Home > >

---

Misadventures in TikTok (40)

---

Partly inspired by the great threads here (and also some recent struggles with my other campaigns), I decided to throw my hat in the ring and give Tik Tok a try. I’m not sure if this is really a follow along or more of an unhinged cry for help, but I’ll try and share some insights as I struggle through learning this traffic source.


Today is technically day 3 of my campaigns actually spending after a week or two of research and prep. I figured if you want to do something, may as well go all out. I hired a part time video editor/creator who has experience with Tik Tok himself to make my videos, and went right in with testing 3 ecom offers with 4-6 videos each right off the bat. My videos are mostly mashups of stock videos from the offer with onscreen text and either background music or robot voiceover. Im getting some real influencer made UGC style clips made, but those are taking a while and my ads are at least decent so I launched as soon as I had them ready.


From reading how successful others are, I half expected a winner right from day one. The results so far have been humbling to say the least. At around $200 spent, I’ve yet to make a single conversion, and only a handful of people have made it to check out. I’ve posted a screenshot below for the stats from one product, that can broadly be described as a “gadget” without outing the offer. I’m not bothering to post stats for the other two as they both had some pixel/tracking issues that led me to do a bunch of angry edits and stop/start campaigns.




The conversions listed there are just checkout hits, no actual sales. There doesn’t seem to be enough data yet to optimize the conversions at all, but the videos themselves have very varied performances. As you can see, two of my ads have solid 2%+ CTRs, while some of the others are painfully bad. That doesn’t tell the full story though. Both those ads are similar, and as you can see from the yellow alerts, they were also retroactively disallowed a few hours after launch. One of them fairly (seems my video guy got a little too creative and used a stock clip with some light nudity in it) and the other one incorrectly flagged, but I don’t see any way to appeal.


There were also really noticeable trends in the data. The entire campaign had an awful first hour or two with a campaign wide CTR of under 0.5% across all videos, then hit it’s stride and the stats for everything improved substantially, and then fell off badly once the ads were rejected. This isn’t just skewed data from the top videos getting banned, but an underlying pattern across all ads/groups. Has anyone else noticed similar patterns with new campaigns taking an hour or two to find their stride?


For the other two offers I ran into another strange issue, which might be self inflicted. While I impatiently waited to fix Tik Tok pixel issues, I launched those campaigns with Traffic rather than Conversion as the goal. Both managed to get relatively cheap traffic and solid 1.5-3% CTRs. Later, once so got the pixels working and launched new campaigns with Conversion as the goal, the performance completely tanked. The CTR dropped to 0.5%, and one of them could barely even spend.




I’ll try and update this periodically as I either make progress or fail miserably. I did have a few questions and thoughts to share in case anyone feels like weighing in.

1. Do new Conversion campaigns normally take an hour or two to warm up at a high CPC / low CTR when launching something on a new pixel for the first time?

2. Do you think I sabotaged my other two offers by starting off with a Traffic campaign while the pixel was non firing before launching tracked conversion campaigns?

3. How bad is clickloss with Tik Tok? For me it’s been brutal, and even removing any tracker redirects I’m losing a good 25%+ of the reported clicks

4. Is credit card billing broken for everyone or just me? I had to use PayPal because TikToks billing address form is a DROPDOWN rather than text field, and for most Canadian provinces the list of options are horribly wrong (The cities in Alberta are a literal list of numbers), so even with valid 3DS the charges all fail for me.

---

Nice! Very cool man

Are you running affiliate stuff from GiddyUp/DFO/Jumbleberry? Or your own products via Shopify stores?

I know an infinitesimal amount compared to @ScottyG and @cassshy, but the one question I was going to pontificate on was #2 , as I had the same thing happen. In my case I just paused those original camps once I had tracking working, and just restarted new campaigns for those offers from scratch.

It seems as though launching lots of campaigns/ad groups/ads is the name of the game, and then letting the winners run, which is a bit foreign for me since on native its more about slowly optimizing one single campaign, so I'm trying to kill non-performers super quick on TikTok.

Wish you much success man and great work starting this FA!

---

I'm running affiliate network offers to start, since I figured it'd be a lot faster to get set up, though with all the struggles getting the damn pixel to work I'm not so sure anymore.

I've killed off the bad campaigns already, but am unsure whether to duplicate and relaunch, or to also kill off their pixels and recreate new ones first to give them a fresh start.

I mainly run native too, so Im equally not used to the mass campaign approach. It's definitely weird having campaigns die off at trivial spend amounts of $5-20, but at least it makes testing things cheap

---

You're not the only one lol.



Shit happens amigos. This was yesterday for me on a new offer I want to crack.

