Watch Two Gen-Z Kids Master Tiktok Or Die Trying (31)
Hello STM Forums!
Chris and Ricky, we’re what you call reformed degenerates. We’re young and hungry. Early 20s to be exact.
Been lurking on these forums for a little bit and was inspired by Scott’s Follow Along.
A little background before we get into the juicy stuff. (Don’t worry, we’ll try to keep this short bullet point montage style.)
Can’t speak for all of you but we have the attention span of a dog at a neighborhood park.
2016
Dropped out of college and started a false eyelash brand.
Yes you heard us. 2 guys and falsies. It was a reason to talk to girls and a business idea. We were horny college students.. what’d you expect?
- First business venture so didn’t know wtf we were doing and learned as we went.
- Blew 75% of our budget on dumb shit because we didn’t know how expensive marketing actually was.
- We thought sales would come in just because our IG influencer friends made a post. That was our first mistake. Never been more wrong in my entire life.
- BUT what we did gain was experience running an ecommerce store and realizing the importance of SMM.
2017
Dropshipping
- Falsies weren’t doin too hot due to a lot of supplier issues and as a victim of “shiny object syndrome”, we hopped on dropshipping because our friend was finding success.
- This was our intro to paid social ads (Facebook)
- However, we were taught by the friend to look for certain metrics. We learned the HOW but not the WHY (ex. Sub 0.4 CPC? scale that bitch. Why? Dunno but it works).
- Found success here with multiple stores. Nothing TOO crazy but proof of concept was there. Averaged around a 25-30% profit margin
- Only issue was Paypal. The only thing we hate more than Zuckerberg and his shitty ad platform (it’s always a love & hate relationship with Facebook) is Paypal’s treatment towards sellers.
- Had a decent amount of capital locked in there at one point, but that’s a story for another time.
- Keep in mind, we were shipping everything. NOT SCAMMING. Paypal didn’t like the shipping times and boom. Paypal perma-bans started rolling in.
- Paypal made up 50% of lifetime conversions. Tried substituting it with apple pay and no dice. Doesn’t even come close and banger ads started becoming unprofitable.
- Didn’t like how a lot of the issues were out of our control to fix so we moved on.
Notable mentions
- Amazon FBA/Dropshipping
- Find a fire product + wholesaler that gives you a competitive price? NOTHING stopped amazon from hopping on that listing and listing the product with a price nobody could compete with.
- Happened to multiple of our own products. Called BS. Moved on.
- Side Note: The Adult Toy Industry on Amazon is super profitable if anyone ever wants to give it a shot LOL.
- Affiliate Marketing on FB with Clickbank Nutra in 2020
- Cycled through $40k and lost $10k.
- Introduction to affiliate marketing and the WHY of looking for certain metrics.
- At the end of the day, warming up ad accounts for 15+ days. FINALLY being able to run conversion ads, slowly scaling, and STILL having accounts perma shut down was just not it.
- We probably cycled through 30-40 ad accounts. Headache was just not worth it.
Me and Chris fell into a rut for a bit.
Couple weeks went by and we realized we were being pussies.
Got right back to figuring out a game plan.
We liked the concept of affiliate marketing since we didn’t like handling all the back end work for an ecommerce store from our lash brand.
Tiktok had an ads platform and we understood how to make creatives and why the good ones did well. Sounds like the best of both worlds?
That about sums up our experience. No more “shiny object syndrome” and no more running away when it gets tough.
We’re going to master Tiktok ads or die trying.
“Days 1-63” A lot to catch up on. I mean it’s two whole months for this one.
“Offer Offer on the Wall Whose the Sexiest of Them All?”
Clickbank and Digistore, either you’ll become a millionaire or die trying amirite?
After IOS 14.5 rolled through Facebook overall just didn’t seem feasible.
Running Clickbank/Digistore Nutra products on Facebook feels like you’re walking on LEGOS.
We had some success, but after our “x”th facebook account ban, I mean it’s disheartening. We’re human after all.
So we ventured off to the internet and found this community STM.
We lurked for a while and contemplated, Push? Pop? Native? Sweeps?
