Mastering TikTok ad targeting: tips to reach the right audience

Targeting the right audience is a crucial factor that determines the success or failure of TikTok Ads campaigns, just like any other advertising platform. However, delivering ads to the right audiences is not easy. For inexperienced advertisers, their targeting may overlap or be too broad. The following article will guide you on how to identify targeting, the smart tools of TikTok Ads, and some examples of targeting from certain brands

1. Targeting option on TikTok Ads

Identify, reach, and measure relevant audiences with TikTok Targeting solutions & tools:

• Reach & Engagement: Grow your business - Reach new and existing customers at scale, and engage with audiences discussing your brand on TikTok.
• Audience & Re-engagement: Engage your customers -  Transform data into actionable targeting capabilities.

Depending on your chosen strategy, you can either narrow down or broaden the audience for your TikTok ad campaign. To ensure that you're targeting the right audience, you can create multiple options by including or excluding various groups. You can choose from different targeting options, including:

• Demographic (gender, age, religion, etc.): this option allows you to reach a wide range of audiences.
• Interests: this targets users based on their long-term interests in different videos, which are determined by their interactions with TikTok videos.
• Behaviors: this targets users based on their recent engagement with videos and creators, which is determined by their behavior on TikTok (such as video completion, likes, comments, and shares).

Tips: TikTok targeting enables brands to reach active and engaged audiences through interest and content engagement.

Take this one step further to maximize performance:

TikTok’s audience data management platform enables brands to build flexible & scalable targeting capabilities to re-engage existing customers and attract new ones.

You can retarget users based on your own CRM, ad engagement, and website traffic.

2. TikTok's smart targeting tools

Automatic targeting (beta)

Use an automated targeting solution to  automate 99% of your targeting by using the power of BETA. Allows intelligent targeting across your campaign objectives to reach relevant customers at scale. The targeting strategy will be adjusted as the campaign goes on.

Just select Location and Language, and Automated Targeting will do the rest (include: age, gender, interest, behavior, device etc..)!

Targeting expansion

Use Targeting Expansion to enhance ad efficacy and boost conversions. Automatically expand the targeting audience range across the duration of the campaign.

Driven by TikTok’s own unique algo, Targeting Expansion is based on expandable targeting criteria, relating to your industry, campaign objectives, and the characteristics of the converted audience within the current ad group.

ECOMDY recommends activating Targeting Expansion at the beginning of the campaign setup process.

Targeting recommendation:

TikTok Ads Manager offers a Targeting Recommendation feature that suggests relevant audiences for your ads. During ad group setup, this feature provides a collection of recommended Interest & Behavior categories based on the audience most likely to contribute to your campaign's advertising objective.

• Recommended Interests or Behavior Targeting categories that are more likely to contribute to their objectives when they create ad groups.
• Find Relevant Audience
• Shorten the testing and learning journey.
• Advertisers can edit recommended categories, or add more categories.

3. Example: targeting ads for brands

For trendy fashion brand

• Female; 18 - 25 years old.
• Interests: Fashion, Fashion tips, Fashion stylist.
• Behaviors: People who have viewed the profile of creators X, Y, and Z (fashion creators).
• Custom audiences: People who have added one item to the cart on the website.

For sport nutrition brand

• Female, male; 25 - 40 years old.
• Interests: Sports & Fitness, Sports & Outdoors, Sports Nutrition, nutrition service.
• Behaviors: People who have watched videos with the hashtag ‘Fitok’.
• Custom audiences: People who have added a product to their wishlist on the website.

For home & garden brand

• Female, male; 30 - 45 years old.
• Interests: Home Decor, home improvements, home furnishings.
• Behaviors: People who have commented on videos "Home & Garden".
• Custom audiences: People who have searched for a specific item on the website.

Conclusion

Targeting the right audience is a critical factor for the success of TikTok Ads campaigns. TikTok provides several tools and solutions that can assist advertisers in effectively reaching their desired audiences. We hope this article has provided you with the necessary tools and solutions to target the right audience for your campaign. Remember to continually analyze and optimize your targeting strategies to achieve the best ad performance.

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