- - -

1. Set the scheduled start date an hour in the past to have them start right away. For me, I tend to burn through $100-$300 chasing the first conversion and after that, the stats tend to improve once it has some data to base itself off of.
Focus on CPC/CTR until you get conversions, then the only thing that matters is your ROI.

2. Traffic campaign won't ever get a sale, don't use them.

3. 25% isn't even that bad to be honest. I've seen 50%+. Average person on TikTok has a 1.5 second attention span, hard to capture that.
Also make sure you're not showing ads to 18-25. They won't buy anything, ever.

4. You can sign up and use Koho as a preloadable visa with cashback that works for TikTok.

- - -

If you need an agency account, hit me up man. It helps a lot for getting started.

Also add me on Skype if you got questions about TikTok.

Good luck my man!

---

Thank you! Setting the start time in the past is genius, I'll do that from now on. Good to know on the click loss, I'll try to reduce any sort of latency and track redirectlessly to try and reduce that, if even slightly. I've just added you on Skype, though you may regret that as I have way too many questions haha.

---

Well, I figured I should post an update, though given my results I'm embarrassed to do so. TikTok is now officially off to the worst start of any ad platform I've tried. In no way am I giving it, but it's mildly discouraging. As I said above, I went in a little too over confidently, and most my ads can best be described as 'stock models dancing in the general vicinity of product images', because I figured those would get me at least enough traction and sales to find the winning angles and offers to then go back and make better creatives for. This was wrong! After properly structuring my campaigns, I spent another $150 yesterday, mostly on the gadget I shared stats of above, and have posted its stats below again. My other offer TikTok decided to do a retroactive ban after 2hrs once again, so I've decided to pause it until I switch to an agency account.


There's not really a lot to show there, other than the CTR/CPC simply aren't good enough. I'll let it run another day, aside from pulling the plug on the top ad which had the worst CTR and didnt get anyone to the checkout at all. The bottom group with the 0.93% is actually the same ad as the one I had 2.2% CTR on initial testing, but without the accidental nipple inclusion, so I think that people were clicking that ad for the wrong reasons before haha. There also were 6 checkout hits not 4. TikTok's pixel when run client side definitely has some major discrepancies (the other offer only for 2 of 4 checkout events before it got disapproved too).

The other massive issue I'm facing is click loss. I knew it was bad, but now that I've gone through and crunched the numbers it's horrific. Of the 205 clicks reported there, I only see 128 on my side. That's a 37.5% click loss! Part of that is probably due to the poor pre-sell in the videos leading to disengaged clickers, but its bad no matter how you look at it. The other offer was even worse, at around a 45% click loss.

Basically, I'm pretty much back to the drawing board, but at least I have a better idea of what I need to do:

S2S Postbacks for TikTok Pixel - I know the other threads all mention it, but it cannot be overstated. The TikTok pixel absolutely sucks when used client side. I am having my developer set up a postback relay server to handle things correctly. Since I like to spend way too much time on these things, I'll be giving it a dashboard and control to basically act as a full replacement for the TikTok Events page entirely. It'll probably take a week or two, but if it ends up half decent I'm happy to share the setup with others.

Better Landing Pages - I've been direct linking to offers, or my own ripped self hosted first funnel pages of those then linking to their checkout. The click loss shows that is not good enough at all. I'll be making a few extremely fast mobile landers to use, and entirely redirectless tracking. Click loss will still be an issue, but I want to be absolutely certain that none of it is on my side.

Proven Offers - I started with 3 offers because I thought they'd work well on TikTok, and only 1 of the 3 was proven to convert well elsewhere. I'm going to work in two of my best offers that Ive proven out on other traffic sources and know the best angles for and have benchmark stats. No guarantee they'll work, but right now I'm trying to deal with too many unknowns so this will simplify a bit.

Better Videos - I knew this was going to have to happen eventually, but my video strategy needs to be redone and I can't rely on my freelancer making quick generic videos. I'm switching over to painstakingly writing the scripts and directing, as I've done in the past for YouTube. TikTok ads are fortunately short, fun, and kind of dumb, so hopefully this will be a fun part to distract from my awful stats. My blocker here is finding actors/actresses for these videos. I've read up on hiring influencers, but it all seems tiered towards the influencer putting UGC on their own pages and pricing it based on their follower count. Does anyone have any on how to find/hire 'micro' influencers to do full custom videos. I'm a married man in my 30s, so I'm a little hesitant to start sliding into random people's DMs online

---

Great stuff man... I'm sure you'll start seeing green soon... I think you're right that creatives are probably the biggest variable to improve... (although as always, my TikTok knowledge is infintesimal compared to Scott and Cassshy)...

