Stop Wasting Money on Ads That Don’t Work – Here is How to Create TikTok Ads That Convert

by Zoco Marketing | Feb 3, 2023 | Tiktok Ads

Stop Wasting Money on Ads That Don’t Work – Here is How to Create TikTok Ads That Convert

So you want to create TikTok ads that convert. Well, you are in the right place! In this blog, we are going to go over tools that you can use to find inspiration to create ads, proven frameworks that you can go through and implement, and finally, best practices for creating TikTok ads. By the end of this article, you will have everything you need to start creating high-converting TikTok ads no matter what your budget, niche, or experience is. If you do not already have a TikTok ads account created, we have partnered with TikTok to offer a limited-time deal for all our readers, which you can access via this link.

Before jumping into what works for TikTok ads, let us first quickly address the things that do not work.

1. Copy-Pasting Ads from Other Platforms into TikTok

Copy-pasting your Facebook ad into TikTok will result in wrong formatting, lettering being cut off, and it will very much look like an ad. People on TikTok are used to seeing TikToks, so the ads that really convert often look like TikToks. That is a theme that you’re going to see consistently throughout this article.

2. Not Using the Vertical Format

Avoid having black bars on the top and bottom of your ads simply by using the vertical video format recommended for TikTok. Doing otherwise will result in lower conversion rates. If your ad does not look native to the platform, people will scroll right past it.

3. Over-Produced Videos that Look Like Commercials

Fancy texts, commercially-edited images and any additions that do not look native to the platform will certainly not yield the same results or conversions.

4. Using Only Images

TikTok is a video platform. If you just take images of your products and just scroll them through, you will not see great results.

Those are the four common things to avoid when it comes to TikTok ads. We will be going over a couple more throughout this article as well.

How to Create TikTok Ads That Work

This may sound really simple, but the one thing to always remember when it comes to TikTok ads is that there are three parts to a TikTok ad:

The Hook: This is arguably the most important part of the ad. If people are not engaged enough to continue watching your video, then nothing else matters.
The Information: This is the meat of the product. When creating information about the product, keep in mind that your information should fall into three buckets. Your information about your product or service should either be in the form of entertainment, education, or inspiration. Therefore, ensure you have one if not all three of these elements when it comes to the actual product information. Ask yourself, is this video entertaining, educational, or inspirational? Having all three is a super bonus.
The Call-To-Action (CTA): We will cover further details on how important the CTA is in the course of this article.

These three parts form the basic framework for your TikTok ad.

Let’s go over a few hooks that you can use in your TikTok ads:

A. Here is a simple hack to help you X:

This is a very calm common hook. An example of its application includes, ‘Here is a simple hack to help you organize your tank tops’ or ‘Here’s a simple hack on how to clean your car”. This can be used on pretty much any niche, service, or product out there.

B. Do you have a problem with X? Here is a solution:

This one is a very good formula to follow. For instance, you can have a video with the hook, ‘Do you have a problem with getting curly hair? Use surf spray.’ You can then show the after-result with curly hair.

C. Don’t Buy This, Buy This Instead:

This hook is very native to TikTok and is somewhat of a trend. For instance, you can tell users, ‘Don’t buy this microphone, buy this microphone instead’ then expound on the XYZ reasons after comparing the two. This is very heavy education play and is super effective for bringing in conversions in sales.

D. Things That TikTok Made Me Buy:

This hook is also very native to TikTok, hence its title. You can run a search in your TikTok search bar to see more examples of similar videos with this hook. If you go through the analytics while watching the videos with this hook, you will see right from the beginning that they have nice bold captions that look native to the platform. They start with the hook and proceed to explain what they like about the product while unpackaging and showing the product.

The click-through rate will be high, the conversion rate and clicks will be at the top of TikTok ads and the people that watch all the way through will be among the top percentages of TikTok ads. This shows that it is indeed a super effective way to sell and market your product.

E. 5 Reasons You Need X:

This is an excellent strategy you can test along with the previous hook. Take the exact same product and create a video with the hook ‘Things That TikTok Made Me Buy’ then create another video with the hook ‘Five Reasons You Need X Product’. Add a powerful CTA and lots of text inside in form of captions so that your viewers can have an idea of what is going on even when the video is on mute. Compare the CTR, the clicks, and the conversions to determine which hook generates the best results in your niche.

