Mastering TikTok Ads in 2023: A Foolproof Guide to Testing Your Product

With TikTok recently surpassing over 1 billion users, it has undoubtedly revolutionized the short form content game. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that advertisers are flocking to this platform. In combination with the iOS 14 update, TikTok ads have become a hot opportunity to promote products & reach a massive audience.

In this blog, we'll dive straight into the essentials of testing a product using TikTok ads and unveil a simple yet effective strategy.

Setting Up Your TikTok Ad Account:

First things first, if you're new to TikTok advertising, to get started you need to first set up your account and pixel. It’s a really straight forward setup process - simply google search 'tiktok ads' & follow the steps to set up an account. Provide your name, email, and a few other basic details, and voila! You have your ad account ready to roll. If you need assistance, there are plenty of helpful YouTube videos available to guide you step by step through the process.

Prior to kickstarting your product testing journey, there are a few essentials you'll need:

3-5 ad creative variations: Experiment with different images, videos, and formats to find the winning combination.
A budget of $125: (May vary depending on your product's price and cash flow, but allocating a sufficient budget is crucial)
A live website: Ensure that your website is up and running, ready to handle potential customers.
The right strategy: Here's where the true magic happens - setting up your campaign with a proven approach.

Implementing the Strategy:

To keep things simple and effective, we'll follow this campaign structure & assume for any future reference that we are selling our product for $50.

Create a new campaign using ABO structure (Auto Bid Optimization) Meaning you’re controlling your budget on each individual adset. You’ll also want to tick the ACO box (Auto Creative Optimization) to turn it on. ACO allows you to test multiple variables simultaneously, such as creatives and text copies, optimizing towards the best-performing combinations.
Avoid interest targeting initially to reach a broader audience and avoid pigeonholing your pixel.
Set a budget of $25 per ad set and schedule the campaign to start at midnight the next day. This ensures a full day's spend for analysis while minimizing the risk of spending issues.
Duplicate the ad set four times within the same campaign, giving you a total of five adsets spending $25 per day. ($125 total full day spend)

For optimal results, consider these recommendations at the ads & adset level:

Disable comments on your ads since shopping-oriented TikTok users rarely leave comments, and potential negative comments are best avoided.
Exclude the 13-17 age range to target audiences with genuine purchasing power.
Turn off Dynamic CTA. Located at the ads level, set your CTA to 'standard - Shop Now' button.

Analyzing and Adjusting Your Campaign:

Always keep your break-even point in mind, as it helps determine the actual profitability of your ads, which is what we’re specifically looking for with a conversion campaign. Continuously monitor your ads, and generally speaking if you spend $100-$125 without generating sales around or below the break-even point it may be time to consider testing a new product. And if you are testing another product, it’s especially important to keep your testing strategy the same, this minimizes the amount of variables & gives you clearer results when analyzing multiple products tests. If you’re just slightly around breaking even or even turning a profit by the end of the day, you should be able to assess whether it's worth extending the campaign for further analysis & hopefully more optimized spending = bigger & better profits!

As your pixel optimizes on the sales you made and ultimately narrows down your target audience, you may even witness improved performance on the second day. Which is where you can really utilize your positive cashflow to start increasing budgets & take the next necessary steps towards scaling up your business!

And there you have it, unless you’re selling an extremely high ticket product, when it comes to TikTok that’s all it takes to properly test a product. This testing strategy ensures there's enough data to analyze its true potential for success & is extremely cost effective, so you don’t overspend trying to force things to work. If it’s a true winner, you’ll know!

What’s next?

To see this strategy in action and gain even more valuable insights into why we follow certain rules & so on, check out Noah’s Youtube channel, where he showcases live demonstrations and guides you step by step through testing winning campaigns. You can follow along his Q3/Q4 Spark series to see what he personally does day by day when taking products from a day 1 test campaign to consistent high level scaling. And if you want to watch Noah guide you in setting up a campaign for the exact strategy we’ve just discussed, you can go ahead & watch it right here!