If you're running with GiddyUp/DFO/Jumbleberry they have tons of great UGC stuff you can use... if its the wrong length or dimensions just edit it in something like Camtasia (that's what I do)...

You can also do your own UGC videos without showing your face... just hold the phone over the product while talking about it... that's what's given me the best results so far... even better than the GiddyUp UGC stuff...

Another thing that's been good for me is if I start the video saying "What's up TikTok..." or "Hey TikTok..." which I'm presuming helps because it signals that this isn't some random video ad just being re-used but instead something designed just for TikTok...

With that said I've also done well with really poor quality voiceover 'slideshow' ads too...

Only thing I haven't had success with is b-roll voiceovers where its the audio played over a video of the ocean or a forest or something... I see LowerMyBills (or their affiliates) doing tons of those but they don't work for me at all... at least not with the verticals I've tried so far...

---

My first batch used the network videos, but my editor grabbed mainly the 'commercial' style ones rather than the UGC, then heavily overproduced them so they look like TV ads rather than TikTok. I'll be doing UGC stuff this next set. I happened to see a competitor of one of the products video show up in the Top-Performing Ads list built in tool, so I figured if I recreate something like that it'll be a good benchmark.

Great to know that UGC can succeed without people in it. I'll make one like that in my next batch! Way easier than hiring an influencer. I have seen some b-roll voiceover ads that look like they're doing well... but they seem to be on products where there's a strong emotional attachment of cause behind it (in this case it was eco friendly ecomm products being sold to environmental destruction footage)

Have you tried making any videos in the format of a TikTok trend/meme? I'm in the process of making one in the 'previous owners' trend style that they're all doing now

Despite my poor results, I really like the idea that creativity and actual marketing seem to be the differentiator in TikTok. It's a struggle at the moment, but will feel good if/when something works out

---

Yes I agree 100%.

And yeah, I tried one AirPhysio one set to that 'Nope... Nope... Nope... Yes...' song that's all over the platform... it got a couple sales but nothing spectacular...

There's so many cool things you could do though... the potential is really infinite if you have the creativity and the time...

And then yeah I've tried to use the TikTok editor itself so the videos look more native, and plan on doing so more in future, but I'm just so used to editing videos on Desktop in Camtasia I can do it 10x faster... plus when I create a video on TikTok I can't figure out how to export it without them adding some watermark of my username from the throwaway profile I created to spy/make videos...

(if anyone figures out how to do that please let me know! )




Update: Just had someone share this with me (for downloading TikToks without the watermark): https://snaptik.app/

---

Hey! Love the follow along so far, Im also trying to get into more TT ads from FB. I noticed you said that you were wondering where to look for quality actors. Ive used backstage for my FB ads and have had a lot of success there if you dont want your face in it. I agree with Jack, you can also just talk over the product. Works well for FB. But I also heard from my networking, your face in the ad on Tiktok does better since it is more natural to the platform. It blends in and doesnt stick out as an ad since most users show their face on tiktok. More likely for the user to watch the video. Natural is key. I havent tested it myself, but it makes sense. Just thought Id share

---

Thanks for the tip on Backstage. My city is on the smaller side so the results a bit limited, but there do appear to be some decent options on there

---

Oh nice, I was looking for something like this the other day, thanks for sharing the app!

---

You don't have to hire in your city. Or do you want to be there in person to help them direct?

Another option is joining local Facebook groups for actors. You would be surprised how many small local organizations there are for acting. Or you could always just join the NYC/LA groups in hopes to get someone who doesnt need much direction.

---

@bc_red I'm learning from all your updates - thank you! I've JUST started running on Tiktok myself, so we're in the same boat. I'll try to share what I've observed so far in case it may be helpful.

I LOL'ed at your observation that TT vids are "short, fun, and kind of dumb". Agree with you completely - although occasionally I do see some intelligent and tasteful stuff on there as well. That gives me hope, knowing I don't necessarily have to feature in my ads, people doing dumb/insane stuff using exaggerated motions and tones in order to have them convert.

As for where to find people to do vids aside from influencers - here are some places:

-Upwork.com - just post your job and wait for proposals; optionally you can invite freelancers you think would be a good fit

-Freelander.ca - same as above

-Fiverr.com - you can post a request and wait for replies, or reach out to the many gig providers - https://www.fiverr.com/categories/vi...=category_tree

-Topkwork.com - I don't think they allow to post requests, but there are relevant gigs here: https://topkwork.com/categories/audio-video

-TT's Creator Marketplace - https://creatormarketplace.tiktok.com/ - haven't looked into this one yet. Look for tiktok’ers that are already producing your type of content for your type of vertical/products, reach out and ask them to produce content for you (in exchange for product and/or pay money).