F. Foreshadowing something that is going to happen to Build Curiosity:

This one is a super interesting strategy to go through and implement. It can be tough to pull off but when it does work, it works really well. For instance, using the hook, ‘I tried it and it worked’ brings in an element of foreshadowing and builds a lot of curiosity among your viewers, resulting in impressive CTRs and conversions. If you can go through and pull off a strategy like this, it is super effective.

G. Anything That Builds an Anticipation of Human Reaction:

This last hook is similar to the one before. Humans love to watch other humans react to things. It is just in our nature, for whatever reason, and this works well if you can format it into an ad. If the primary objective of your ad is to get reach and have people watch your ad through to the end, then this strategy is the effective choice for you.

In case these weren’t enough examples for you, here is a list of another 20 hooks that you can use in your specific videos.

Tools for Finding Inspiration for your TikTok Ads

The examples we just went over were just a few inspirations that you can draw for your TikTok ad. You need to arm yourself with the following tools to help you find these trending videos:

1. The TikTok Creative Center:

This platform allows you to explore the top ads on TikTok. You can certify brand products, keywords, or different trending searches. Furthermore, you can filter your search by industry, state objectives, likes and duration, within the platform.

You can then see the data when you click on the ‘View Top Ad’ button on the video. This will direct you to a view where you can see the click-through rate of these ads, the conversion rates, clicks, conversions, and remain. Therefore, this is a super powerful tool for finding inspiration for TikTok ads and learning what works.

2. Search Hashtags or Keywords on TikTok Itself:

This is another great way to find inspiration for your TikTok ads. Simply go to the search bar and type the product you are selling. TikTok will show you some of the top videos in your niche. You can go through and watch the content for inspiration, whether or not they are ads. Learn what works and see if you can convert those ideas into ads.

You can also click the filters icon next to the search bar to sort the results by date posted, relevance, or by most liked. Oftentimes, if you want to find the most current trending content in your industry or niche from which you could create a TikTok ad, just filter content for the same week and then opt for the most liked videos. Chances are that if you were to take one of those videos and format it in an ad-type way for your product or service, it would probably work out very well.

3. TikTok Creative Solution Finder:

This is a pretty awesome tool that allows you to take a little quiz to understand what creative direction you should go with your TikTok ad. Once you take the quiz, it will walk you through a ton of different resources that will help you find your inspiration for your TikTok ads.

The 2 Ways of Making TikTok Ads

Having discussed various ways for finding inspiration for TikTok ads, we can now cover how exactly to make TikTok ads. There are two main ways:

1. Using Creators to Make Your TikTok Ads:

If you opt to use creators for your ads, here are a few tools for finding the right creators:

The TikTok Marketplace: The TikTok Marketplace allows you to search for specific creators by their engagement rates, country, or amount of followers, and reach out to them. Therefore, it is a great resource if you want to find creators very fast.

TikTok Spark Ads: This tool essentially allows creators to give you an authorization code that then allows you to run their post as an ad for your product or service.

Thus, this is another super effective way to run TikTok ads. If you aren’t sure how to set up Spark Ads or you want to learn more about the process, check out our YouTube Video with a full step-by-step tutorial on that

2. Creating Your Own Ad:

The second option is to go through and make your own TikTok ads. A few different resources for this is CapCut and Creative Center Audio Library.

CapCut is TikTok’s editing software. What we like most about this is that they have both a mobile and a desktop app. It also has a text feature that allows you to instantly auto-add captions quickly. It automatically generates the captions and places them onto the video. However, the generated captions may be kind of small and may blend in with the background. Simply click on the captions, go over to the system, and find a bolder font and color. You can also change the font size. CapCut also has lots of different templates that you can use for editing your videos a lot faster, as well as an audio library for adding background music and sound effects.

Speaking of Music, if you are running TikTok ads, you will need to make sure that the music is set for commercial use. A faster way to find commercial sounds is at the TikTok audio library. When using your desktop, you will see that for usages, you have the TikTok series and then TikTok commercial use. If the audio is for commercial use, you can use it for marketing, advertising, sponsorships, and endorsements.

Therefore, as long as you make sure that this TikTok Commercial Use is checked, all of the music shown should be free for commercial use.

