You already have an account set up; campaigns set up, and videos available that are entertaining, informative, and educational. You’ve run your first ads, and now what?
How do you optimize your campaigns? How do you compare your ads to each other? How do I know the winning creative? And what to do with it next? All these questions are answered in this article.
First, what metrics should I focus on?
- Amount spent
- Click-through rate
- Cost per click
- CPA (Cost Per Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout, Purchase)
- ROAS
*When comparing metrics, it is recommended to look at a 14-day window.
When comparing metrics, it is recommended to look at a 14-day window.
Amount spent is a great metric because it shows which video TikTok’s algorithm has rated as having the most potential (based on watch time, engagement, and clicks). I would take the ads that TikTok decides to spend on as a sign that it’s a good ad.
What values should I expect?
Expect TikTok’s CPA to be 3x higher than the actual CPA.
A CTR above 1% is considered a good result, and above 1.5% is excellent.
Below 1% means you should work on your creatives.
*Remember, 50 conversions per week per ad set is a must:)
Once I have a winning creative, it’s time to test. You can try anything, but I would definitely test the same ad to different audiences, then bidding strategy and landing pages. What works for one account may not work for another, so it pays to test everything. As for the creative itself, I would play around with the video itself, cut it up, try a different type of music, and change the hook (first 3s of the video). Also, at the end of the video, I would test the CTA and then watch the CTR metric; the higher the percentage, the better.
*I recommend changing only one transformation at a time. Otherwise, you won’t find out exactly what caused the change.
Where to find the truth?
The data in TikTok BM is used to decide which ads to turn off and to see which creatives are performing well. So mainly for analyzing creatives and making decisions about creatives.
I don’t recommend looking at the metrics in TT BM to analyze TT’s contribution to your business. If you only looked at TikTok, you would most likely dismiss TT and stop spending on it:)
Also, Google Analytics data will give you a very depressing picture. So it’s not worth following GA either. This is because the TikTok user journey is different. Typically, a user will see an ad on TikTok and later return and place an order through Facebook or Google or come directly to your site. And GA will only record users who click on TikTok’s ad and now place an order. But that’s not the typical behavior of TT users. This is the first step along the way. TT is great for increasing traffic and awareness.
What’s definitely worth doing is doing a post-purchase survey and asking how customers found out about you (FB, TikTok, Instagram…). Or put a discount code in the TikTok ad, for example, called TIKTOK10, which will also give a better picture of TikTok’s benefits.
Then it is also possible to use external tools that specialise in attribution modelling and first party data such as Triple whale and Northbeam, but they are pretty expensive.
And, of course, I recommend looking at the big picture of your marketing efforts – the MER metric, or marketing effectiveness ratio, measures the overall benefit of digital marketing. Total Revenue/Total Cost. It’s not meant to serve as a guide for ad or campaign-level decision-making. Instead, it helps you understand marketing costs as a revenue generation multiplier.
A simple example: if I invest 100 000 CZK in internet advertising campaigns and my revenue is 400 000 CZK, then MER is 4. If I invest 50 000 CZK in TikTok and the total cost is 150 000 CZK, but the revenue is still 400 000 CZK, then I see this investment did not bring anything.
How do we approach campaign evaluation in 6clickz? We strive to ensure every client has KPIs set at the whole project level (MER). We then work with that KPI in our reporting tool 6ixwand, whose data pipeline looks like this:
We aggregate data from all advertising systems, Google Analytics, GMC, and CRM, into one place, and that is 6ixwand. That’s where the exciting work starts when we create wonders with MER metrics.
One of the exciting reports is Marginal Acquisition Budget (MAB). The report shows the current e-shop and hypothetical end-of-the-month (EOM) sales. When I meet the project level KPIs, which is a Target PNO of 20%, it creates an Acquisition Budget that I can use to test new products, creatives, or new audiences, and I will still meet Target PNO. So the DAB daily metric shows me how much I can spend on experiments daily to meet the project-level KPIs.
TikTok has also developed handy reports to help you analyze your videos clearly. Video insights can be found in TikTok Ads Manager under Reports. Here you can compare videos by CTR, Total cost, conversions, CPC, CPM, and CPA. Below the graphs, you’ll find all your videos and see how they perform against others in your category. This report is worth checking out!
In addition, you’ll find Custom reports, Audience insights and Creative inspirations below the reports.
In Creative Inspirations, you’ll find top ads and trends to inspire you. You can filter by region, category, optimization, number of likes, and video length.
Evaluating the success of your ads on TikTok is inextricably linked to your campaign goals. It’s important to remember that TikTok is still a relatively new platform constantly evolving. Therefore, it is necessary to be innovative and test new features that TikTok offers.