One tip I've learned over the years: If you can "lure" freelancers off these freelancer websites and pay them directly instead of through the website, you can potentially 1)pay less (or pay the same but the freelancer will receive the full amount and conceivably do a better job), and 2)not be limited by freelancer site policies. For example Fiverr forbids freelancers from doing testimonial videos - and we all know how well those can convert!

The only downside is then both the seller and the buyer will lose the protective measures provided by the freelancing platforms. Not every freelancer is willing to take the risk, but some are, and of course we need to ask skillfully so as not to arouse suspicion of any reviewers that may be going through the messages, or use words that could trigger their algo (e.g. the word "payment" in fiverr private messages used to trigger a warning message - don't know if that's still true now).


I agree with @jack_l - having a face talking directly to the audience isn't a must. I've seen some of the following formats get millions of views (although it may just be that the creator already has a large following so people are gobbling up anything they produce - but these formats are still worth testing I think):

-Delivering a message/story entirely through text/caption. Background vid could be someone dancing, or a river flowing, or even a black screen. Of course the message/story would have to be very powerful.

-If the product you're selling is sensational and can be demonstrated in a captivating way, and the benefits are self-explanatory, then no face or even voice is necessary. Basically just showing off the product and how it's used may be enough.

-Real human voices are not a must. Can just use music + text. Can also try siri voices. There are free voice-generating services online that can convert your text into speech, with the option of changing the speed and pitch of various male or female voices. This is one that works well: https://projectpages.voicebooking.co...over-generator



Nice share thanks @jack_l! Up to now, I've been downloading as normal, converting to "live video" and then saving again as video. That did away with the watermark but didn't capture the audio, so I'd have to download the video WITH the watermark AND audio. Then I'd combine the video from the first version with the audio from the second version. You've just saved me like 5 minutes per video!



Amy

---

I really appreciate all the great advice everyone! I have had my campaigns paused for the last day while I worked on new videos, and those are almost done. For the product I've got screenshots of my stats above I'll be trying 4 new videos:
- A product only UGC recorded and voiceover provided by myself, as per Jack_L's suggestion
- A true UGC with an actress, recreating a video for a near identical product I saw in the Top Performing Ads list. I convinced my wife to be the actress for this one for 'free', so it may end up being the most expensive video of all haha
- A meme video in the style of the groove tonight/previous owners trend
- A '3 reasons to buy...' video, which I'd also been told can work well
I think I'll have them done by tomorrow, and will label them in my next update for the sake of sharing.

Regarding downloading videos off TikTok, I can actually weigh in there. What I've been doing is using 2 accounts. One which publishes the videos as posts set that only followers can view, and that account only lets 1 person follow it, my main account. By doing that I can use my main account, visit the publishing account's profile, grab the video link, then download with Snaptik or similar, watermark free. The only worry I've had with doing that it seems to reduce the quality, so if its stacked with additional edits, the video can look a bit grainy. Does anyone know if TikTok serves everything in 576x1024? Or by doing this am I going to be ending up with ads that look bad on iPads and other high res devices.

---

Things got a bit delayed with the long weekend and I'm still finishing the last of the above videos, but I figured I'd post an update anyways.

Today I finally made my first sale off of TikTok. It's not for the above product, but another that I have had considerable experience with on native ads and thus know the best angles and funnel. The video style I used is a more natural looking pseudo UGC using robotic voiceover. It's not the cleanest, as the voiceover in no way matches up with the mouth movements of the people in the videos, but so far my ads are getting a 1.15 to 2.06% CTR, and the best of them has managed to generate my first sale. I fear their compliance may end up rejecting the top video at some point as it's a bit borderline with product claims, but I'll let it run as long as they let me.

The biggest difference I'm seeing so far, aside from the sale of course, is that the early funnel engagement is much better than with my previous failed videos (even the 2%+ CTR ones). Click loss is lower, Lander CTR is up, as is time on page. I'm still setting optimization to be the ecommerce checkout page click, but based on my way too early findings, what it looks like might be the best early stage goal when evaluating new videos, would be some form of an engagement event, even earlier than a button click, such as for example, an event that fires after 3s on landing page or after a scroll action. Something that is relatively high volume to get good data in early, but not a simple pageview as there are so many insta back button clicks with TikTok. That to me seems like it would be the best metric to evaluate potential early on.

---

Nice! Very good stuff man! Congrats on the first sale!