If you are editing from your mobile app, when adding a sound to your TikTok video, click on the sound drop-down at the top and select commercial sounds. This will filter only music that is free for commercial use in your TikTok ads.

One final resource for best practices for your TikTok ads is the TikTok Creative Center. TikTok has compiled a lot of data on what ads work there are great insights to learn from.

For instance, in these insights, videos with high-quality resolution have a 312% lift in conversion, videos with a 9:16 aspect ratio full-screen have a 91% lift, a video duration of anywhere from 21 to 34 seconds results in a 280% lift in conversions, and a vertically oriented format gets a 40% higher lift in impressions. Adding a clear Call to Action (CTA) at the end indicates a 152% lift in conversions.

Here are a few additional Golden Nuggets as well. Our rule of thumb for when you are creating TikToks is to try to cut the video so that every three seconds the user is seeing something new to keep them engaged. Therefore, videos with over 5 scenes result in a 171% lift in conversion.

For e-commerce, adding captions and displaying a written CTA results in an 80% lift in conversion, while adding a real voiceover CTA results in an 87% lift in conversion rate.

Be sure to check out the limited-time deal for a TikTok Ads Account.

11 Tips to Improve PERFORMANCE MAX Campaigns [Google Ads]

by Zoco Marketing | Feb 2, 2023 | Google Ads

11 Tips to Improve PERFORMANCE MAX Campaigns [Google Ads]

If you’re running Performance Max campaigns, you understand how tough it can be to get good results. In today’s blog, we will share eleven tips on how to improve your Performance Max campaign and get the best results possible. These tips come from our extensive experiences running multiple successful accounts and spending thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on Performance Max campaigns. We are eager to share these tips with you, so let’s jump right in!

Tip 1: Be Aware of Campaign URL Expansion

First, check your campaign URL expansion settings by simply coming into your Performance Max campaign and then clicking on the settings. Next, scroll all the way down until you get to the additional settings box from where you can look at your final URL expansion settings.

I recommend keeping the URL settings on, but pay keen attention on where the setting is sending traffic to. This is because we have learned from big failures that when the setting is checked on, it can send traffic anywhere on your website. We have had experiences where it is sending people to the Contact page, a Privacy Policy page, or a 404 page, which essentially wastes a ton of ad spend. You may be asking yourself, how do I check to see where the final URL expansion is actually sending traffic to? The answer to that question is that Google doesn’t give you any great way to view that within the platform. The best way is to check your Google Analytics to see which landing pages the Performance Max campaign is sending traffic to. Start by clicking on the Reports tab, followed by the Acquisition tab and then to Traffic Acquisition. In the table, change the primary dimension to session campaigns, and the secondary dimension to landing pages.

Finally, do a search of the campaign on the search bar to see only the data related to the Performance Max. Type in ‘Pmax’ and hit enter to filter the session campaign to only show the ones that contain that keyword. You can then go through and look at the landing page report to see exactly where the Performance Max campaign is directing traffic.

Consistently check on your landing pages weekly, especially when you start a new Performance max campaign. If there are specific pages you don’t want your Performance Max campaign to be showing up on, it’s as simple as clicking on Exclude URLs under the Additional Setting tab of your campaign settings. You can go through it and add either a rule or the specific URL you want excluded.

Tip 2: Pay Attention to Your Audience Insights

The Insight tab is somewhat of a newer addition that Google has introduced and it is very helpful. If you go to your Performance Max campaign and then into insights, you can scroll down to see the audiences that are bringing in the conversions, the clicks and then the impressions. This is crucial because you want to make sure that whatever audience is bringing in the most conversions is the one that is also getting the most in clicks and impressions.

You need to go into your audiences and exclude any audience that is not currently converting the way it should be. In order to do that, go to the Asset Groups tab, click on the Audience Signal and then click on edit icon on the Audience Signal section. From there, you can scroll down and remove the market audience.

Keep in mind that Google will still target people outside of these interests and detailed demographics. In a scenario where there is an audience you want to remove that is currently taking up a lot of the click share or impression share, there is unfortunately no way for you to manually remove it if it is not already in your audiences. You will just have to wait to make those adjustments after Performance Max highlights them.

