TikTok Image Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effortless Advertising

by Corbin White | Aug 1, 2024 | Tiktok Ads

TikTok Image Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effortless Advertising

Introducing the New Era of TikTok Advertising

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, TikTok has emerged as a powerhouse platform, captivating audiences with its unique blend of creativity and engagement. As businesses strive to stay ahead of the curve, the introduction of TikTok Image Ads has revolutionized the way brands can connect with their target audience. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll dive deep into the world of TikTok Image Ads, exploring the different formats, setting up your campaigns, and unlocking the secrets to maximizing your reach and engagement.

Mastering the Three Types of TikTok Image Ads

TikTok offers three distinct types of image ads, each with its own unique features and benefits. Understanding the nuances of these ad formats will help you make informed decisions and choose the best strategy for your business.

1. Standard Carousel Ads

The standard Carousel ads on TikTok allow you to showcase a series of up to 35 images within a single ad. This format is perfect for highlighting multiple products, showcasing different features, or telling a visual story. The key advantage of standard Carousel ads is the flexibility to customize each image and the ability to direct users to a single destination, such as your website or a specific product page.

2. VSA (Video-Style Ads) Carousel Ads

VSA Carousel ads take the Carousel format a step further by integrating dynamic product recommendations. These ads allow users to click on individual products within the Carousel, taking them directly to the corresponding product page. This seamless user experience can significantly improve conversion rates, as it reduces friction in the customer journey.

3. Product Shopping Ads

The third and perhaps the most exciting TikTok Image Ad format is the Product Shopping Ads. These ads are designed to appear in the TikTok Shopping Center and search results, mimicking the functionality of Google Shopping Ads. With Product Shopping Ads, users can discover and click on individual products, which then take them directly to the corresponding product page. This format is particularly beneficial for e-commerce businesses, as it taps into the high-intent user behavior of shoppers actively searching for products.

Setting Up Your TikTok Image Ad Campaigns

Now that you’re familiar with the different TikTok Image Ad formats, let’s dive into the step-by-step process of setting up your campaigns.

Step 1: Create Your TikTok Ads Account

The first step is to create your TikTok Ads account. If you’re new to TikTok advertising, be sure to take advantage of the $500 ad credit offer when you sign up and spend $500 on your campaigns.

Step 2: Set Up Your Campaign

Once you’ve created your TikTok Ads account, it’s time to set up your campaign. Here’s how you can get started:

• Navigate to the Campaigns section and click on “Create New Campaign”.
• Select the appropriate objective for your campaign, such as Traffic, App Promotion, or Website Conversions for standard Carousel ads, or Product Sales for VSA Carousel and Product Shopping Ads.
• Configure your campaign settings, including your budget, targeting, and optimization goals.

Step 3: Create Your TikTok Image Ads

Now, it’s time to create your TikTok Image Ads. Depending on the format you’ve chosen, the process may vary slightly:

Standard Carousel Ads

For standard Carousel ads, you can either manually upload your images or leverage a tool like Canva to create a series of images in the correct aspect ratio. Remember, you’ll need a minimum of 2 images and can go up to 35 images per ad.

VSA Carousel Ads

To create VSA Carousel ads, you’ll need to have your TikTok Seller Center account set up and connected to your TikTok Ads account. This will allow you to pull product images directly from your product catalog, making the setup process much more streamlined.

Product Shopping Ads

Setting up Product Shopping Ads is even more straightforward. Once you’ve selected the “TikTok Shop” objective and the “Product Shopping Ads” format, you can simply choose the products you want to feature, and TikTok will automatically generate the ad creative for you.

Step 4: Optimize Your Ads

Effective optimization is key to ensuring the success of your TikTok Image Ad campaigns. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your ads:

• Monitor Search Terms: Regularly review the search terms that are triggering your Product Shopping Ads and add any irrelevant terms as negative keywords to refine your targeting.
• Analyze Image Performance: Utilize the TikTok Creative Library to track the performance of individual images across your campaigns. This will help you identify the best-performing assets and allocate more budget accordingly.
• Leverage TikTok’s Recommendations: TikTok provides valuable insights on best practices, such as highlighting product benefits, using a single human model, and showcasing customer point-of-view. Incorporate these recommendations into your ad creative for optimal results.

Unleash the Power of TikTok Image Ads

As you’ve discovered, TikTok Image Ads offer a versatile and powerful advertising solution for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re looking to showcase your products, tell a captivating visual story, or leverage the high-intent shopping behavior of users, TikTok has an image ad format that can help you achieve your marketing goals.