Had a couple DMs from networks and to our surprise this world is HUGE.
Saw “cassshy” Follow Along for JumbleBerry and said f*ck it. That’s the one.
It was a whole new world. We had an affiliate manager? A point of contact that can deal with our stupidity? BET. If you need a referral let us know!
The first month we blindly threw money on tiktok. We hopped from offer to offer, and didn’t understand why the data would show on Total Events, but not Attributed. Hell we didn’t know and we didn’t care.
Total Events
Attributed Events
Yes we’re stupid. This straight up means the pixel fired, but not a SINGLE event showed up on the ads manager to let us know which ad had potential.
Jumbleberry is a great platform, but to get the best offers you need RESULTS.
Once we had tracking fully set up and figured out (ily Scott you’re so hot lol)
Our plan was to simply BREAKEVEN to get spots opened on the top offers.
We were lucky enough to secure a spot on Jumbleberry’s top offer at the time. (Thanks to our affiliate manager at the time)
Goli.
We threw money at it, but strangely enough, the offer did not convert as much as we had hoped.
Total Events
Attributed Events
There was a huge amount of traffic coming in that wasn’t being counted for, but what we couldn’t wrap our heads around was the huge drop off from Page View to View Content. And also from View Content to Purchases.
We found out that Tiktok doesn’t attribute events UNTIL the page is fully loaded. Goli’s page takes 37 seconds to be fully loaded. With this information we realized our data was skewed.
We had spent close to $1800. [Some ads aren’t shown because Tiktok only lets you search one keyword at a time :/]
Result: Spend: $1800 Sales: $100 ROI: pain.
We tried another offer. Had some success with it.
Result: Spend: $7,353 Sales: $9,480 ROI: less pain.
We won’t release which offer we’re promoting just yet, I mean one of us just got furloughed (c'est la vie) and we gotta make ends meet somehow ya know? Hope all ya’ll understand. But we’re still going to explain our strategies and thought processes to provide as much value as possible. It is STM after all 
.
And after all of that, we’ve run into this:
We can’t scale when all our ads either are getting rejected or shut down.
We wanted to give agency accounts a try to see if the cursed photo above happens less. A friend of a friend offered us to rent some, however; we’re running into tracking set up issues.
Notable Mentions:
-Ad Accounts have identities. One ad account we tried with manual bidding would just not spend unless the bid was a little bit higher than the suggested bid and the budget was atleast 2x. Having $300 with $150 per conversion bids really makes your butthole clench. Especially when you’re running 10 ad groups each with a separate creative.
-CBOs: We haven’t gotten to test them to the fullest extent, but everyone has different opinions and ideologies about these. It’s like a religion. We’ll eventually get back to testing them some more, but they didn’t work too well for us.
-Tiktok Account Reps: I don’t know if Tikok and Facebook have the same recruitment teams but all I can say to this one is:
These two fucking animals taught me everything I know regarding TikTok creatives.
Huge props and so insanely excited to see their progress.
Can't wait to see them absolutely conquer!
Godspeed!
p.s: if you make this shit look easy god help me I'm coming for you
Originally Posted by omoaha
Clickbank and Digistore, either you’ll become a millionaire or die trying amirite?
After IOS 14.5 rolled through Facebook overall just didn’t seem feasible.
Running Clickbank/Digistore Nutra products on Facebook feels like you’re walking on LEGOS.
We had some success, but after our “x”th facebook account ban, I mean it’s disheartening. We’re human after all.
So we ventured off to the internet and found this community STM.
We lurked for a while and contemplated, Push? Pop? Native? Sweeps?
Had a couple DMs from networks and to our surprise this world is HUGE.
Saw “cassshy” Follow Along for JumbleBerry and said f*ck it. That’s the one.
It was a whole new world. We had an affiliate manager? A point of contact that can deal with our stupidity? BET. If you need a referral let us know!
The first month we blindly threw money on tiktok. We hopped from offer to offer, and didn’t understand why the data would show on Total Events, but not Attributed. Hell we didn’t know and we didn’t care.
