TikTok Top Media Buying & Ad Creative Strategies [JULY 2023]

Key Takeaways

hey everybody this is Savannah Sanchez from the social Savannah really excited to be here today to talk all about Tick Tock media buying and AD creative strategies so who Am I who is the social Savannah um I started my business at Social Savannah in 2020 I actually started as a media buyer my background is in media buying I worked at an agency called Common Thread Collective where I led the Facebook and Snapchat media buying teams in 2020 I decided to go off on my own and essentially become a paid social freelancer work with Brands directly on their media buying really started leading into Tick Tock in April of 2020 was one of the very early adopters of that platform and I've helped multiple Brands scale on Tick Tock from that time I've also really had a heavy emphasis on the creative portion that something in the last couple years especially since iOS 14 that has become just so critical is having really great creatives for tick tock so I've been building out my creative team to provide really great ad creatives as you can see on the screen for a multitude of clients like athletic greens Farmer's dog revolve Dr squats just to name a few I'm also one of the top three most popular Tick Tock creative exchange agencies in North America and so I'm able to work with over 200 brands on their Tick Tock ad creatives so I put together this brand new deck just for the special day and I'm going to be sharing exactly what's working for my clients right now for tick tock media buying and AD creatives so this is my default ad set structure when I'm working with e-commerce Brands I'm always optimizing for conversions complete payment I'm never using day parting I'm always using audience exclusions um 180 day past purchasers something that's really worked well for me is optimizing for Value as the optimization goal that's something that I just do standards this is my standard ad setup no gatekeeping here just sharing exactly what I would do if I was training a new media buyer on my process audience targeting when working with e-commerce Brands I'll usually have five ten ad sets running at a time in my Tick Tock ad account here's some examples of the ad sets that I use most frequently usually I'll do some sort of broad so no interest targeting and just part it by age so like under 24 year old broad female let's just say if we're doing a makeup company I just want it to be female I'll have another ad set for broad 25 plus female and the reason why I separate out the age groups is it all has come down to creatives so if I'm doing a makeup ad that I want to Target like older women like 35 Plus and the models and the ads are going to be more mature that's going to make sense to separate my ad sets by age and have the older looking models in that um that 25 or 35 Plus ad set and then the teenagers in that 20 form below so I separate it by age so I could put different creatives in each one another standard ad set that I'll run in my ad account is a look like based off of purchasers from last year other audiences that work well are like interest in hashtag Stacks so essentially all stacked together a bunch of interest and hashtags into one I'll show an example of that another thing that's working well is auto targeting so essentially there's a button in Tick Tock ads manager that lets Tick Tock Target for you I'll let the robots take over and have machine learning do all the targeting that's one that I'll test another one is smart performance targeting I have a whole slide on that later and talk about my experience with smart performance and then lastly I'll usually have some sort of retargeting AD set so I'm usually retargeting page views last 30 days video views 50 people have added to cart in the last 90 days and I'll kind of combine all those audiences into one retargeting ad set so just to elaborate on the interest and hashtag stack what I mean by that what I'll do is I'll select a variety of interests I'll try to pick pretty broad interests over a million in that in that interest and essentially combine them all together so I have makeup liquid makeup nail art products all include some hashtags in there as well and this is what I would call an interest or hashtag stack definitely a staple ad set in all of my ad accounts another thing to keep in mind when doing interest and hashtag targeting I always turn targeting expansion on so essentially that's the toggle in um in Tick Tock ads manager that you would turn on and you would want to expand the Audience by interesting behaviors essentially meaning that if you when you were doing your hashtag and interest selections if Tick Tock thinks that they can get lower CPA targeting someone outside of your initial selections it allows Tick Tock to expand outside of that initial audience that you chose so that's always a smart one to click on and then I mentioned automatic targeting so as you can see when you're setting up your ad set you'll have the option for custom targeting which would be like your standard targeting where you're choosing your audiences or you can also choose an ad set for automatic targeting so when I'm launching a new tick tock ad account I'll always try to test both I'll have some of my my interest Stacks I'll have my local likes but then I'll also test the automatic targeting because I've actually seen that work well for a bunch of my clients just essentially you put no targeting parameters I would say if your product is really Niche specific that's probably going to work less well but if you have a pretty broad appeal product that automatic targeting can work really well for you because Tick Tock will essentially try testing it on a lot of groups of people and then learn from the data of who's purchasing of who to show the attitude next so