How TikTok ads work, and why they’re different
TikTok shows people what it predicts they’ll watch, not what the accounts they follow have posted. Every video, ads included, is tested on a small group, and the ones that hold attention get pushed to more people like them. That is the whole game. A brand with no following and a better video can outrun a brand with a bigger budget and a worse one.
For advertisers this changes where the work goes. On TikTok the targeting settings matter less than on any other platform, and the creative matters more. The video tells TikTok who to show it to: who watches it to the end, who taps through, who buys.
TikTok optimises around attention
How long people watch, whether they rewatch, comment, share or tap the profile. Your ad is scored like any other video.
And around your conversion data
The purchases your Pixel and Events API send back. Without them TikTok finds people who watch, not people who buy.
Stop thinking
“How do we get our existing ads in front of a younger audience?”
Start thinking
“What would make someone stop scrolling, watch to the end and want this, if it weren’t an ad?”
Is TikTok right for your brand?
TikTok’s ad tools reach roughly 10.9 million Australian adults, about half of everyone over 18, and it grew faster over the last year than any other major platform. It isn’t a teenager’s app any more: your buyers are on it, whatever their age.
Two Australian specifics to know before you start:
- No ads reach anyone under 16. Australia’s social media minimum age law took effect on 10 December 2025, and TikTok doesn’t deliver ads to Australian users under 16. If your buyer is a young teen, TikTok ads aren’t the channel.
- TikTok Shop isn’t here. TikTok Shop, GMV Max campaigns and in-app checkout are not available in Australia as of October 2026, and TikTok hasn’t announced a date. Every TikTok sale for an Australian store happens on your own website, which is exactly how the rest of this guide sets it up.
Brands that tend to do well
- Products you can show working. Beauty, skincare, fitness, home, pets, gadgets, food and fashion: anything with a before and after, a demo or a reaction.
- Products with a story or a point of view. A founder who can talk to camera, a problem people complain about, a habit worth changing.
- Brands that can make video every week. This matters more than category. If you can only produce a few polished videos a quarter, fix that before you spend.
Our rule of thumb
If Meta is already profitable for you and you can supply new video every week, TikTok is usually the next channel worth testing. If Meta isn’t working yet, fix the offer, the landing page and the tracking there first: TikTok won’t rescue a product people don’t want.
Set up your foundation first
Most TikTok accounts that “don’t work” were set up to fail before the first ad ran. Get these right first.
Business Center and Ads Manager
Create a TikTok Business Center for the company and an ad account inside it, rather than an ad account on someone’s personal login. Business Center is where you add people, own the Pixel and the catalogue, and link creator and brand accounts. Link your brand’s own TikTok account as well: it gives you Spark Ads from your own posts and lets your organic activity feed the ad system.
TikTok Pixel and the Events API
The Pixel tracks what happens in the browser; the Events API sends the same events from your server, so you keep the sales that ad blockers, cookie limits and app browsers hide. Run both. On Shopify the TikTok app sets both up when you choose the highest data-sharing level. Elsewhere use a server-side tag or TikTok’s Events API Gateway.
The events to send, in the order a customer fires them:
- ViewContent
- AddToCart
- InitiateCheckout
- AddPaymentInfo
- CompletePayment
Send the order value and currency with every purchase, and pass hashed email and phone number where you have them. TikTok rates how well it can match your events to real people as Event Match Quality in Events Manager. The higher it is, the better TikTok can find more buyers like yours, so treat a low score as a job to fix, not a number to ignore.
Product catalogue
Connect your product feed in Catalog Manager. It powers catalogue ads, which show people the products they looked at or ones like them, and it lets Smart+ mix product cards in with your videos.
Check before you spend
Place a test order and confirm the purchase shows once, with the right value, in Events Manager. Duplicate purchases from an old Pixel left in the theme are the most common tracking fault we find, and they make every result look better than it is.
Smart+ and campaign structure in 2026
Since October 2025 TikTok has run one buying flow called Smart+. Instead of choosing between a fully manual campaign and a fully automated one, you now switch automation on or off one part at a time: targeting, budget, placements and creative. You can run it fully automated, part automated or fully manual inside the same flow.
For eCommerce the objective is Sales, with your website as the destination and a purchase as the optimisation event. TikTok is folding the old Website Conversions and Product Sales objectives into Sales, so the label in your account may still differ while that rolls out.
What Smart+ automates
- Targeting
- Broad by default. TikTok finds buyers from your creative and conversion data. You can still set a country, an age floor and exclusions.
- Budget
- One campaign budget shared across ad groups, or your own budget per ad group.
- Creative
- Each ad works as a group of up to 50 videos, images and lines of text. TikTok tests the combinations and spends more on the ones that win. Reporting shows you each creative.
