What Products are TikTok Ads Best For?

People use TikTok for entertainment—it gives users a steady drip of pleasurable dopamine hits, one after the next.

That means buyer intent is low on this channel.

Broadly speaking, TikTok is best suited as a secondary channel to drive top of funnel traffic to your website or app. For a smaller subset of businesses—particularly those selling visual products with broad appeal and short sales cycles—TikTok is worth exploring as a legitimate acquisition channel to convert customers right away.

That’s the focus of this playbook.

At a high level, the paid strategy we recommend looks like this:

1. Get people to stop swiping and pay attention to your ads.
2. Bring them back to your website (or app) to track, retarget, and convert.

It’s the same two-pronged approach we recommend Growth Program students follow to acquire customers on any paid social platform. But the secret sauce on TikTok has nothing to do with technical media buying—it has everything to do with your content.

Content is king, as the cliche goes. We show you how to approach content creation for your ad creatives in an upcoming section. But first, let's go over the types of products that have the best chance of succeeding with TikTok ads right now.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce

TikTok is an energetic, visual platform, so it's only natural that visual consumer goods do well on this platform. Companies that sell physical products with Average Order Values (AOVs) under $100 and short sales cycles are ideal for TikTok ads.

• Beauty and cosmetics: Jones Road sells clean, high-grade beauty products for all skin types and tones. They use makeup tutorials and seemingly-authentic product reviews to show viewers how to use the product. This strategy helps to generate awareness, interest, and desire.
  
  
• Fashion and apparel: True Classic sells premium fitted t-shirts for men of all body types. They use before and after UGC, testimonials, and side-by-side product comparisons with competing brands.
  
  
• Consumer-packaged goods (CPG): Athletic Greens, mega podcast advertiser, sells a convenient nutritional greens powder. They make sales on TikTok with creator Spark ads, incentivizing conversions with unique discount codes and free samples.

Mobile apps

Mobile apps and games work well on TikTok for the same reason they work on other channels: free app installs are low-friction. To get affordable CPIs, try showing real-time usage of the most interesting parts of your app (e.g., gameplay, onboarding, user progression, exclusive features your competitors don't have).

• Fintech: Coinbase is the most reputable cryptocurrency exchange. They work with young, energetic content creators who lean into FOMO messaging and timely crypto news to hook viewers, then demonstrate how easy it is to get started in crypto using the free Coinbase app.
  
  
• Games: Beatstar is a simple music rhythm game that features both classic and timely hits. They use a simple, effective formula:
  • Feature a popular song for compelling audio
  • Show gameplay footage
  • Close with a free download CTA.
    
    
• Travel: Hopper is an app that helps users book cheap flights, hotels, and car rentals. They use a Buzzfeed-esque headline to capture the viewer's attention and use education, value props, and varied audiovisual elements to keep people watching to the end.

Advantages of TikTok ads

TikTok presents several advantages over paid social channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat:

• TikTok is unsaturated: Most companies are too timid to invest in TikTok ads properly, which means competition is low, and traffic is affordable. TikTok CPMs range between $1-$5 on average (~1/10th the price of Facebook's), CAC is around $35 depending on business type and ad quality, and CPAs are among the lowest you'll find, falling in the $1-$4 range for ecom businesses.
  
  
• Exponential user growth: TikTok's user base is snowballing across audiences worldwide. Low advertising competition and an influx of new users make TikTok a potential blue ocean channel for customer acquisition. And the broad range of age demographics allows brands to market to secondary audiences effectively.
  
  
• TikTok ads are repurposable: The learning curve is steep, but once you iterate towards a winning ad template (we'll show you a framework for this), you can repurpose top-performing creatives for other ad channels and anticipate comparable results. Keep in mind that the inverse doesn't hold true. TikTok ads are distinct from other social ads, and what works on another channel (say, Facebook) is unlikely to work on TikTok. That's what makes this advantage so powerful: if you can make TikTok ads work, you can make any ad channel work.

Brands that acquiesce to TikTok's creative requirements now will have an edge in the long-term as the channel becomes increasingly crowded with new advertisers.

