TikTok Ads: A Complete Guide (Costs, Strategy & Expert Tips)

TikTok Ads help businesses reach their target audience through promotional content like in-feed ads, branded effects, and TopView ads. Generally more cost-effective than other platforms, TikTok can boost brand awareness and revenue — here’s how.

Thinking about advertising on TikTok? You’re not alone.

In 2024 alone, TikTok generated an estimated $23 billion in revenue — 77% of which came from advertising.

With all the hype surrounding TikTok and its quickly evolving options for marketers, we tapped HawkSEM Social Lead Strategist Nicole Goodnough to help us break down the basics of TikTok for business, including pro tips for creating effective campaigns.

What are TikTok ads?

TikTok ads are promotional content that appear on the app to help businesses reach their target audience. These can be in-feed videos along with other ad types, such as branded effects ads or branded hashtag challenges.

You want your videos to fit seamlessly into the viewer’s For You Page. (Image: Unsplash)

Types of TikTok ads

There are several TikTok ad campaign types to choose from, including:

• In-feed ads: In-feed videos appear on users’ “For You” pages, blending with organic content.
• TopView ads: Full-screen ads that appear when users open the app, offering high visibility.
• Carousel ads: Multi-image ads, usually found in TikTok’s news feed for specific ad campaigns.
• Branded effects: These are custom AR filters, stickers, and effects that users can interact with and share.
• Spark ads: Boosts existing organic content from creators or brands as paid ads.
• Branded hashtag challenges: Encourage user participation through branded challenges, boosting engagement.
• Search ads: Appear in TikTok’s search results, reaching high-intent audiences at a critical moment in the buyer’s journey.
• Branded mission: In this format, you can boost top-performing videos as ads and source content from creators on TikTok.
• TikTok Promote: Boost content using TikTok’s built-in advertising tools to help improve audience engagement and sales.

Who should use TikTok ads?

Businesses with a young audience — especially in ecommerce — benefit most from TikTok ads.

With TikTok Shopping and user-generated content (UGC), social commerce is booming: 58% of TikTok users shop directly on the platform.

Along with the platform’s in-app shopping feature, however, Goodnough explains that “lead gen forms can help capture leads for your business seamlessly.”

Benefits of TikTok ads

TikTok ads benefit businesses by providing a unique opportunity to connect with a massive, highly engaged audience through authentic content and ad creative.

The platform’s diverse ad formats allow businesses to blend seamlessly into the user experience, driving conversions and enhancing engagement.

With precise targeting options, detailed reporting, and reasonable pricing, TikTok is an ideal advertising platform for many brands.

TikTok vs. Meta and YouTube

TikTok, YouTube, and Meta (Instagram and Facebook ads) all offer short-form video content but generally cater to different audiences.

Here are the main differences between the three platforms:

1. TikTok: Trend-driven, community-based short videos.
2. YouTube Shorts: Tied to YouTube search/discovery, great for long-term growth.
3. Instagram Reels: Integrated with Meta’s network, ideal for influencer/brand engagement.

How much do TikTok ads cost?

The average cost per click (CPC) for TikTok ads is $1, while the average cost per mille (CPM) is $10.

By comparison, CPMs are around $7 on Meta (this is an average across all campaign types: reach, engagement, and conversion). TikTok has a minimum cap of $500 to be spent per campaign.

The average CPC is $1 on both TikTok and Meta ad platforms.

Like most advertising platforms, TikTok uses an auction-based system; so your bidding strategy can ultimately impact the cost of your campaigns.
At the ad group level, daily budgets must be over $20, while lifetime budgets are calculated by multiplying the minimum daily budget and the number of scheduled days.

11 steps to create a TikTok campaign

1. Set up your TikTok ads manager account
2. Ecommerce businesses: Integrate Shopify
3. Identify your audience
4. Create and edit within the app
5. Start with a strong hook
6. Play off of trends
7. Focus on storytelling
8. Leverage audio
9. Conduct consistent testing
10. Keep your messaging direct
11. Keep iterating

1. Set up your TikTok ads manager account

To set up a TikTok ads manager account:

Go to TikTok for Business

• Go to TikTok Ads Manager
• Click “Create Now” or “Sign Up”

Create account

• You can sign up with your email or phone number
• Choose your password and fill in the business name (must match your legal business name if you’ll run ads as a business)
• Agree to TikTok’s terms
• Click “Sign Up”

