TikTok just came out with another new feature that is in my opinion a game changer. They are going head-to-head against Google in the search space to try and capture the search market and I think this presents a very unique opportunity for advertisers like me and you to take advantage of this opportunity.
TikTok Search Ads
Now the question you’re asking is what am I talking about here? Well, TikTok has just released search ads and you may be wondering how that works or how that’s possible inside of TikTok.
If you aren’t familiar, there is a search bar, and when you go through and search for specific things it will give you results that look something like this.
So in this example, I went through and typed in “best productivity app.” You can see these four videos pop up.
There are 3 organic videos and one ad, there’s a small little thing that says “Sponsored” right there. This is Zapier running an ad.
You may be asking yourself well that’s great that option is there, but how many people actually use that?
The answer is a lot even Google themselves are basically admitting that this is a threat to their business.
When we look at this article, you can see that Google exec suggests Instagram and TikTok are eating into Google’s core product search and map suggesting that 40% of young people when looking for a place to eat lunch, don’t go to Google Maps or search they go to TikTok or Instagram.
This is just one small data point that I think highlights the trend in where people are searching for short-form videos to go through and answer their questions. As I mentioned, it presents a very good opportunity for us as advertisers to show up when people have a high-intent question that they need to go through and answer.
Now TikTok themselves have come out and said that according to their research, the rise of TikTok as a destination for search represents a great opportunity for brands to reach and connect with new customers.
According to their studies, 58% of TikTok users discover new brands and products on the platform 1.5 times more than other platform users. So the questions are
- How do you create these TikTok search ads?
- How do you make sure that you’re showing up in the right spot?
- How do you make sure you get the best results possible out of these TikTok search ads?
That’s what we’re going to talk about and telling you everything you need to know about this brand-new ad format.
So as I showed you before I just want to give you a closer view of where the actual search ads appear when somebody goes to the search bar inside of TikTok.
You can see here that they go through this little search bar and when people search this is where you have the opportunity to show your products.
They go through and search and it will show them four videos kind of at the top here one of them will have a little sponsored logo at this spot and then when they click on that it will go to your specific video.
Setting Up TikTok Search Ads
Now setting up these TikTok search ads is actually incredibly easy. The first thing that you need to do is make sure you have a TikTok ads account all set up. If you don’t already you can sign up here and get a $500 Ad Credit (Limited Time Offer).
From here what we want to do is come in and go to campaigns and then create a new campaign.
Once you’re inside of the new campaign, you need to go through and select an ad objective.
Now in order for your ads to show up on these search results, you need to either do the web conversion objective, the lead objective, the traffic objective, or the app promotion objective.
You can see right now this is only available in the US, the buying type is auction only, inside the TikTok ads manager only, and then the language of support is only English so these are some other things to keep in mind there.
For this example we are just going to choose the traffic objective.
You can go through and keep all these settings the same I’m not going to go through all these ad settings here for the purpose of this blog. I have a full tutorial on how to set up TikTok ads if you want to check it out, but for this blog I just want to show how to use search ads.
Now we’re here inside of the placement. You can see when you go through and select the “placements” you’re now going to have this option for the toggle “Include in search results”, if you switch this on your ads, it’ll automatically going to start showing on the TikTok search results page.
Now this is where I usually get the question, “Is there a way to make sure that your ads are only showing on the search results page?”
As of now, it is not possible, your ad is “included” in search results reach means it will show in the normal TikTok feed as well as on search.
You can see this feature is only available currently inside of TikTok not in App Partners. When I run this typically I will keep that on and then I will opt out of Global App Bundle and Pangle as well. Then everything else is basically the same when it comes to the setting up a TikTok ad so we’re just going to go through and hit next here.
This will take you to the ad creation section where you can get a preview bar of what your ad will look like.
How to Target Specific Keywords?
So another one of the questions that people probably have at this point is how you actually go through and target specific keywords and unfortunately, right now can’t give TikTok a list of keywords that you target.
TikTok has told us that the targeting is based on the following.
- Ad relevancy
- The user search term query
- The actual broader data that TikTok has on the user
So my guesses are they’re and crawling the ad, they’re taking note of things that you’re saying in it, and based on what you’re saying, what’s in the caption and what’s in the title is what they’re using to decide where your ad is going to show up.
But one of the things that TikTok does is they allow you to see a search term report that shows you where your ads are showing up and they allow you to add negative keywords to your campaign.
How to Check Your Search Term Report and Add Negative Keywords?
So in order to see your search terms report or add negative keywords, come into your campaign. Come to the ad group level. You can actually do this at the campaign ad group or ad level if you want it to but I find it’s the most effective at the ad group level.
You want to hover over your ad group and then come over here to the view data underneath that ad group.
From there, you’re going to notice a new underneath the search.
Inside the search, it is going to start showing you all of the different search terms that you are currently showing up for. It’s going to show you the current amount of impressions that you’re getting on that specific search term, the clicks, the Click destination, and the CPM that you have for all of these.
Then you can scroll over and see the results.
You can see this is a newer campaign so we haven’t seen any leads come from this yet.
From this point, you can click on “Add” and then you can upload a file of negative keywords or you can manually upload keywords inside of here.
You can see here they’ve kind of taken a playbook out of Google where you can add different match types. You can use the “parenthesis” for a phrase match or you can use [brackets] for an exact match.
You can see you can add up to 10,000 keywords inside of here which should be plenty for what you are trying to do.
That is pretty much everything that you need to know to get started with these new search ads inside TikTok.
I’m sure as time goes on they’re going to give us more features and more control and maybe even allow us to bid on specific keywords inside of TikTok. When that kind of update comes up I will be sure to go through and update you about it!