Tip 3: Look at Your Asset Performance

Go into your Asset Details, check which ones have low performance and replace those images or videos. A bonus tip along with that is to make sure that you do have a video inside of your Performance Max campaign. If you don’t, Google is going to automatically create a video for you using images from your website or images that you provided for the Performance Max. Obviously, that is not going to be an ideal video scenario. Therefore, if possible, try to add a video inside the Performance Max to have some control over the video used.

Tip 4: Break Out Your Product Listing Groups by Specific Products

This step allows you to track performance and consequently pause low performing products. You can achieve this with Performance Max under Listing Groups by clicking on the pencil edit icon next to All Products to add a subdivision. This will allow you to then go through and add subdivisions for each of the items by Item ID, Brand, Condition, or Category, among other options.

Depending on how your feed is set up, you can opt for Item ID to view data on how much you’re spending on each individual product and how much your conversion value over cost is, that is, your row ads and the cost per conversion. Sort your products by ‘conversion value/cost’ and pause any products that have lower row ads by clicking on the green button adjacent to it.

Tip 5: Optimize Your Product Feed

This goes back to even smart shopping campaigns or standard shopping campaigns. Make sure you’re fixing any disapproved products or warnings inside of your merchant center. You can organize your campaigns with custom labels, making sure to update product titles, descriptions and images while testing different things as well.

Tip 6: Clean Up Your Conversion Actions

Go into your Tools and Settings and click on Conversions. Next, go through it to make sure that all of the conversions that are currently set are ones that should be primary actions. If they should be secondary actions, ensure that the algorithm isn’t using them to optimize the accounts. If you have multiple primary actions, be sure that you are only optimizing towards the most important goal inside your Performance Max.

To do that, go over to your Campaign Settings and on to the Goals section. If you have multiple primary goals in your account level, be sure to switch it over to a specific goal setting for website purchases, leads, or your most important objective for Performance Max.

Tip 7: Utilize Ad Schedules in your Performance Max Campaigns

In your Performance Max campaign, if you go to Overview, you will see that Google will generate top bidding signals to give you an idea of the days and times that your campaign is bidding higher or lower.

If you want to be even more aggressive, you can opt not to show ads during times when your campaign is bidding lower by setting up a complete custom ad schedule that caters to your specific needs under the Ad Schedule tab.

Tip 8: Create Separate Performance Max Campaigns For Products with Varying Levels of Margin or Price

If you have an account that has products with varying degrees of margins, go ahead and create separate performance max campaigns for those levels of margin or price. For instance, one product may have a 50% margin but the other has a 20% margin. In other cases, products may have big swings in price, say one costs $100 while the other costs $10,000. The reasoning behind this is that the way Google targets a person who is going to spend $10,000 versus $100 or a $1,000 is going to be drastically different.

Tip 9: Take Advantage of New Customer Bidding in Performance Max Campaigns

If you go to the Settings of your Performance Max and click on Customer Acquisition, you will see that you can bid higher for net new customers. If you click on this option, it means that you recognize that a brand new customer is probably going to be of more value to your business in the long run because you can obtain their email and upsell to them. You are therefore willing to pay an additional amount for that new customer. It will then prompt you to import a list of all customers.

Tip 10: Testing Different Bidding Strategies

Understanding this tip is highly essential and is the underlying strategy of bidding. Going through and testing different bidding strategies, whether it be your Target Row Ads or doing a max conversions can really have a big impact on the account.

Whenever we launch a brand new Performance Max campaign, we often leave the target Row Ads at blank for the first couple of weeks to allow the algorithm to start learning, and then adjust it from that point. However, don’t be afraid to go through and switch your conversion value bidding strategy to conversions or to play around with the strategies. Just be sure to keep track of what is working and what is not.

Tip 11: Click on More Asset Types when Creating your Performance Max Campaigns

Expand the hidden ‘More Asset Types’ section when creating your campaigns and add all the different provided extensions. Utilizing these options can really improve the click through rate and conversions of your campaigns.

What’s Next for Performance Max Campaigns?

Of course, not all these tips are going to be applicable to every single business. However, if they are applicable to your business, be sure to go through and do each of them. Our final bonus tip goes to those who have a Google rep assigned to their Google Ads account, and thus may not apply to everybody. If you do, give your negative keyword list to your Google rep and request them to upload it to your Performance Max campaign. While you can’t do this yet inside your account, Google reps on the back end can add negative keywords. However, Google is working on adding this feature soon.