Enter business information

• Business type, Country/Region, time zone, and currency
• Add Business Details

• Business name
• Website URL
• Industry category

Set up payment

• Go to the Billing section in Ads Manager
• Choose a payment method:
  • Automatic (credit card): TikTok charges you as you spend.
  • Manual (prepaid): You add funds first and TikTok deducts from the balance

Create a campaign

• Campaign > Create
• Choose an objective:
  • Awareness – To grow your brand’s awareness and reach, getting you the maximum amount of impressions from your target audience.
  • Consideration – This middle-of-the-funnel goal aims to grow your brand’s traffic, video views, and community interaction, aka getting more people onto your profile page.
  • Conversion – These action-oriented campaigns are meant to encourage someone to complete a task, like app installs or purchase completion. Think: website conversions, lead generation, app promotion, and product sales.
• Define your target audience, budget, ad placements, and campaign length
• Create your video ad content
• Submit your ad for review
• Monitor the results and iterate as necessary

Pro tip: TikTok has its own guide to six principles that’ll help you create ads that perform.

2. Ecommerce businesses: Integrate Shopify

For ecommerce businesses with a Shopify store, you can integrate it with your business account by installing the TikTok app.

This streamlines your campaigns through automated ad creation, and in certain countries, you can launch a shopping tab on your TikTok profile.

3. Identify your audience

While TikTok is known as an app for younger generations, there is a wide range of demographics. Identify who your audience is, then follow and interact with their content.

This will surface more of that content type, giving you a window into what’s resonating most with this audience segment.

Goodnough adds that, as TikTok’s Gen Z user base ages, colleges and universities should take advantage of the massive pool of prospective students on the platform — for both undergrad and grad programs.

“Location tagging can also be a huge win for local businesses as TikTokers are leaning towards using the platform as a replacement for Google,” she explains.

(Image: Unsplash)

4. Create and edit within the app

Next, you’ll want your videos to fit seamlessly into the viewer’s For You Page.

(This is the main section of the app where people scroll through algorithm-selected videos to find new accounts to view, interact with, and follow.)

One of the best ways to do that is by creating natively in TikTok.

“Highly polished videos or animated text graphics don’t work on this platform like they do on YouTube or LinkedIn,” says Goodnough.

So, rather than struggling to repurpose content you’ve used on other platforms, it’s generally a best practice to create your videos directly in-app. This will also make it easier to edit and post the content when it’s ready.

Videos created elsewhere may render poorly or not fill the specs properly.

Pro tip: HubSpot reports that the three best time frames to post on TikTok are 6-9 p.m., 3-6 p.m., and 12-3 p.m., in that order.

5. Start with a strong hook

While you can technically upload a video up to 10 minutes long, don’t be mistaken: you’ve got 1-2 seconds to make an impact.

You need to hook your audience fast to keep them from scrolling on by. If you don’t? Your video will get “deranked” by the algorithm, effectively sealing your campaign’s fate.

Through our team’s experience creating successful TikTok ads, we’ve seen that capitalizing on existing app trends (more on that below) and using trending sounds and audio clips are great ways to make those first seconds count.

6. Play off of trends

This may be hard for marketers to hear, but it’s nearly impossible to predict TikTok trends.

They come from out of nowhere (case in point: an audio clip from the Gilmore Girls TV show in 2001 becoming part of a meme in 2024) and fizzle out just as quickly.

But it’s also true that this is one of the best ways to get your ad seen by as many people as possible.

When playing off TikTok trends, your best bet is to jump on the bandwagon when the trend is still fresh — that means you haven’t seen tons of other brands play off the same trend.

Trying to capitalize on a trend that’s losing steam will likely result in viewers having a kind of “trend fatigue” that causes them to see or hear the trend and keep scrolling.

“Showing the human side of brands and businesses can be really successful,” adds Goodnough.

“Is a college president a great dancer? What about that head chef who is quippy and hilarious — could he make some great stitches? Try it out, get creative, and throw your brand guidelines out the window.”

Pro tip: There aren’t a ton of evergreen trends on the app. But one that’s proven to have some staying power is the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt tag. If you’re an ecommerce brand in particular, this tag could be worth perusing for inspiration.

Further reading: How to Turn Viral Trends Into Paid Social Ads That Convert

7. Focus on storytelling

Successful ads often have some sort of storytelling element to their content.

Whether it’s a “day in the life” type post (those tend to perform well), someone speaking directly into the camera, or something more, keep storytelling top of mind.

When you look at high-performing ads in TikTok’s ad library, it’s clear that videos telling a story using real people and real-life settings (vs. overly stylized or graphic-heavy videos) are the ones that see success.