a few things that I think are worth testing number one is smart performance so on Twitter I've kind of been going back and forth of I've been testing smart performance I've been liking it I haven't been liking it but for a few clients of mine I've actually seen it work really well for some it's been a flop some it's really well so I can't say it's worked really well across the board but when it works it does work so it's something that I'm testing for all my clients it's brand new to tick tock essentially when you're setting up your campaign type you'll see this toggle for smart performance campaign and you don't choose any targeting again relying on tick tocks machine learning to do all the targeting for you but what's really cool about it and why I think it works so well is that you can upload up to 30 video variants into the iset and up to five text variations and Tick Tock will test all those different combinations of videos and text that you provided and and see which combination performs best for that audience and continue to optimize so I just gave a little example you can upload seven videos so if you have seven really great ugc videos in your ad account you want to try consolidating everything into one smart performance campaign add a few text options we never know exactly what's going to work so always try a few different options and essentially Tick Tock will do that work for you of doing the testing and then figuring out which copy variation is the best so smart performance campaign one of the biggest benefits is just it's very easy to manage since there's no media buying involved you're letting Tick Tock do all of the targeting and the optimizations you're just uploading your videos and your text which is pretty cool so definitely worth testing something that I've been testing a lot in the last month here's another thing that I've been testing a lot and that I would definitely recommend is these display cards so essentially when your ad pops up you can choose the duration of when the sticker comes up and you can add your call to action a discount and what's cool is that you don't even have to create your own graphic and upload it tick tock in ads manager has this really handy templates so like for this one I just chose this template put your discount the text that you want the call to action the color and boom there it is so been seeing these display cards work really well especially when I find a creative that works like a video that I've seen work really well kind of my next step in optimizations is okay let me test it with a display card and usually I see when I add the display card it actually really helps extend the life of the creative and lower CPA so something I would be testing if I were you so here's like my Tick Tock ad optimization schedule when I'm media buying twice a week I launch new ads as we know creatives are really the main driver of performance on Tick Tock um of course you need a great landing page and a great product but to stop the scroll initially you need a really great creative so I'm going to be spending the last part of this presentation kind of Rapid firing through my top creative formats so when I'm working with clients I launched no less than two new ads per week and I'm usually launching either net new creatives or iterations off of my past best performers also twice a week I'm turning off ads above my CPA Target another thing that's been really helpful for me is North beam attribution a lot of my clients use it I also use purchase surveys like fairing is a really great Shopify app that can help paint that whole picture of what's actually working and is Tick Tock driving incremental Revenue so but I'm going through my twice week optimizations seeing what ads are above my CPA Target turning them off I'm also turning on ads that are below my CPA Target that maybe have some delayed attribution I might have turned them off earlier in the week but now when I look back at the last seven days I see oh actually that one um was a good ad so I can turn back on ads that actually came in below my CPA Target so it's like my twice a week schedule of course you don't want to be tinkering too much in your ad account you want to let things kind of rest and learn so I find that going in twice a week and making those little optimizations is a really good schedule uh some general rules I always like to keep five to seven ads active in ad set at a time so if you have an ad set and you are ending up turning up off the majority of the ads because they're above your CPA Target that should be an alert to you that you really need to make some new creatives you always want to have a library of new creatives that you can upload to the ad account Once you turn off the ones that are underperforming so that's why I mentioned at least two a week that you're ready to rotate in the ad account and then leaving best performing ads and AD sets alone if I have an I've had ad sets that I am running for months if not years and some ad accounts and I have the ads in there and they're working well I just don't touch it I leave it don't turn everything off don't duplicate it just leave it and then launch new ad sets alongside of it you can even duplicate that ad set with the exact same targeting to launch your new ads but I my number one media buying rule is if it's working don't touch it so leave your ad sets and ads alone if they're not broken just let him be so let's go through some top ad creatives on Tick Tock so really what you should be focusing on is the ad creative portion that's why for my business I work closely with e-commerce Brands to provide them new creatives each week because I know that's really the biggest differentiation that I can provide I just showed you guys the whole media buying structure so there's really nothing proprietary to