---

As promised, here is a proper update. Yesterday was not just the first conversion, but also the 2nd. Technically speaking it was also the first profitable day, but since spending $70 and making $80 isn't that impressive, I'll hold off declaring that milestone accomplished until I have profitable day with a little more volume behind it. Here are the stats for the new campaign:

The ad groups are right at the 50 click mark where TikTok compliance seems to crack down, but as long as they survive that it looks like I finally have a campaign I can let run and get some usable data in. A big thanks to @jack_l and @ScottyG in particular, the 'hello TikTok' opener, and setting the ad group start time to a few hours in the past, both worked very well. Ads C1 and D1 are both pseudo UGC, while B1 is my old medley/commercial style.

The big thing I noticed, even ignoring the conversions (the ones in screenshot are checkouts, though D1 also made the two actual conversions), is the View Content rates. View Content is basically the measure of clickloss, but as tracked by the TikTok pixel which under reports across the board. Given that TikTok has such a high bounce and clickloss, CTR itself looks like it can be a really misleading statistic. I would recommend to anyone else getting into TikTok to make sure you have the pixel placed on landing page view, regardless whether you self host or need the network to do it for you. The best early indicator Im seeing so far of video potential seems to be the augmented CTR statistic of "Unique View Contents / Impressions". Looking back at my old high CTR videos that were basically half nude Russian camgirls dancing in the vicinity of the product, had quite awful View Content rates, while the ones that actually included product benefits has much higher View Content rates despite low CTR.

I'm still finishing my new UGC video set for the first product, but Ill post its stats as soon as I get it live, hopefully today.

A few new things that I'm currently trying to figure out:
- Does TikTok have any dynamic parameters I can place in destination URLs so that my tracker and postbacks can include things like the ad group and ad. I can't find any documentation at all on this, but I noticed that adding {clickid} seems to populate, so I figured other parameters might exist too
- Im noticing on not just this campaign but most of my others, that typically iOS or Android; and either Male or Female; will do WAY better than the other at a campaign wide basis. I haven't let anything run long enough yet to see if these trends will continue onwards or if it's just a pool serving thing in the early stages of the algorithm's learning that will balance out. Those who have run more than I have, do you tend to find this kind of stuff reverts to the mean, or should I be rushing to make edits as soon as a big gap emerges?
- When raising spend on a promising ad group, what is the best way to do it? I'd heard raise by 10-20% every 1-2 days until 50 conversions, but also to clone out good ad groups at higher budget and not touch the original.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/QYOlIWS.png[/imI

---

I'm seeing big differences between ages groups and genders too... unclear how much benefit there is splitting them out though as it seems like I typically do way better with broad targeting... definitely still doing it though and testing it each time that dynamic pops up...

---

Sadly, my two sales from the other day weren't the start of something great, and in the 1.5days since I've had no further conversions. The CTR and CPA from the checkout perspective is good and even improving slightly, but the CPMs seem to be skyrocketing. They went from $6.90 USD on the first day, to $11.60 on the second, and today they're at $12.75. I'm not sure if that's 'normal' for targeting 55+, but it feels higher than it should be. The iOS/Android gap has narrowed, but in genders there's still a massive difference between male and female. Does anyone know if it's best to edit the targeting to remove a gender? or clone the ad group to modify the targeting?

I've decided to leave the top D1 ad group running to see if it can get to 20 conversions and exit learning, and paused the other two. I doubt things will improve much as is, but I want to get some decent data and experience in even if this one will never turn profitable.

I'm still stalled on my other offer testing due to a combination of waiting on creatives, and pixel issues. It makes it difficult to 'fail fast' with TikTok when the pixel is a recurring blocker and an unreliable nightmare to deal with. On the bright side, my developer is almost finished my S2S postback server, and that should help a lot. I'll try and post more 'eventful' updates soon. Unfortunately with TikTok there's been a lot more setup and growing pains than I anticipated, so I've found myself having to solve various unexpected problems that are taking more time than what I should be focused on: finding offers, making creatives, and launching campaigns.

---

Hey man, similar story here... my cpa's keep going up as well... always get super excited day one and do great and then by day 4-7 my cpa's are like triple what they were to start with lol...

Also I tried female-only targeting since females were doing better for me, but it did awful actually... seems like broad is working best for me... though the 45 and 55+ camps have okay...

But yeah, I am noticing more and more affiliate networks having TikTok tracking solutions, so that is nice... I guess if you're gonna have the s2s finished though it won't matter anyway...

But yeah, excited for your next update dude!

---

Update: TikTok is infuriating! I really want to share some major updates and start spending non-trivial sums of money, but there's been an endless parade of setbacks. On the bright side it means I haven't really lost that much money (maybe $500 total), and for the first time in ~30 attempts, I think I finally have a winning video.