Remember, the key to success lies in understanding the unique features and benefits of each ad format, setting up your campaigns strategically, and continuously optimizing your ads based on performance data. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking the full potential of TikTok Image Ads and driving remarkable results for your business.

Ready to get started? Be sure to take advantage of the $500 ad credit offer when you sign up for TikTok Ads, and don’t forget to stay up-to-date on the latest TikTok advertising trends by subscribing to the @zocomarketing channel on TikTok. Happy advertising!

How To Set Up TikTok Pixel For Lead Generation

by Zoco Marketing | Jul 11, 2023 | Tiktok Ads

Are you considering running TikTok ads for lead generation? If your answer to this question is yes, it’s vital to understand how to add the TikTok pixel to your website and set up lead firing events. This blog will walk you through these steps in detail, so buckle up and get ready to learn all you need to know about this.

Importance of Setting Up the TikTok Pixel and Lead Events

Before diving into the “how,” let’s first address the “why.” Essentially, setting up the TikTok pixel and lead events is essential for four main reasons:

• Understanding Cost per Lead: With the TikTok pixel, determining your actual cost per lead on TikTok becomes easier.
• Targeting the Right Users: The data obtained from the pixel helps create lookalike audiences, which makes your targeting more efficient.
• Campaign Optimization: TikTok Pixel data helps you refine your campaigns more effectively.
• Determining Lead Generation Efficiency: You can track which ads and campaigns generate leads and their associated costs.

Having established why you need to set up the TikTok pixel, let’s delve into how you can do this.

Setting Up The TikTok Pixel

Here, we’ll break down the process into two straightforward steps:

Add the Pixel Code to Your Website

1. First things first, you need to create a TikTok Ads account. 
2. Once inside, head over to Tools, then Events, and create your pixel. 
3. Select web events, as that is what most of us will deal with. 
4. Name your pixel appropriately and choose your website platform (in this guide, we’ll use WordPress as an example).
5. You have two choices for installation; either install the code manually or set it up automatically with web partners. For most lead pixel setups, it is better to choose manual installation over the automatic installation with web partners.  
6. After selecting manual setup, choose the event builder option unless you have more complex systems that need developer support. 
7. Copy the pixel code provided.

Install the Code onto Your Website

To add the code to your WordPress website:

1. Navigate to the plugins section of the website.
2. Search for the “Headers and Footers” plugin. 
3. Once installed, go to the “Headers, Footers, Code Manager” (HFCM) section and click on “Add New”.
4.  Name your snippet (for instance, “TikTok Pixel”). Ensure it’s set to display site-wide and in the header.
5. Paste your copied pixel code in the Snippet/Code section.

Now, your TikTok pixel is installed on your site.

Setting Up The Lead Event

Back on TikTok, you can now set up the lead event.

•  After activating Automatic Events Matching, you can choose the event to track. 

• If you generate leads, “Submit Form” or “Complete Registration” will likely be your go-to option.

Next, you need to decide how you’ll track this event. There are two ways: tracking a URL or tracking the click of a button.

To decide which method to use, you must understand how your website forms behave. If your form redirects to a new URL upon submission, you should track the URL. Alternatively, if your form stays on the same page, displaying a “thank you” message instead, tracking the click of a button is the most effective option.

Track a URL

This tracking method should be used if your website takes you to a different URL after submitting a form.

To set up URL tracking, enter the destination URL that fires after a form submission. For example, if your thank-you page URL contains “thank-you”, add that to TikTok.

Track a Button

This tracking method should be used if your website doesn’t redirect the user after submitting a form.

If you’re tracking a button click, the process is slightly different. 

1. Add the URL of the form’s website to Tiktok.

2. Select the button you wish to track as an event using the “Element Selection” option, which allows you to select any element on your website and follow it as an event. Once selected, every click on this button will trigger the event on TikTok.

Tracking a URL is generally more reliable, as it only fires when a lead form is successfully submitted. Tracking a button click may result in false leads if the form submission fails, but the button click is registered.

Testing Your Setup

Finally, you need to confirm that your setup is working correctly. For this, use the TikTok Pixel Helper, a Chrome extension. Install it and visit your website to see the events you’ve set up on the pixel helper. This confirmation ensures that your setup is correctly tracking your lead generation attempts.

By following this guide, you can effectively set up your TikTok pixel for lead generation, giving you valuable insight into your campaigns, improving targeting, and increasing the efficiency of your lead generation process. Good luck!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.