how to Media Buy on Tick Tock now it's common knowledge in this presentation but really the secret sauce is making those creatives that can stop the scroll and convert and that's where I really specialize in so I'm going to be sharing some really great ad formats that you can copy for your ad account so out of all the examples I'm sharing this is the only one that I didn't create but I wanted to include because I saw it last week and I thought it was absolutely genius so essentially what they've done is they've set up a fake podcast like this is an actress I've seen it on a bunch of ads and they're faking a podcast intro and then you can see they even added this on air overlay which is just hilarious and then they go into the ad so just by having it on a podcast even though it's fake adds that credibility so that's something I thought was really genius another hook that I've seen work well is just saying like I heard about this on a podcast and I wanted to see if the hype was real that's been another best performing hook so all the other AdSense presentations are ones that I've made for clients I'm going to be going through some of my top performing hooks that if I'm working with a new client these are hooks I would probably want to test first because they're tried and true so this one is I tried blank to see if the rumors were true and then going through the value props always keeping my ads below 30 seconds having the text overlays with the tick tock native fonts having my CTA with the website at the end I finally get the hype after trying X another best performing hook as you can see too when we're editing ads we like to add little simple zooms very subtle animations we try to keep things very native to tick tock while keeping it direct response and high quality ending with your offer in the ad so this one is a format called three reasons why and this is one that's been working well for years essentially three reasons why um you should buy X number one is blah blah blah another uh thing that we've been doing with this three reasons why is pairing it with what I call the SpongeBob voice this voice effect has been working really well for tick tock ads I'm gonna play it so you can hear what it sounds like but uh SpongeBob plus three reasons why has been a really winning combination completely yeah very annoying but it works so definitely test that SpongeBob voice here's one that is a little bit interesting uh three reasons you shouldn't buy X so sometimes clients would be like why are we saying that we shouldn't buy something um but just by saying you shouldn't buy something it it captures the attention of consumers because they're not expecting a brand to say something negative about themselves and ads but then of course your three reasons why is like I literally bring this everywhere I became obsessed with it I ended up buying too many and gave them to all my friends definitely don't go to sandcloud.com it's too versatile so all the reasons are you know positives another spin on this that we've been doing is uh showing negative reviews so like reading out one star reviews and then saying like however uh thousands of customers disagree and we have um like a five star average rating like see why customers love it at blah blah so just doing stuff like that like being able to poke fun at yourself say why you shouldn't buy it or reading out one star reviews or waste you can stop the scroll here's a classic one what I ordered versus what I got um so essentially saying like I I saw this online and I wanted to try it out I saw this on Tick Tock as you can see we use um the green screen effect um to show what it's like on the website and then showing what it looks like in real life so this is a format that we've used time and time again and I've seen work well across many brands calling out the problem as a question do you want wider teeth this is for you and then going into the value props Tick Tock comment question overlay looks very organic to tick tock having this overlay there with a question and then and having someone in a testimonial style answering the question life hacks skincare life hacks I wish I knew sooner I had no idea I was doing this wrong so I had no idea I was wearing the wrong sports bra this whole time so it's almost like having a little bit of a cliffhanger of what the problem is and the solution testimonial mashup so something I do with a lot of my clients is that we'll film with multiple models especially for clothing so that you can see what it looks like on different body types having multiple people say to the camera why they love it we see that combining multiple models in one ad works really well Tick Tock made me buy it another classic hook that we've seen work well time and time again it's still working even years later so that's one that we also refer back to similarly talk top Tick Tock shopping finds even um green screening the actual Tick Tock profile of the brand so talk to coxhein's property Edition and then going into the value props gift ideas he'll actually love shout out to the ridge wallet are the reviews actually true and then screen recording over the reviews on the website and then sharing our personal experience with the product so I hope you enjoyed some of these ad examples um like I said I create brand new ads for e-commerce clients each week if you want to check out more examples for inspiration I have my full portfolio online at thesocialsavannah.com if you like the media buying portion of this I do have a tick tock ads course and a private Facebook group for those Tick Tock ads course students to ask me questions you'll have lifetime access it's constantly updated with new information and so you can get that at this bitly slash Tick Tock smart marketer.com and you even get 100 off just for signing up with this link