The following are just a few of the issues I've faced recently:
- Yesterday I spent 2hrs placing, recreating, and replacing, a TikTok pixel 4 times due to a variety of bugs on their end. In Standard Mode, the pixels seem to lock into their event configuration, so if you test a pixel then try and edit it, the edits don't seem to take. Eg. if you create a pixel but don't fully define its events and triggers, confirm the pixel placement, then later try to set the events and triggers, it will work within the TikTok dashboard, but not out in the wild. This is forcing me to have to basically configure pixels blind
- Five offers I've wanted to run have been stalled or dead on arrival, two because the affiliate networks can't seem to figure out how to place the TikTok pixel; another I had to drop because it violates TikTok's oddly specific compliance rules, and two more that can be run, but only with an agency account.
- Every video I've had with a CTR over 2% has been retroactively disapproved by TikTok, though I'm starting to learn why
- My 'influencer' I was going to have do some UGC videos appears to have ghosted me
- My Audiences on TikTok aren't populating, even with active pixels generating the event. Do they just stay at 0 until they hit the 1000 needed to serve? Or am I dealing with some weird glitch. These are all Website Traffic Custom audiences based on pixel events like View Content

Despite all this, I'm still making some progress, and I think might finally be turning a corner in terms of the type of videos and funnels that work on TikTok.

These stats are for a new ecomm product I'm testing, and as you can see, ad A1 above is doing better than anything else I've tried in every single measurable metric. Even with the high CPM the 4.23% CTR is keeping the CPC low; and the View Content rate and 'Conversion' (Checkout hits) are great, especially compared with the UGC style video B1 and everything else I've attempted. It only made 2 sales, but that still made it profitable in the short time it ran. The sample size is obviously really small, but that's only because TikTok promptly disapproved the ad. I was ready to angrily lash out at them for once again killing my best ads, but upon closer inspection they were right on this one. The audio background had profanity in it (I've since had a word with my video maker on his choices in music), and in my rush to get my landing page live, I broke the footer links so the Privacy, Terms, Refund and Contact pages all 404ed.

My next steps are to fix that video/page and get it running again, so I can finally spend some decent money instead of having all my campaigns cut short. I'm also going to be making videos for all the other offers I'm testing in the style of the winning video. I'll wait to see how those turn out until declaring this a winning formula, but from an impression to checkout perspective, it beats all my old ads by a factor of 5-10.

---

Glad to hear you are turning the corner. I can't wait to see you post @ScottyG numbers.

---

Reading this is giving me PTSD flashbacks haha.

You're on the right track and got solid creatives, if disapprovals are your biggest issue, make sure you're on agency account if not already.

You'll be making some big bucks in.... 42 days or so.

---

Today has been kind of a mixed bag. TikTok is finally letting my spend money without compliance killing my campaigns or the low CTRs destroying them right out the gate, so I was able to spend a solid $150 today, and with much better video and lander CTRs, I managed to send 147 unique visitors to the checkout of two ecomm offers, at roughly $1 per. Previously, I haven't managed anything even close to that, so it was significant progress. On the downside, not a single sale.

I relaunched the ad from the last update with the compliance issues fixed, and it ran without issue. The CTR even went up to almost 6%!

Sadly, despite all those clicks through the landing page to the checkout (113 total as TikTok underreports), I didn't get a single sale! At this point I'm not sure if the offer is the issue, as it's relatively low cost, and having that many checkout hits without a sale isn't something I'm used to, as typically the early funnel is where things vary. For comparison, the similarly priced ecomm offer I'm running on Taboola converts at roughly 20% from checkout. I'm going to take a closer look, but the things I'm wondering that might be the cause:
- Offer sucks. Kind of a cop out answer, but as I don't think it's a top offer on the network, it might be the case
- Running TikTok campaigns with Checkout as the optimization goal might be causing the algorithm to serve my ads to mindless tirekickers and bots. If anyone has some thoughts on this I'd love to hear it. I'm not running with sale as the optimization goal, as there isnt the budget on these campaigns yet to give the system much to work with, and until I get my S2S setup done most sales dont even get tracked by the TikTok pixel anyways
- My creatives/presale aren't effective. I haven't ran enough on TikTok to know, though this creative does market the product, and the landing page clearly shows the price with an Order Now button, so I wouldn't think it should be this bad

As a bit of a comparison test, I also launched new creatives for the offer I first posted screenshots of stats for. My UGC ads got delayed due to the ghosting influencer, but I made a few other concepts, including one that uses the same style and format as the creative getting 6% CTR above:

