Early Adoption of TikTok Ads

Here’s a look at how I approached developing and launching growth ads on TikTok with minimal creative budget and time.

Year
2019

Client
IPSY

In late 2019, the VP of Growth tasked the UA team to launch TikTok ads with an urgent timeline. IPSY had no organic presence on the platform and we had minimal creative budget to make new content for the launch. The goal was to launch within a month, but ideally as soon as possible.

With this urgent ask, I first aligned with our UA managers on the demographic we’d target on TikTok. We determined our key demo would be 18 to 24-year-old women in the US, but we’d also broadly target women 18-55. With the demo set, I looked at internal customer data for which products and beauty categories the age demo rated highly. I also looked at which of our creatives were currently working for that demo on Meta, our highest-spending channel. Finally, I looked at what content was on TikTok in the beauty space and found it was very different from what we were making for Meta and our other video-based ad channels.

From my research, I decided to launch TikTok with two batches of content. First, with top-performing creatives from Meta, and then with a small batch of TikTok-specific content. I worked with my growth creative pod to resize and edit the top Meta assets to be shorter and with faster-paced editing. We also contracted a micro creator to film TikTok-style assets with the popular products for the 18-24 demo. We were able to shoot 4 concepts for ~$500.

We launched the tests within the month and found useful findings from both. We found that the repurposed Meta assets had low CTR, but good CVRs, while the TikTok-style assets had good view-time and CTR, but poor CVRs. I determined that it was worth it to invest in another batch of content for TikTok that would marry the two original buckets, and have an organic UGC feel, but with DR talking points and visuals. This third batch ended up performing great, and TikTok quickly became our second-highest-scaling UA channel.

Other Work

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