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TikTok Advertising Basics: Is it Good for E-commerce Sellers?

October 07, 2020 | Author: Andrew Maff
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On the 53rd episode of Marketing Interruption, your host Andrew Maff discusses TikTok advertising. Of course, this new platform that has been a hot topic all year has been growing quickly with both consumers and businesses, but how has it affected their advertising? he dives deep into the pros and cons of TikTok advertising and helps you decide if you should give it a try as well.

 

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TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:41

Hello, and welcome to episode number 53 of the marketing interruption podcast. Today I'm going to talk to you about Tick Tock advertising and what it means for e commerce sellers. So this one's very interesting Tick Tock is clearly a hot topic. As we're talking right now, Oracle is their tech partner, but no one has officially bought them yet. But by the time this podcast actually comes out who the hell knows. So we started to use it, we have decided that we will obviously offer our services for paid advertising on Tick tock, but we decided that the organic posting and tick tock at least for e commerce sellers just wasn't something that we thought we could do well enough at a low enough rate for it to be worth it, especially considering it's such a brand new platform, and no one has really figured out what's working great. As a side note, for what we suggest, is will typically give some guidance on content types and things like that. But we actually think that it's nice to be more of a personalized platform, where it's actually used in the office by employees, and they all just do their different TikTok dances and stuff like that. So that way, you can still hop on trends. And you can kind of keep it branded and keep it a little more fun. But I see it as a better personalized place. But I digress. So the advertising benefit to it, the user experience of the whole back end is great, there's it's super easy, it's very clean, it's very understandable, the reporting is beautiful. So whoever did their UX fantastic. The issue I had in the beginning, when we first started doing this was the setup wasn't as simple as they made it out to be. There's some issues with the pixel and the audiences where the pixel will take up certain events, it will say, you know, X amount of product page views or X amount of added to cart or anything like that. But then you go to create an audience. And it's not showing that same amount, which causes an issue in who you can actually exclude or who you can create a look alike audience with or anything like that. And since I wanted to touch on the basics, let me dive back into that real quick, the audiences are almost the exact same as Facebook, you can do look alikes, you can create custom audiences, you can upload certain you can upload email lists, but there's, I forgot what the files called. But you can upload certain customer lists. So it's very, very similar to Facebook. In fact, there's actually some other targeting that they have, where essentially, you can get more content specific about like, not not the person who posted it. But the content that was created based on the hashtags and things like that, you can get that specific to that piece of content, as well as specific to who liked it, or targeting who commented or who shared or one of each or none of them. So you can get very granular in terms of who you're targeting. And then they also have categories and things like that, that aren't as in depth as Facebook, but they're pretty in depth. So there's some pros and some cons to the different types of targeting that you can do. But in my opinion, the targeting is great, especially for a platform that is relatively new. But the biggest issue for e commerce sellers right now is going to be there's no conversion value tracking. So you can't tie a direct ROI to it. You can't say I spent x and made y. The only way you can do that is through Google Analytics. And I would suggest doing it through a UTM code through Google Analytics. Because the issue we had in the beginning, we first started doing this, which I would say we first started doing tic Tock ads. What is it? It is September in the beginning it was probably January or February, I think we started doing this. And we we had an issue where essentially, the conversion value wasn't showing, which we found out later was just never going to show. And then the other issue was Oh, that the traffic just wasn't showing at all Tick Tock was showing you've had 100 300 clicks, which means 100 300 some odd people went to the website, and they would go to Google Analytics and there'd be nothing and then we would go to Shopify and there would be nothing. Even today we still have the issue where it's not showing up in Shopify and my thought is because Shopify just hasn't implemented that type of reporting for tik tok to be just shown yet. There's my opinion assumption, but some of them it shows some it doesn't. But I'm not going to get in there.

 

05:04

So so there's a bit of an issue there. The other side of the problem is the bidding. So you don't always you don't bid like you would in Facebook, you don't say, here's my budget surprise me, you actually kind of bid on what it is you're targeting. So if you're targeting traffic, you bid on clicks, if you're targeting conversions you bid on a CPA. And the problem is that when you first launch a campaign, it will say, based on what we see right now, you should be bidding x. And it won't increase your bidding for you. So you have to go in and check. So we're on a daily basis of checking what should our bid be, what should our bid be watch our videos all the time, to a point where it's if you don't have enough data coming in from the conversions, you actually now have to go back and change your bidding all the time. And it's just going to consistently increase your CPA target. So we had one of those issues where you kind of want to start further up the funnel. So we would start with traffic targeting, we would change it to targeting add to cart, and then we would change it to conversion targeting. And that's kind of been where we've seen a lot of the benefit. However, so far, the results we've gotten have been mixed. We've had a couple sellers where it worked really well. And it's a nice channel for them. It's not Facebook, it's not YouTube, in some cases, not Google. But we have had some success with it. We've had some others where we've gotten great branding out of it, we had a great reach, and the cost per click is like nothing, but the conversion rates just not there. And we've gone through the typical, like maybe it's the wrong audience, maybe it's their own content. We've been testing that stuff, and we've been tweaking, but we're also learning that even if you target that older audience and tik tok, it is still a very different type of user experience on this platform, where people are really there to just blank out and siphon through videos that they think are funny. And the way to get rid of an ad is very simple. Obviously, in Facebook, you can just scroll past it. And same with Instagram, you can just scroll past it, and tick tock you can also just scroll past it. So if you don't catch their, their eye within seconds, they're gone. So we've kind of said with e commerce sales, you haven't done it yet tread lightly. Give it a try. Keep the budget relatively low. Our favorite is to if you're going to do like a really minimal test to start it like $100 a day for a couple weeks and see see if it brings in anything or even enough data for you to kind of decipher what it is. I don't know what the minimum is, I think actually it's $50 a day I think is the minimum that you can do on Tick Tock to test. I'm always a fan of testing something you can't say it doesn't work until you've tested it. But I would say tread lightly there's still some areas where they need some work. They I would love conversion value tracking. So I want to know what the ROI is for obvious reasons. But that would be my suggestion. If you're looking to try it out. Those are the basics. One of these podcasts. I'll dive deeper into what works and what doesn't but it for the basics. Start a low budget, test it out, see how it goes. That's all I have for today. So I will see you all tomorrow.

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