- The middle two ads are the ones with the style of the 6% CTR ad. It didn't get the lofty CTR this time, but it had a solid CTR at the landing page level
- The 'Meme Style' video is literally the 'Previous Owners' TikTik trend where I edited footage of the product rotating on a lazy susan to make it look like it was dancing to the song Groove Tonight while displaying its selling features in text in the style of a used car ad... I feel weird writing that, but it's TikTok, I had to try something stupid. The video CTR is decent, the highest of the bunch, but at the landing page level it does worse. None of that is shocking as it's a catchy ad but doesn't really sell the product at all, so I assumed things would look like this
- The last ad is done in the list style of a "3 reasons to buy ____", which I'd been recommended to try. Surprisingly it did very poorly
Once again, no sales from the 34 people this one sent to checkout. It doesn't have enough data yet, so I'll let it run for another $100 or so to see how it develops

So overall, I feel like I've overcome a big hurdle in that I can now get ads that generate good CTR and landing page engagement, but now I've ran straight into the next big challenge, getting them to buy! I'd love to retarget these people and build up some lookalike audiences, but for some reason Website Traffic audiences TikTok do not populate at all! I'm not sure if it's a bug or I'm doing something wrong, but no matter what pixel or event I choose, the audience sizes stay at 0 even days later. They don't backfill or add new users. Ad Engagement audiences work, sort of, but they also seem to only update at the time of creation.

In terms of my next steps, I'll probably switch over to testing some new offers, maybe some leadgen ones, as I'm temporarily at a dead end with these two and need to gain some more experience with TikTok to figure out how to get them converting. My S2S tracking looks to be almost ready, which should open doors to running some other offers.

---

@bc_red if TikTok is anything like Facebook, and it appears to be, you should choose what you want as the optimization event. If you want purchases, choose purchases. Anything else and like you said, you get tire kickers.

---

Appreciate the tip. I will definitely test that with a new cloned campaign with the conversion goal set to Purchase rather than Checkout. Unfortunately both these offers the network have been unable to successfully place the TikTok pixel for me still, so I'm at a standstill until my S2S Postback setup is completed. I found a couple new offers I'm eager to test, so Ill have a lot to run soon, but for the next day or two I'll probably switch my focus from running traffic to getting the tracking perfect.

---

I wouldn't run any offer if it cannot properly track conversions. You are flying blind and denying the AI the signal it needs most, who converted.

---

Worse than running traffic with no sales, you could crack a killer offer and not even know without tracking in place, get that ASAP.

---

Thanks @ScottyG and @iwanttofly. The tracking is a top priority, its literally all I worked on yesterday. The only thing I can say in my defense on it is that I didn't *think* tracking would take this long. I do have tracking on the events I control: ViewContent and ButtonClick, but not the conversions itself. I didn't expect that I'd be waiting ages for pixels to get placed (or be misplaced multiple times), or that the TikTok Marketing API would make me cry haha. I figured I'd look pretty flaky if this follow along's first 10 updates amounted to 'waiting for tracking.... still waiting for tracking'. Thankfully, as I'm putting in my next update, my S2S tracking is almost done!

Can you expand a bit on this? I do have tracking of the first two funnel events through the TikTok pixel (ViewContent and ButtonClick), and also full tracking of everything through my Voluum tracker, including which adgroup/video is responsible for what etc. I just cant get any later funnel events and conversions back to TikTok due to lack of properly placed pixels on offer pages. I figured since its still early and I only have a handful of conversions total that it wouldn't make much of a difference yet while I'm still testing and optimizing the creatives and early funnel. Are you saying that TikTok's algo will be negatively effected by lack of sales tracking even for something new where 0 or few sales have occurred?

---

One more thing, my tracker registered about 5.7k visitors from that campaign.

Tiktok shows 6.9k impressions and only 1.2k clicks.

I already suspected that maybe instead of the actual clicks the impressions (minus trafficloss) were sent to my tracker but then there has to be some kind of prefetch mechanism or so on Tiktok that calls the URL already.

---

Well, it seems like it's a case of the algorithm struggling to know how to serve the campaign due to not having enough data on the pixel. From what I can tell it seems like with Cost Cap the algorithm will stop serving if it lacks enough signal data, while with Lowest Cost it will do this, where it wildly sends junk traffic. The general suggestion is to let it run until some data points come in for the events and then it will fix. That makes sense, and probably works in some cases, but I have been getting real events (and spamming fake events) to no avail. So I looked a lot closer to try and see the differences between the campaigns/pixels where things have run smoothly vs the ones that got relegated to junk traffic, and I found something in the developer docs that gave me an idea.