Basically, aim to create good TikToks, don’t just run ads.

Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to break the proverbial fourth wall. Talking directly to the viewer, even asking them a question, has been shown to help people connect with what they’re watching. Explore existing templates and see which might work for your brand.

8. Leverage audio

While it’s common for people to use almost all other popular social media apps without sound, TikTok is decidedly a “sound on” environment.

Captions are helpful, especially for making your content as accessible as possible. But, as Social Media Today reports, “brands need to consider sound as a key part of their overall branding effort.”

TikTok offers an audio library with royalty-free music, citing a study that found TikTok was the only social media platform “where ads with audio generated significant lifts in both purchase intent and brand favorability.”

Brands can use this library to explore hundreds of thousands of recordings and filter by preferences such as:

• Region
• Usable placements
• Themes
• Mood
• Duration
• Genre

9. Conduct consistent testing

TikTok seems to know what we want to see before we do.

“Their algorithm is unmatched in the social space, so I always test their auto-targeting options against my own audiences I’ve built for my clients (based on interests or lookalikes), and TikTok’s algorithm performs better fairly often,” explains Goodnough.

Testing out goals (aka campaign objectives, which we’ll get into below) can help you with campaign optimization — and can also yield surprising results.

“One client recently created a TikTok account, and one of their goals was to grow their followers in addition to running brand awareness campaigns,” says Goodnough.

“We tested Video View campaigns and Reach campaigns, but they weren’t resulting in audience engagement and growth. So we switched to Community Engagement campaigns and saw a more than 13,000% increase in paid followers after 30 days.”

If you’re new to the platform, want to see if it’s right for you, or have a limited budget, you can start by publishing organic, free TikTok videos.

This way, you can test a few different strategies out and see what resonates. From there, you can use ad options to amplify your content. This is also a great way to grow your presence and following.

Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to have fun and try new things with your organic videos. A great example: The language learning site and app Duolingo gained a ton of visibility for posting funny, ridiculous videos that played on trends and featured a person donning the company’s mascot owl costume.

While it’s common for people to use almost all other popular social media apps without sound, TikTok is decidedly a “sound on” environment. (Image: Rawpixel)

10. Keep your messaging direct

From your caption to your calls to action (CTAs), less is more. With TikTok marketing copy, you want to be direct, concise, and appealing right out of the gate.

Plus, if you’re going for a goal other than brand awareness, you’ve got to have a strong enough message that’ll inspire viewers to navigate away from the app. If you’ve used the app, you know that’s no easy feat.

11. Keep iterating

As mentioned above, when it comes to TikTok trends, it’s nearly impossible to predict what videos will hit their stride on the app.

Because of that, rather than throwing in the towel on a campaign that’s not getting views, it’s best to keep iterating.

Changing up the first few seconds, speeding up the video, or changing out the music could be just the tweak a video needs to start performing well.

So, if you have a good feeling about what you’ve created? Keep fine-tuning it to see if performance improves as a result.

Pro tip: Use TikTok analytics to track which ad version resonates best with your audience by tracking metrics like views, comments, likes, and favorites.

The rise of TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop first launched in Southeast Asia in December 2020, expanding to the United Kingdom in 2021 and the U.S. in September 2023.

Since then, social commerce has been booming.

In fact, TikTok Shop sold more than two thirds of the total social shopping gross merchandise value (GMV) in February 2024.

While TikTok Shop is still unavailable in some countries like Australia, India, and Canada, it continues to have a hold on the ecommerce market.

“TikTok creates a seamless shopping experience from discovery to research to purchase — hello, #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt,” says Goodnough.

TikTok ads mistakes to avoid

“What works on LinkedIn probably won’t work on TikTok — and vice versa,” Goodnough says. “When it comes to social advertising, you can’t just slap a ‘TikTok Strategy’ sticker on your LinkedIn or Meta strategy and expect it to work.”

Rather, she says each platform has its own purpose and strengths. Your TikTok strategy should plug into your holistic digital marketing strategy for your brand in its unique way, “not just replicate another platform’s strategy.”

The takeaway

When compared to other popular social platforms, TikTok’s current growth just can’t be beat. That’s why you’ll likely continue to see more brands joining in and creating TikTok content.

If you want to reach the right audience in a new, direct way, create fun organic content that shows off your brand’s personality, or simply keep up with the competition, TikTok is where you want to be.

Want to make the most of TikTok advertising? Our team can help you launch and optimize campaigns that deliver real ROI. Reach out today to learn more.

This post has been updated and was originally published in March 2022.