Challenges

There are three main challenges to be aware of if you're considering advertising on TikTok:

• Creative-intensive: TikTok is one of the most creative-intensive channels, by far. You'll need to allocate resources to produce bespoke video content that feels native to the platform. To do this successfully, you'll need a large stockpile of user-generated content (UGC), custom or license-free music, and the patience to withstand repetitive ad rejections. To compress the learning curve, we recommend most companies pay creators to help produce content (we show you how to find and work with creators in an upcoming section). If you have the resources to create ads yourself, we'll show you how to do that as well.
  
  
• High ad refresh rate: TikTok users have short attention spans and ads fatigue much faster than other channels. Ads also tend to hit or miss with relatively little in-between, which means rapid testing and iteration cycles are crucial to success. Expect to launch and test flights of new ad creatives every week to keep up the pace.
  
  
• Targeting and attribution challenges: As a relatively young ad platform, TikTok lacks the robust targeting, reporting, and attribution capabilities of mature channels like Facebook and Google ads. Crucially, you can't upload customer email lists to create lookalike audiences. Right now, the only available format is mobile IDFA/GAID. And attribution-wise, TikTok relies on a single session attribution window, making it difficult for businesses to optimize if relying exclusively on TikTok's in-app reporting.

In short, the creative requirements are very high on TikTok, and it remains a challenge for brands to accurately measure ad success without using third-party solutions.

When is it the right time to test TikTok ads?

Now that you have an overview of TikTok ads—including the channel's key advantages and challenges—here are four questions to ask yourself when deciding if now is the time to test this channel:

1. Can you commit the budget to test TikTok ads properly? Every new channel has a cost of entry, and you must be prepared to spend money to learn. We recommend setting aside 10% - 30% of your marketing budget to test this channel properly. If you follow the strategy we outline in this module, it should take about 6-10 weeks to test and validate TikTok as a paid acquisition channel.
   
   
2. Does your business have strong product-channel fit? If your product is visually appealing, has a short sales cycle, and your AOV is between $25 - $100, OR you sell a mobile game or app, TikTok ads are worth testing.
   
   
3. Do you have the capacity to focus on TikTok as a separate channel in your ad mix? TikTok is an entirely different beast than Facebook. To give TikTok ads a fair shot, you'll need to invest resources into producing a high volume of channel-specific creatives that you can test diligently. Whether you make them yourself or partner with content creators, having a high volume of creatives ready to go is essential.
   
   
4. Have you seen success with Snapchat ads, IG Reels, or IG Stories? If you've had success with any of these channels and want to diversify, TikTok is a logical next step. TikTok has cheaper CPAs, cheaper CPMs, and higher quality traffic than Snapchat or Instagram. You can try repurposing Snapchat/IG assets because these types of ads are typically vertical UGC videos, precisely the kind of content that performs best on TikTok. And if you have the original video content, even better. You can cut new ads, making full use of TikTok's audiovisual publishing tools to achieve the right aesthetic.

→ If you answered 'yes' to all four questions, TikTok ads are worth testing.

→ If not, and you're still interested in experimenting with TikTok, consider testing an organic strategy first.

Consideration: Start with an organic strategy

It typically takes many weeks or months to get results with organic social.

Paid advertising lets you accelerate the time-to-results by paying for attention instead of building it piecemeal via community-building tactics and content marketing.

As we explained, investing in TikTok ads doesn't make sense for every business, but nearly any business can learn to create great content and build an audience on this platform. This can happen faster than you think.

TikTok is a virality engine, and it's still possible to rack up hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of views overnight with a new account and zero followers.

When recommending videos, TikTok uses a Content Graph instead of a Social Graph. This means content is served based on users' interests, not which accounts they follow. That's huge because, unlike Instagram, follower count on TikTok doesn't directly impact your video views. That means your ability to grow rests upon the quality of your content, not your popularity.

If you learn how to make excellent thumb-stopping TikTok content, the algorithm will continue boosting it to new audiences as long as people continue engaging with it, and you'll have a real shot at building a marketable audience much faster than on any other platform right now.

Example: Morning Brew

The popular daily newsletter, Morning Brew, started with an organic strategy to test content ideas, establish brand awareness, and build a following on TikTok. Once MB proved they could make content that drives engagement and new followers, they partnered with TikTok content creators to help produce ads and scale subscriber growth. Here's an example of a successful ad they ran:

The TikTok strategy we teach in this playbook is meant to help companies acquire customers with ads. Still, the creative best practices and templates we cover are also applicable for an organic content strategy.

On the next page, we’ll walk you through the platform’s two main ad types and how to use them in your campaigns.