In addition to all the events (ViewContent, AddToCart, CompletePayement etc) that we optimize for, there is another one, PageView. TikTok 'sort of' deprecated it a while back, but I noticed the other day that it hasn't actually been removed at all. Instead what they did is make PageView fire automatically every single time a page that has the TikTok pixel code present fire. I don't have exact dates, but roughly, TikTok deprecated PageView sometime in August, then re-added it as an automatic event sometime in October. PageView is a weird event, in that you CANNOT fire it by the API at all. It has no conditions, and only fires when the JS pixel code is physically on the landing page. I looked at my old campaigns/pixels, and prior to October none were firing PageView even if the code was present. But all my new pixels were looking something like this:


I did some testing, and found that if I go back to my old landers I hadn't run for over a month, they now all send PageView even though they never did before. I also recalled my rep saying that you should fire ViewContent events even when not optimizing for that because it helps the algorithm learn.... which is what gave me the idea. I added the base TikTok pixel code to the 2 offers where I'm self hosting my landers and it's easy to do so, and within 2-3hrs one of them stopped sending junk traffic. The CPM went up from $6 to $10, the video CTR dropped from 8% down to 2.5%, the CPC rose from 15c to 40c, the Lander CTR rose from 1.5% up to 14%. Basically, the stats started to look 'normal' again. I still need to test a LOT more, because on the other campaign this hasn't had a positive impact yet, and even on the one where things are looking better it doesn't have anywhere near enough data. I wasn't going to post this yet until I know whether it's truly the cause or not, but you asked, so there you go :P

TLDR: I think that if you use S2S for events, but don't have the TikTok pixel still placed on your landing page, that it makes the TikTok algorithm think users are bouncing off your site before it loads or at the very least not giving the algorithm a data point it needs, which would cause it to devalue your campaigns and serve bad traffic. Please don't shoot me if I'm wrong, I haven't tested this anywhere near enough to say this with confidence yet, its still just a theory.

---

5.7k vs 1.2k seems extreme, but TikTok do send a lot of bots and compliance visits. The bulk of them are from Singapore (103.136.xxx.xxx IPs) and Evanston Wyoming (198.240.xxx.xxx). If you add &ttclid=__CLICKID__ onto your TikTok campaign URLs are configure your tracker to store that value as a variable, then you can filter out those users. Eg on Voluum I only look at the stats where the TTCLID is Not __CLICKID__

EDIT: Misread that, didn't see the part about impression tracking. I don't do impression tracking myself, but I'd agree they probably use a prefetch for it

---

I filter my traffic already and although there are bots and reviewers there are still thousands of more visits than what is shown in Tiktok.

All in all I filtered several hundred visitors.

Yup, doing it anyway.

I did nothing for impression tracking, I just add the __CLICKID__ to the campaign link for postback, that's all.

Maybe I missed something and enabled such stuff by accident, will check it.

---

Thank you for sharing that. I'm direct linking as everyone I saw suggested to do that. I am getting conversions, but the traffic is all over the place. I'll ask if I can get the pixel added, it may help.

---

I just realized I never ran into the junk traffic issue when not running a CBO campaign. I got to used to ticking that box (because it worked well a few times) that I totally forgot about running without CBO.

Time for some tests

---

I also had Campaign Budget Optimization enabled, will test again with CBO disabled.

---

Interesting. All my issues with junk traffic have come from non-CBO campaigns (haven't really run CBO more than a few times). The only thing I can say, is that as soon as I added the TikTok pixel to the landing pages of my S2S tracked campaigns so that it started firing the PageView event, 2 out of 3 offers where this was an issue quickly stopped serving junk traffic and sent the regular kind. The one it didn't work on was the one I'd spent the most money on and also spammed the pixel with fake conversions to try and fix things that way so it not working there might have been due to those factors.

---

Also interesting although 2 out of 3 offers are probably is probably too less to spot a pattern.

This also wouldn't work easily with direct linked campaigns.

---

Update: I don't have a large enough sample size to be 100% certain, but I can say in my experience these past days, that I have never had a single ad group relegated to 'traffic campaign' junk quality since I started adding the base TikTok pixel to my landers. All but one of one of the pixels that were getting junk traffic now get the regular quality, and the other one which had the most bad data on it and wasn't improving, I decided to shut down and move everything to a new account. That new account was doing pretty well (Running at -40% and showing signs of good potential), but of course TikTok decided to disapprove everything on it today saying it was a Prohibited Product, despite it having been totally fine for almost two weeks on the other account. I have appealed and yelled at my reps to fix it.

Other stuff, after a day for the traffic to 'transition' from junk to normal, are all running at -75% or so, so I'll get to testing more landing pages and creatives to try and get them converting.

---

Home > >