Total Events
Attributed Events
Yes we’re stupid. This straight up means the pixel fired, but not a SINGLE event showed up on the ads manager to let us know which ad had potential.
Jumbleberry is a great platform, but to get the best offers you need RESULTS.
Once we had tracking fully set up and figured out (ily Scott you’re so hot lol)
Our plan was to simply BREAKEVEN to get spots opened on the top offers.
We were lucky enough to secure a spot on Jumbleberry’s top offer at the time. (Thanks to our affiliate manager at the time)
Goli.
We threw money at it, but strangely enough, the offer did not convert as much as we had hoped.
Total Events
Attributed Events
There was a huge amount of traffic coming in that wasn’t being counted for, but what we couldn’t wrap our heads around was the huge drop off from Page View to View Content. And also from View Content to Purchases.
We found out that Tiktok doesn’t attribute events UNTIL the page is fully loaded. Goli’s page takes 37 seconds to be fully loaded. With this information we realized our data was skewed.
We had spent close to $1800. [Some ads aren’t shown because Tiktok only lets you search one keyword at a time :/]
Result: Spend: $1800 Sales: $100 ROI: pain.
We tried another offer. Had some success with it.
Result: Spend: $7,353 Sales: $9,480 ROI: less pain.
We won’t release which offer we’re promoting just yet, I mean one of us just got furloughed (c'est la vie) and we gotta make ends meet somehow ya know? Hope all ya’ll understand. But we’re still going to explain our strategies and thought processes to provide as much value as possible. It is STM after all
.And after all of that, we’ve run into this:
We can’t scale when all our ads either are getting rejected or shut down.
We wanted to give agency accounts a try to see if the cursed photo above happens less. A friend of a friend offered us to rent some, however; we’re running into tracking set up issues.
Notable Mentions:
-Ad Accounts have identities. One ad account we tried with manual bidding would just not spend unless the bid was a little bit higher than the suggested bid and the budget was atleast 2x. Having $300 with $150 per conversion bids really makes your butthole clench. Especially when you’re running 10 ad groups each with a separate creative.
-CBOs: We haven’t gotten to test them to the fullest extent, but everyone has different opinions and ideologies about these. It’s like a religion. We’ll eventually get back to testing them some more, but they didn’t work too well for us.
-Tiktok Account Reps: I don’t know if Tikok and Facebook have the same recruitment teams but all I can say to this one is:
Chris and Ricky - thanks for starting another Tiktok follow-along!
Perfect timing as @ScottyG has just wrapped up his FA.
Looking forward to lots of learning!
Amy
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums
Good luck with TikTok.
I have started to advertize on TikTok for my own brand and have been running ads for more than 4 weeks now. Early results look promising with really low CPCs and we have only tested winning creatives from our Facebook advertizing so far.
I wonder what
creatives you run? Do you get content from influencers or do you use creatives provided by the publishers?
Looking forward to seeing your progress towards profitability!
Originally Posted by jack_l
Originally Posted by vortex
STM forums provided so much value for us and gave us an idea for an action plan. Happy to give back and provide value as well as soon as we figure out the tracking situation
Originally Posted by kaizen502
....
Yes were stupid. This straight up means the pixel fired, but not a SINGLE event showed up on the ads manager to let us know which ad had potential.
Would you mind explaining what the difference between the total and attributed events is? Anything to consider when setting the pixel up?
Hello Friends,
I’m one of the affiliate managers at Carousel - Jumbleberry. If anyone is interested in working with us hit me up on Skype or Telegram and let’s chat about how we can crush TikTok together!
Cheers,
Shelley
Agency Partner - Jumbleberry
Skype: shelley.gu@jbskype.com
Telegram: @shelleyjgu
Originally Posted by leadmarketing
Pixel set up -- It's all circumstantial based on your lander/store. Could you be more specific on how you're set up?
We’ve been sitting on our asses for the last two weeks trying to figure out tracking on an agency account we acquired through a friend of a friend like we stated above..
We’re close. But nothing huge to update yet, since the juicy stuff can’t get started until we’re properly set up.
