. TikTok Ads Manager is the one-stop shop for running and managing paid ad campaigns on TikTok. Registering for an account and running your first campaign works best on a desktop. To see detailed instructions and a step-by-step video, refer to How to Create a TikTok Ads Manager Account.

Recommended Best Practices

• Set up your TikTok Pixel. Pixel allows you to track events for all the visitor actions you value and informs your campaigns to find users more likely to become customers. You must use a TikTok Pixel to run a conversion campaign.

  • Best Practice: Start with at least 3 events - View Content, Add to Cart, and Complete Payment as your events.

  • Best Practice: Turn on the Automatic Advanced Matching and First Party Cookies toggles.

  • Best Practice: Set up Pixel with one click if you use a TikTok E-commerce Partner Platform. Partners include Shopify, BigCommerce, Ecwid, WooCommerce, Prestashop, and more.

  • Best Practice: Add Pixel Custom Code events with little to no developer resources using TikTok's tag template with Google Tag Manager. To learn more, refer to Get Started with Google Tag Manager.

• Build your first ad creative. Are you new to TikTok's video format or want to learn more? We have the right tools and resources to get you started.

  • Best Practice: Find an existing TikTok video to use as a Spark Ad. Spark Ads are an ad format that transforms existing TikTok videos into paid ads on the For You feed. Spark Ads have a 134% higher completion rate than standard in-feed ads.* Because Spark Ads feel like native content, they tend to perform better. Our internal research suggests that the best-performing Spark Ads are videos that touch on your business or product with the most views. This works better if your video is recent, within the first 3-5 days, but you can Spark Ads any TikTok video.

  • Best Practice: If you don't have an existing organic video for Spark Ads, get inspiration to create a new video and see what creative tools can help you bring your ideas to life.

*2022 Spark Ads AB Test Result Data - Brand Auction

• Run your first campaign. Use our best practices below when setting up your first TikTok Ads Manager campaign to set yourself up for early success:

  • Best Practice for Objective: Select the Website conversions objective.

  • Best Practice for Optimization Event: Choose Add to Cart as your first campaign optimization event. Our research shows that starting with Add to Cart events helps the system learn what types of visitors convert. See the FAQs for details on when we recommend moving to Complete Purchase.

  • Best Practice for Targeting: We recommend trying "Automatic Targeting." If you do use "Custom Targeting," keep your audience broad using the Audience Size Estimator.

  • Best Practice for Budget: Start with at least $30 USD for your first campaign's daily ad group budget. If you're based in APAC, try $ 20 USD or your local equivalent. This amount gives the algorithm enough to learn who your ideal audience is and get optimal results early.

Find more details and a first campaign checklist in our E-commerce Starter Guide one-pager:

-External- SMB Newbie Ecommerce Best Practices One-Pager (1) .pdf (22.24 MB)

To learn more about FAQs, refer to FAQs for New E-Commerce Web Conversion Advertisers.