Best practices for optimizing brand awareness and ad recall with TikTok's Brand Basics

If you have a business goal of building your brand's digital presence on TikTok, you want to use tried-and-true principles for your campaign strategy that optimizes brand awareness and engagement with your audience. In the following, we outline TikTok's Brand Basics, which are data-backed best practices for running brand ads and measuring their impact on TikTok. The Brand Basics include best practices for:

1. Target audience reach %

2. Frequency

3. Quantity of creatives

4. Product mix

5. Campaign length

Note: The following recommendations are general best practices that have been shown to have positive impacts to ad campaigns in TikTok studies. While every campaign is different, these tips are a starting point that you can build upon. To discover what works best for you, we recommend continuous testing and learning to ultimately refine your strategy. Learn more about conducting brand lift studies with TikTok.

1. Target audience reach %

TikTok's targeting features enable you to define your campaign's target audience. Your campaign's overall target audience reach % is an important factor in achieving your campaign's overall branding goals. Alongside the other optimization factors, studies show that TikTok campaigns with a minimum reach % saw greater brand lift results than average, depending on region.

Source: TikTok Msci Data Science, Multi-objective Optimization to Achieve Effectiveness and Efficiency, 2024.

Please contact your TikTok sales representative for help with attaining the right target audience reach using our planning and forecasting tools.

2. Frequency

Overall, higher frequency of ad exposure brings higher value in effectively refreshing your target audience's memory and increases your odds of driving key brand metrics. The sweet spot for average weekly frequency is 2-3x per week, which has shown to most efficiently drive improvements in ad recall and brand awareness.

Source: TikTok Data Science, Value of Frequency Planning of TikTok Ads 2.0, Global, 2025.

Source: TikTok Marketing Science, CPG Meta-Analyses, US, Conducted by NCSolutions, 2021-Q1 2024.

To achieve optimal ad exposure frequency, TikTok Ads Manager provides frequency control features. These features include frequency cap, which sets a maximum of ad exposure for users, as well as target frequency, which sets a specific number of ad exposures for users. To manage your ad's target frequency, learn how to use TikTok Ads Manager's frequency control features.

3. Quantity of creatives

A higher quantity of creatives in your campaign maximizes its effectiveness by increasing creative refresh and reducing creative fatigue. For branding goals, while we’ve seen success with campaigns of all shapes and sizes, try a starting point of a minimum creative quantity based on your campaign region. For North America, campaigns with a mix of at least 10 unique creatives led to 1.3x higher ad recall, 3.0x purchase intent, and 1.5x higher awareness when compared to campaigns with fewer than 5 unique creatives. See the statistics from studies for various regions below.

Creative quantity decisions must also factor in creative production constraints to evaluate your ROI. To help reduce the cost and time spent creating the right creatives, use TikTok's creative solutions to:

1. Inform your creative production with TikTok's creative insights using Creative Center insights.

   
   
   

2. Streamline your creative production with tools such as Symphony Creative Studio and creative sourcing platforms such as TikTok One for advertisers.

   
   
   

4. Product mix

TikTok's ad solutions include various ad products and formats for engaging users on the platform. The strongest campaign results don’t come from using in-feed ads alone. A study shows that bundling in-feed video with premium ad formats or units drives greater impact, including 7.5% higher ad recall, 1.4x higher awareness, and 3.0x purchase intent.

Source: TikTok NA Power Slides analysis, 2023- 2024.

When considering bundling, evaluate the mix of different standard in-feed ads and the right premium solutions to pair based on format and audience needs.

Finally, we recommend using different forecasting and planning tools available to select advertisers to decide the right product mix for your media plan. Please contact your TikTok sales representative for more information.

5. Campaign length

To drive higher awareness, we recommend running your branding campaign for a minimum of 3 weeks. In fact, a study showed that advertisers in North America whose campaigns ran 3-4 weeks drove 24.5% higher awareness than average TikTok brand lift results, and advertisers in North America whose campaigns ran for 5-6 weeks achieved 5.7% higher brand association versus average TikTok brand lift results. See the following for studies of campaign length in different regions:

Aside from the minimum, consider aligning your campaign's length to your product's purchase cycle. A study showed that campaigns running for longer than the full purchase cycle had 1.3x the ROAS compared to benchmark.

Source: TikTok Marketing Science, CPG Meta-Analyses, US, Conducted by NCSolutions, 2021-Q1 2024

Finally, consider aligning your campaign against brand moments and tentpole events, both big and small, throughout the entire event lifecycle, including pre-event, launch, and post-event message sustaining.

Learn more

Brand Basics are a starting point in a branding strategy and journey of driving your brand's presence through best practices and TikTok solutions. Explore other resources to learn more.

• Learn how TikTok Brand Basics helped CeraVe in boosting their virality.

• Learn about Symphony Creative Studio and its features for easily generating and adapting creative assets.

• Learn about Creative Center and its creative insights to inspire your creatives.