Not down to drop a couple thousand again on data we can’t even use or see :’).
Good ol’ code 40002.
For some reason, Tiktok keeps rejecting our ass.
This is the foundation of our house. We’ve sent in a ticket to Tiktok; hopefully they can provide some sort of insight.
We’re running out of ideas; FOR THE TIME BEING. We’ll find the solution, soon.
Originally Posted by omoaha
Originally Posted by leadmarketing
Hey everyone! hope you had an amazing week.
Ladies n gents it’s the mf weekend but that don’t matter. We’re on 7 day work weeks you already know.
Anyways this is just going to be a short post to update on our upcoming plan.
We’re still waiting on Tiktok to respond about our tracking issue but waiting around is literally giving us anxiety. We hate being stagnant.
In the meantime, we’re working with someone as Tiktok media buyers for an Ecom store.
They have
Tracking is almost good to go, and we’ve got content ready to LAUNCH. Plus we’re testing on agency accounts with a fat credit line and 1 day payout.
So you’re tellin me.. We can apply our knowledge.. plus theory test without it coming out our own wallets? SAY LESS
By the way if you’re worried about us getting chained back by NDA’s don’t be.
We asked for permission to update STM on our strategies and our partner is letting us be completely transparent
If anyone is interested in renting agency accounts for Tiktok, he’s willing to do that for us as well!
Don’t worry guys, the juicy stuff on strategy will come soon…
Hope you all have an amazing weekend because this is us right now
Great to see more TikTok action here.
Although I am still a pops and push dude myself it´a fantastic to see when a new trafficsource where you can run big campaigns gains traction, especially when FB gets harder and harder to run.
We asked for permission to update STM on our strategies and our partner is letting us be completely transparent
If anyone is interested in renting agency accounts for Tiktok, he’s willing to do that for us as well!
And please extend our thanks to your partner as well!
Looking forward to all the knowledge bombs!
Yeah but you guys are CHOOSING to work on the weekend.
Your friends probably HAVE to work most of the time except when they're on vacation - which is probably no more than 2-4 weeks in the year. And they probably need prior approval from their employer.
Not to mention you guys have the potential to experience big jumps in income in a short time. Working people? Not so likely.
So yeah. Pros and cons.
Amy
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Originally Posted by vortex
And please extend our thanks to your partner as well!
Looking forward to all the knowledge bombs!
Yeah but you guys are CHOOSING to work on the weekend.
Your friends probably HAVE to work most of the time except when they're on vacation - which is probably no more than 2-4 weeks in the year. And they probably need prior approval from their employer.
Not to mention you guys have the potential to experience big jumps in income in a short time. Working people? Not so likely.
So yeah. Pros and cons.
Amy
Yeah with the constant up and downs I think we've gotten pretty good at not being too emotionally attached to the results. A quote that stuck by us is "You've traded your freedom for your security. I've traded my security for my freedom." We're going to the MOON!
Hope ya’ll had an amazing weekend
A couple of updates… Tracking is set up for the Ecom store so that’s a BIG.
We’ve tested a couple of products and here’s what we’ve found out.
First thing I want to emphasize is that on Tiktok, creative is KING.
You’ve probably already heard that somewhere else or thinking “I’ve run Facebook ads I know that” but in my opinion it’s even more so the case on Tiktok.
It’s to the point where the majority of our testing isn’t even geos, interests, devices (these are better to test down the line after finding good creatives).
That being said, your creative testing campaign should ALWAYS be updated with new videos to test.
If a product is good and your creative is a banger, the ad can probably get conversions with a fresh account, fresh pixel.
Example of this is when we ran JB offers. The offers we had were already top performing, all we had to do was look for videos. (don’t even bother trying slide style format or stagnant product picture with music background. Shit will not work)
We ran a video view campaign prepared to lose the initial $500 investment with the expectation of 0 sales just to collect LLA data for conversion campaigns
Surprisingly that campaign profited 60% in the first week
Completely broad, only thing we did was target males only because of the product.
