With a total of over $11 billion in advertising revenue, TikTok is one of the hottest platforms for fast growth right now. This may surprise you, but scaling your TikTok campaigns can be much simpler than you think.
In this article, we will look into how you can scale your TikTok campaigns in 6 simple steps and share our best tips and tricks to try out.
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 1: Nail Down Targeting
The first step, before we dive into the details of targeting, is knowing your product and your audience. The more information you know about them, the easier it will be for you to select the right criteria.
Let’s start with the basics. On TikTok, you can target on three core dimensions:
- Demographics: location, gender, age, language
- Interests & Behaviors: general interests, video interaction, interaction with creators, interaction with hashtags
- Device: operating system, device model, connection type
With so many targeting options available, a lot of advertisers make the mistake of selecting a lot of criteria and not receiving any traffic. A good approach here is to only start with the necessities first. You can select your target location and language, and exclude users younger than 18 years old, especially if your goal is to make purchases.
Selecting interests & behaviors can work if your target location is the United States, but if you are catering to a smaller market, you may need to keep it broad.
If you do select specific interests, make sure to enable “Targeting Expansion”. That way, TikTok will target people from different interests if it is relevant to your product.
Each time you select a criteria (for example, exclude users below 18 years old), you will see an estimation of your audience size (top right). Along with this data, you will also see a target audience indicator from TikTok.
There are four indicators:
- Too Narrow: The audience size is too small, and you will need to remove some criteria to ensure your ads receive enough traffic
- Narrow: The audience size is still small and not ideal.
- Balanced: The estimated audience is at a balanced level, and TikTok recommends this for most advertisers.
- Fairly Broad: The audience size is large. This is not necessarily a problem, especially if you are just getting started and want to gather more data. You can always start broad and eventually cut or remove things that are not working (we will discuss this more in Step 3).
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 2: Play With Your Creatives
You may have heard that TikTok is a “creative-hungry” platform. In fact, TikTok recommends changing your creatives as often as every 7 days!
So how can you keep up with this pace? First, know when to change your creatives and when to do nothing. If an ad is performing extremely well, we do not recommend changing the creative, even if TikTok’s 7-day mark has passed. On the other hand, if an ad is performing exceptionally badly, chances are that changing the creative will not make a huge difference.
Generally speaking, the perfect moment to change your creatives is when performance is getting stale.
If you have a design team, this should not be a big issue for you. If you are working alone, take a look at our article about the 9 tools that will allow you to create ads faster with the help of free stock videos, or platforms where you can connect with affordable UGC creators.
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 3: Cut Things That Are Not Working
Sometimes, no matter how good your creatives are or how well you have perfected your targeting, things simply don’t work out. In this case, you will need to employ a defensive strategy and cut underperforming campaigns, ad groups or ads.
First, you will need to set clear rules for yourself based on your metrics and goals. For example, if the campaign has been running for 7 days and ROI is below 0%, you will pause the campaign. If you only have one TikTok account and a few campaigns, you can do this easily by checking your data and manually pausing underperforming campaigns.
However, if you are running multiple high-budget campaigns from several accounts, you should consider automating this process. TikTok already offers a few simple automation rules on their Ads Manager dashboard, but if you want to manage hundreds of campaigns and TikTok accounts with more complex rules and metrics from one single dashboard, an automation tool like The Optimizer is extremely helpful. You can set your timeframe, conditions, and select all your active campaigns.
This is a simplified example with dummy numbers just to showcase what the system can do, but you can customize this according to your preferences. Instead of ROI, you can choose any other metric you use (conversions, CPA, clicks, ROAS, etc). You can select data from today up until the last 90 days, and choose to run this rule from weekly to as often as every 10 minutes. The system will also notify you when it executes a rule.
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 4: Gradually Increase Budgets
On the other hand, if things are working out well, you may want to increase your budgets. A common mistake is increasing budgets too quickly. In general, increasing them gradually by 15-20% at a time is safer.
Again, you can do this manually, using TikTok’s rules, or using an advanced automation tool like The Optimizer.
Here is an example of an automatic rule you can set within The Optimizer. According to this rule, the system will check if there are any campaigns that have spent more than $50 and reached an ROI of over 50% in the past 7 days. For each campaign that fits this criteria, the budget will automatically be increased by 15%.
The exact same approach works for decreasing budgets when needed.
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 5: Clone Ad Groups
If an ad group is performing exceptionally well, you might want to increase bids and budgets more than the recommended 20% rate. However, this can confuse the algorithm and cause performance to drop.
This is why we generally recommend cloning top performing ad groups instead. As with the previous two steps, this one can also be delegated to our automation system. Depending on your own metrics, you can specify which ad groups should be cloned.
If you are still unsure of whether an automation tool is right for you, check out our case study on how one of our users made $195K in a month with TikTok ads while using The Optimizer.
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 6: Know & Monitor Your Numbers
Finally, it’s important to know and consistently keep track of your numbers. Which metrics are important to your business? When do you make money, and how do you monitor your results?
This may sound like a small step, but in reality it is often what sets successful advertisers apart from their competitors.
Create a list of your key performance indicators, such as CPA (cost per acquisition), conversions, click-through-rate, ROI, etc. For each metric, calculate at which level they are exceptional, average, and bad. Then you can begin the process of gathering data, increasing budgets for exceptional results, monitoring average results, and cutting bad ones before they can lose more money.
How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns: Conclusion
In this article, we discussed how you can scale your TikTok campaigns in 6 simple steps by nailing down targeting, playing with your creatives, cutting things that are not working, gradually increasing budgets, cloning overperforming ad groups, and constantly monitoring your numbers.
The first step in completing these steps successfully is knowing your business, audience, and key performance metrics upfront. With your knowledge, you can start optimizing your campaigns manually if you only have a few, or using an automation tool, like The Optimizer, to take things to the next level.
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