FA: Taming TikTok in 2022 (6)
Today I am starting an extremely boring tiktok follow along. My wallet asked some reasonable questions about why I should do that, but I never listened. So here I am
I have gathered a lot of useful info from you guys while reading the forum. Thank you. Special thanks to @ScottyG, his posts are beyond helpful. I was able to compile a Word file divided into various sections with questions and answers. This kind of (hopefully) clarified something to me.
Current "technical" plan:
1. Sign up to TikTok and start using it for 30-40 mins a day to get a good understanding of what this platform is and what content people are uploading.
Somewhat done, but not being from the US didn't help at all. Couldn't sign up from my mobile impersonating a user from the US. TikTok always identified where I am from. I decided to sign up to it on desktop using an anti-detect browser and US proxy. It helped but I am obviously not seeing any ads. I am planning to download a mobile emulator (Bluestacks?) and try again. Seeing what people are promoting and how users react is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, I got some ideas while browsing even on desktop
2. Sign up to affiliate networks.
I am serious about starting TikTok business and I will try to convey that to affiliate networks. I am willing to put a lot of work, money and brainpower into it. I am thinking about whether or not I should zero in on one proven network and grind out their offers or should I sign up to several networks. The reasoning is that if I find a creative/funnel that works well for a given vertical, why spend more money on researching/testing other verticals? In this case the best course of action seems to be to just swap out offers for this vertical until it converts
3. Find an actor.
Done. I will be paying $10 per video which seems like a steal to me. This is a man in his 30s and a native English speaker from Canada. I found him through networking which is insane. Networking is important. But more on that later
4. Set up tracking
I am considering FunnelFlux's S2S tracking, because I think it gives more datapoints to the algo and it doesn't sound like a bad idea. I will start working on it when I get accepted to at least 1 network
5. Get an agency account
Shouldn't be a problem. Will do that once I get accepted to at least 1 network
6. Read TikTok Business Help Center
In the proccess. Got some insights from there
Campaign plan:
1. Vertical: whitehat leadgen (insurance/financial). No car insurance and e-commerce for now
2. Offers: low payout ($1-5) / revshare. Reasons: cheap tests and I can learn how to make creatives that convert before moving on (If I need to)
3. Offer testing: Thinking about it. It is a nobrainer for medium to high payout offers ($20+):
Not a single conversion after speding x5 of the offer payout - kill
Else, test to x10 of the offer payout.
If the ROI is worse than -25% - kill
If the ROI is better than -25% - start optimizing and spend another x10
Breaking even or profiting - scale
Else, use own judgement whether or not to kill this campaign
But when it comes to cheap offers - let's say $2 payout, I don't think spending $10 and not getting a conversions is a sign of anything. The amount is too small. I could be wrong though
4. Campaign structure: 3 angles per offer. 3 videos per angle. 1 ad group per 1 video. I am also considering this structure:
3 angles per offer. 3 videos per angle. 1 ad group per angle. 3 videos in an adgroup. Automated creative optimization
Still thinking about which one is better
5. CBO or ABO: ABO
6. Budget: Tiktok itself doesn't recommend a daily budget that is lower than $100 for a conversions campaign. I don't remember if it was about a campaign budget or ad group budget. If my understanding is correct, I think I will do a x10 offer payout as campaign budget and $100 daily budget for each ad group. I will use automated rules to stop ad groups if they exceed their budget
There is still a confusion for me when it comes to deciding with a budget. Let's say I have 2 scenarios:
a. An offer that pays $2
b. An offer that pays $20
a. If going by the x10 rule, I shouldn't spend more than $20 for the offer. But I also want to properly test each angle and each video. I want to give every video a fair chance. 20 / 9 = $2 per video for test. I am not an expert, but it doesn't sound like a "fair chance" for a video. How do I effectively test low payout offers?
b. 20*10 = 200. 200 / 9 = $22 per video for test. Slightly better, but I don't think this daily budget is good for tiktok. I think it could be better to test each creative for $50, but that's more than needed.
That's why I am thinking about 3 ad groups. 1 ad group per angle. 3 different videos. ACO. This way I can go with a higher budget per ad group
I would appreciate your thoughts on that
7. Benchmarks: creative CTR 1.5-2%+, CVR 20-30%+
8. Campaign objective: start with a traffic campaign on a fresh new account, give TikTok a few real conversions. Kill the campaign and start launching conversions campaigns
9. Bidding: lowest cost
10. Targeting: Broad, 25+ m+f, ios+android, no interests and behaviors
11. When to run: according to @ScottyG :
The best days for Tiktok are Thursday and Sunday, Fri/Sat are moderate and Tues/Wed sucks.
Holiday Monday? Amazing, otherwise mediocre but still usually small profit.
That's probably it. Too tired to think of anything else. To be continued
Personal prepaid accounts also operate
Interested to follow along with you! I'm on the same journey basically.
Making steady progress towards consistent profit now.
Just a few tips off the top of my head:
1) Split test conversion campaigns vs lead forms. The algo likes lead forms and you have the email/phone data to remarket with. It doesn't hurt the front-end conversion rate either in my experience. @ianinternet made a great FA detailing this. It's stickied.
2) Test the higher payout offers as well. The ROI on the variable payout offers is quite volatile.
3) I would recommend PerformCB and Madrivo for your affiliate networks. They have lots of good financial offers.
4) You say you have an actor but I would recommend split testing other actors as well. Gender/face makes a big difference.
5) Every time I've tried to narrow my targeting too much, my stats plummet. Definitely split OS, gender and age but do so in a way that you aren't choking the pixel too much.
6) Lowest cost has been working better than manual bidding for me for these offers.
