TikTok Ads Tutorial (2026) – Quick Start Guide 🚀

Key Takeaways

In this video, I want to show you how to set up your first Tik Tok ad. Before we start, really important, you need to sign up for the Tik Tok ad manager. Therefore, you will find my partner link down in the video description. And when you click on it, you will see that Tik Tok is currently running a promotion. They will give you up to 6,000 USD in ad credits when you spend 10,000 USD. Of course, this starts a little smaller. So, when you spend 200 USD, they will top your ad credits with another 200 USD. And of course there are some terms and conditions. For example, you have to spend the amount in the first 30 days and you cannot sign up via Shopify because this is excluded. So they are distributing this promotion via their partners. So just make sure click on the link then you will land here and down here you can sign up via your email and the password and on the next page you need to provide some information about your business and then you can sign up for your Tik Tok ads manager. Once you have done this, you will land on this screen here. And here we can start setting up our campaign. Here you have different advertising objectives. For example, awareness, traffic or I think most of you are interested in sales to your website. And you can choose here the manual campaign in order to have the full control over your campaigns. But before we start setting up a sales campaign, we of course need to track our conversions. Therefore, you can go on tools, then on events. And this will bring you to the events manager of Tik Tok. And up here you can connect the data source. Just click on connect data source. Then you can connect your website, an app or your CRM system. But I will go ahead with a website. Then just type in my website for now, julianweber.com. Hit next. And now you can choose a partner integration. I think most of you have either Shopify or WooCommerce. So I will go ahead with Shopify. Then click next. And now Tik Tok will give you a step-by-step guide on how to set this up. And it's fairly easy. You just have to go to your Shopify store, then to your Shopify app store, and then you can just type in Tik Tok, and it will bring you to the Tik Tok app. You need to install this. And then you just have to connect it to your Tik Tok ads manager. And it's fairly simple. So just go ahead and do that. If you are on Shopify, and yeah, once you have done that, you will see some events here on the event manager. Here you can see my pixels. And yeah, just give it some time. browse through your shop and then you will see the events here. And now we go back to campaigns and hit create. And we can choose sales again, website and then manual. And down here you can give your campaign a name. For example, we want to sell watches. So I give just name it watches and click continue. And now we are on the ad group level. So you can give it a proper name. Whatever your naming convention is in your company, just name your ad group. And down here you can choose the pixel. So here for example, this is my pixel deourse and the optimization event. Either they click the button or view content. And if you have an online shop, you probably want to go for add to cart or for the purchase event. So whatever event you're optimizing for, for me in this case is click a button. And next, you can choose the placement. I'm a big fan of selecting my placement here because I just want to run my ad on Tik Tok. So, I deselect the other two because I don't want my ad on the Tik Tok business partner network. And down here, really important, you have the targeting option. And Tik Tok is recommending you that you leave it broad because they have an AI and it's really good at finding you the right people. But I would recommend that you at least choose your location. For example, I'm based in Germany, so I can just select Germany and my age group. And since I'm selling a watch, I think the minimum is then 18 years to 55 and plus. And if I just want to sell my watches to men, I can choose male. But sometimes this is a mistake because also their wives or girlfriends, they buy the watch for them. So I leave the gender at all. And if I'm speaking in my ad, it's a good habit to also select the language here because then they can understand me. And down here, I can also base my targeting on the interest. So I can just type in watches and then I have people who are generally interested in watches or people who have a certain purchase intention for watches. And now these type of interests and purchase intention are in my audience and it's balanced. So I have over 5 million people in my audience. I think this is fair enough. So I leave it at that. And now I can just enter my budget. You have to be over €20 or $20 here because Tik Tok won't accept any less. I think that's quite funny. So you have to spend a daily budget of minimum of $20 or €20. And then you can just go ahead and choose the optimization goal again. Conversions. And we don't need a target CPA right now because we don't have any data yet. And then you can hit continue. And this brings us to the very last step, our ad and where we can upload our own ad. You can name it video one for example. And then you can add your own video here. So just click on add video. And now you have two options. You can either choose one of your Tik Tok posts when you connect your Tik Tok account or you can upload just a video for your ad. And these are called Tik Tok spark ads. And these are just Tik Tok ads. And you can just hit upload here and then select a file from your desktop and upload it to Tik Tok. I have already done this for this tutorial and have uploaded a video of a watch. So I can just select this one, click confirm and now I can add some text. For example, summer sale save 25% off or whatever you want to write here. AI is even suggesting you some better options here. So I can just select this one. And now you can see the ad right here. And down here we have also the call to action. And you can choose the call to action in this dropdown. So for example, listen now doesn't work here. Play a game doesn't now, book now doesn't work. And the others are okay. And now Tik Tok will optimize these call to action. It will go ahead and test different call to actions for you. So that's quite nice. And here we can add like a product card. So this will be just a banner on top of your video. But I think people are clever. So they watch the video and they have the call to action. If they want to buy the watch, then they will buy it. So I won't use this at product information here. And last but not least, we need to add, of course, a URL to our shop page. I will just put in my website URL because then it will just directly link to my website. And please make sure that you click on preview here to see if it's linking to the right product page because I have seen many advertisers putting a broken URL here and then the ad is not linking to the correct page. And this was pretty much it because we don't need any tracking because we already set up our conversion tracking and then you can just go ahead and publish your ad for the first time. So just hit publish and if you have done this for the first time you will see a popup where you can enter your credit card information and your PayPal to be able to pay for the ads cost and then Tik Tok will directly link you to the campaigns here. So this is the campaign view and you can see that the ad is currently pending because it's under review. It can take up to six hours or half a day but usually uh Tik Tok is really quick and yeah when you click on campaign then you can see all your campaigns and once the ad is approved then you will see the data here. So this was the very quick tutorial on how to set up your first Tik Tok ad campaign and if you want to get started as said you will find the link to the Tik Tok ads manager down in the video description. You can sign up and Tik Tok is offering a bonus from time to time and if you want to learn more I also have a full course on how to run Tik Tok ads professionally. It's over 1 hour long and you will learn pretty much everything there is to know. And I will also link it for you down in the video description.