The downside to VV campaigns on Tiktok is it doesn’t show you the conversions in ads manager and that’s why all the conversions show $0)
So back to the Ecom store
For products that we do test, we try around 10-15 creatives broad (maybe gender targeting depending on product). If it gets around ⅓ AOV and it doesn’t get a ATC we’ll look at the CTR.
If CTR is low, creative is shit, make a new one and move on. If CTR is good, we let it run to ½ AOV, if still no ATC then it’s something from the website or funnel.
One example for this is a group of creatives we tested had a 2.5%-4% CTR but 0 ATC at ½ AOV
We figured the perceived value of the product didn’t make sense with the price that it was at. Lowered it and got 2 conversions within the next 30 minutes.
Not running it anymore though since the CPA’s still made it unprofitable. My guess is that product just became too saturated since it went viral on Tiktok 1month+ ago.
NOW
After 10-15 GOOD creatives and everything is still dog, then move on and don’t get emotionally attached.
So far that’s been the case for the past 3 out of 4 products we’ve tried but our partner has a product research/content creator team pumpin them out consistently so I’m not too pressed about it.
One product we tested had 1-2 good creatives so we just decided to test different variables inside the adgroup all with the same creative.
Let me break it down real quick
In my opinion 18-24 age group is absolutely trash on Tiktok (could be different if its a ✨qUirkY gEnZ✨ product)
Takes up almost 50% of our spend with the worst results
Could be that we grew up hearing and seeing the ecom scam memes so our guard is up all the time when it comes to buying something.
I’ve encountered people who do that btw^ so the memes are pretty accurate. Just makes the rest of the legit ecom stores suffer.
I know I would rather buy something off Amazon unless it was a well known/big brand store.
Ad group 1 is 10 of the top interests from breakdowns in our creative test campaign with the same creative and the top categories.
Ad group 2-3 I wanted to try single interest targeting with the top 2 from data breakdowns since I know it did well with Facebook for me in the past
Ad group 4, completely broad again
Now I’ve heard in the past that single interest targeting doesn’t work well on Tikok but this test confirmed it for me based on ATC stats.
Ads are off today because we know there are off days and based on all the separate accounts we’re running plus today’s feedback from other ecom media buyers today just wasn’t performing well across the board.
In the future We’ll probably have 2-3 winning creatives run overnight at low budget and see how it performs when we wake up. If it looks promising, schedule the big boys to run around 2-3pm.
Question for you guys though. I’ve always heard mixed information about shutting down and turning ads back on depending on performance.
A couple successful affiliate friends of mine from Facebook swears by not touching them at all, launch dupes, and just straight up kill the ads when they die off and never look back
But then I’ve also heard from other successful affiliates that do turn off/turn on ads depending on time and day.
What are your thoughts? We’d love to get more insight.
I personally turn on and off ad groups constantly.
Strong morning? Go to lifetime stats and enable the historic best performers.
Falls off? Disable anything with a daily CPA too high.
Works for me.
Originally Posted by ScottyG
This is exactly what we needed to hear thanks daddy scott ��
A couple successful affiliate friends of mine from Facebook swears by not touching them at all, launch dupes, and just straight up kill the ads when they die off and never look back
But then I’ve also heard from other successful affiliates that do turn off/turn on ads depending on time and day.
What are your thoughts? We’d love to get more insight.
Basically if performance isn't good enough (after running the campaign for a bit I'd know what good/bad KPIs would look like) by mid-day, put on pause. Then re-activate at midnight for another run.
If something gets paused out too often I'd shut it down for good.
My experience with that is only for FB though - so it's nice to hear from Scotty that it works for TT as well.
You guys are on fire with your testing! Thanks for taking the time to document all the details!
Amy
We'd like to check out your TIkTok guides
Epic thread Chris and Ricky! Which CTR do you guys aim for to mark it as a good creative?
Thanks for the kind words as always Vortex! We're giving it a shot will report back next week
- - - Updated - - -
Originally Posted by clicklead
Originally Posted by affimediabv
Any updates?
Amy
How is it going guys? Any new progress or updates?
Sorry to see another abandoned FF.
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