7) Get your tracking set up perfectly before you launch anything. Its easy with FunnelFlux - it was an uphill battle for me with
8) @ScottyG said one thing which is I feel the most vital point to remember with TikTok: look at your campaigns over 7-days and not daily. Don't panic in the short term. Trust me, this is easier said than done.
Originally Posted by tamemywildness
So I would find a few affiliate networks to work with. Probably a 4-5 networks at max. 2 networks being lead gen focused and 2-3 networks being ecom focused. I don't know how large your testing budget is, but if you have $100K to test then feel free to go try multiple networks. But if you're within the $10K budget range it might make sense to test only a few networks because you don't want your payouts to scatter all around the networks. Certain networks have thresholds you must meet before they pay you out. And especially starting out, it's ideal to have some of that testing budget being recouped back into your bank account.
Agency Accounts
I would focus on finding a couple of agency accounts just in case you're running into issues with one agency account. Here's a list of TT agency account providers that I found. I personally signed up for East Coast Commerce but haven't fully ran a campaign yet. All I can tell you is that their discord support seems to be on point!
https://www.eastcoastcommerce.com/start
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/fa...iness.1404242/
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/fa...pause.1395015/
https://megadigital.ai/en/tiktok-bus...ount-for-rent/
http://spectersmedia.com/
https://ecomdymedia.com/
Offer Testing
Oh this part is a bitch.... and I'm guilty of this as well... Try not to be attached the amount you should test. So for me, I test offer payout x 3. However, a lower payout like $2 you can afford to test a whole lot more and not really care about the x3 rule. But for payouts like $80, you may be cautious about spending x3 that amount. There's also other factors that play into it. So say for a $80 payout, if my creatives are probably getting a CTR under 1% at like $50-70 spend then I'm probably going to cut it because if the CTR is bad now it's most likely a bad creative. At the end of the day, x3 x6 x8 x10 whatever you choose is fine, but don't be blinded by you know... spending $800 on a video creative and no conversions....In one of ScottyG's post he mentioned testing offers at a cutoff of $200.
Here's the thread, read the whole thing but the first few paragraphs you can see how ScottyG has like no emotion when it comes to grinding out offers. Also read within that post my last comment I've made. Of course I don't think Scotty is testing a offer to $200 if there's no conversions at like the $50, $100, $150 spend mark and that the CTR is less than 1%.
If leadgen: I check for conversions and look for a minimum of -50% ROI before giving it any more cash
If Ecom: I'll want at least 4-6 InitiateCheckout's or 10~ Add to Carts depending on the funnel events
If it doesn't have IC's, ATC's or conversions that equal -50% ROI or better, I kill it.
What I do here is setup 1 AD Group Broad Targeting and 1 AD. When I find the best creatives, I will then create another ad group and utilize ACO. Each Video that I test I use the same methodology as above x3 offer payout.
Campaign Objectives
I don't think you need to run a traffic campaign here. Just go with straight conversions especially for Lead Generation. Choose the Submit Form optimization event.
RevShare Offers In General
I've started to realize that if you're doing RevShare offers, it might be ideal to look for offers that pay out on the lowest tier at least $5+. The reason being is that once you're able to stabilize your CPM/CPC, I feel like out of researching and people's experience it typically hovers around $1-$5.
Originally Posted by adalchemy
Yea in regards to a weekly outlook that's hard for me as well. I think when you start out initially testing creatives/offers, you just want to make sure your offer converts as well as your creative is good. Once you find the good offers/creative you can create another ad group and have it run 7 days to get through the learning phase.
@tamemywildness So awesome of you to start a follow-along!
So much good advice from @adalchemy and @stungads!
I'm also learning this traffic source. Wanted to mention a few things which hopefully will help:
-Spying: Pipiads is a great spy tool:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Is-it-worth-it
Tiktok's creative center can also be a great source of inspiration:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...k-Ads-FOR-FREE!!!
-Agency accounts: When reaching out to agency account providers, be sure to let them know you'll be running financial lead gen offers, and specifically which types. Some of them want to be super-compliant and won't let you run that type of offers with them unless you're planning on adding a pre-lander in between that satisfies all their requirements. Best to find out before you make a deposit.
-Offer payouts: $1-5 may be too restrictive - you may want to consider offers that have higher payouts - especially ones that have proven performance on Tiktok.
-Offer testing: Killing after 5x offer payout may or may not be enough. It depends on how many angles you're testing and how different those angles are, plus how many audience segments (age+gender, plus any interests you may be testing) you're testing, and whether there's potential for the offer to convert vastly different between those audience segments.
-Budget: I've heard from people that are running big volumes on Tiktok, that it's very important to exit the learning phase within the first 7 days of a campaign, which means making at least 50 conversions.
So basically your minimum daily budget should be CPA x 50 / 7, where CPA is the average ad cost per conversion. If you've never run the offer before, try to ask your affiliate manager for an estimate (which of course may be higher than the actual average they're seeing from their stats). Or - what I would do is just assume the campaign would break-even, by calculating the daily budget as payout x 50 / 7.
The budget you set will directly determine the quality of the traffic you receive. If you set a budget that the algo deems to be too low to stand a chance of exiting the learning phase in 7 days, the algo may send traffic that doesn't convert, or send traffic at low volume.
-Audience targeting: Targeting broad is good. But it may not be necessary to target both genders all age groups every time. Often, if you do your audience research properly, you will find stats on gender or age prevalence for the need your offer's trying to fulfill, or the market your offer is in. You may be able to get the best bang for your buck by testing the most promising audience segment(s) first, and if the offer is solid, can scale to the other segments.
-Actor: For quick testing you can also use AI:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-in-Tiktok-Ads!
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...d-of-Your-Own)
Eager to see you set up your first campaign!
Amy
Nice, will be keeping an eye out on you're progress. Best of luck 
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