- Placements
- Automatic by default, which can include TikTok’s partner apps. For eCommerce sales we keep it to TikTok itself unless a test proves otherwise.
The structure we recommend
Keep it this simple until you’re spending enough to justify more. Every extra ad group splits the data TikTok needs to learn, and small ad groups never get out of learning.
One setting to check
Smart+ can automatically pull in eligible creator posts that tag your brand and run them as ads from the creator’s profile. Some brands have found creator content running that they never approved. Look for the automatic creative selection settings in your campaign and decide on purpose whether you want it on.
TikTok ad formats and when to use each
Each format does a different job. Most eCommerce accounts only need the first four.
- In-Feed ads
- Videos and photo carousels in the For You feed, posted from your ad account. The workhorse for sales, and where most of your budget goes.
- Spark Ads
- Real organic posts, from your account or a creator’s, boosted as ads. They keep the profile, likes and comments, so they read like content rather than advertising. Usually our first choice for cold audiences.
- Catalogue ads
- Product cards and videos built from your feed, matched to what each person browsed. Strong for big ranges and for bringing back people who looked and didn’t buy.
- Search Ads
- Ads in TikTok’s search results. In Australia they run on the website conversion objective only. More in the Search Ads section.
- TopView and TopReach
- The first thing people see when they open the app, sold for reach. Built for launches and big moments rather than everyday sales, and usually bought through a TikTok rep.
Creative: what actually works on TikTok
The most common reason TikTok ads fail is the creative: polished brand videos and recycled Meta ads, cut to 9:16 and dropped into a feed of people talking to their phones. They look like ads, so people skip them, so TikTok stops showing them.
What works is native: shot vertically on a phone, sound on, a person on screen, made to look like the videos around it. That doesn’t mean low effort. The best TikTok ads are carefully planned to look unplanned.
Formats that sell
- Creator review
- A real person talking to camera about why they use it. Specific beats glowing: “I’ve tried four of these and this is the first one that didn’t…”
- Problem and fix
- Open on the problem your buyer recognises, then show the product solving it.
- Demo
- Show it working, close up, in real time. Texture, fit, before and after.
- Green screen
- A creator in front of a review, a comment, a news headline or your product page, reacting to it.
- Reply to a comment
- Answer a real question or objection from your comments as a video. It answers the doubt every other viewer has too.
- Founder to camera
- Why you made it, what you got wrong, what’s different. Works especially well for challenger brands.
- Photo carousel
- A swipeable slideshow with a line of text on each image. Cheap to make and often underrated: “5 things I wish I knew before buying…”
- Listicle
- “3 reasons…”, “things that just make sense…”. Easy to watch to the end, which TikTok rewards.
The first two seconds
Most people decide whether to keep watching almost immediately. Open with movement, a face, a bold line of on-screen text or the result itself. Never open on a logo. Then make the middle worth staying for: a hook that wins the first second and loses the next five only buys you cheap views.
How much creative you need
More than on Meta, and more often. Ads tire faster on TikTok because the same people scroll through a lot more videos. As a starting point, aim to launch three to five new concepts a week once you’re spending seriously, and keep 5–10 live in your core ad group. A new concept means a new idea, person, format or opening, not the same video with a different caption.
Coming up with that many ideas is the hard part, so make it a system: a weekly list of hooks to try, a pool of creators to brief, and a review of what won. If you’re a team without the time, that is exactly what we brief for clients: how we run TikTok ads.
Ad specs
| Spec | What to use |
|---|---|
| Aspect ratio | 9:16 vertical. TikTok accepts 1:1 and 16:9, but they look like ads. |
| Resolution | 1080 × 1920. The minimum is 540 × 960. |
| Length | Up to 10 minutes allowed. We keep most sales ads between 15 and 45 seconds. |
| File | MP4 or MOV, up to 500 MB. |
| Ad text | Short. No links, @mentions or hashtags in non-Spark ad text. |
| Safe zone | Keep text and product away from the bottom fifth and the right edge, where the caption and buttons sit. TikTok publishes safe-zone templates in Ads Manager. |
| Sound | Always on. Use TikTok’s commercial music library, not trending tracks you don’t have rights to. |
Spark Ads and working with creators
Spark Ads run real TikTok posts as ads. The video keeps its profile name, its comments and its likes, and anyone who taps through lands on a real account rather than an ad. Because they look and behave like content, they tend to hold attention better than the same video run as a normal ad.
Three ways to get posts for Spark Ads
- Your own account. Link your brand’s TikTok to Business Center and boost any of its posts.
- A creator’s authorisation code. The creator switches on ad authorisation for a post and sends you a code that lasts 7, 30, 60 or 365 days. You paste it into Ads Manager.
- Through Business Center. Creators link their accounts, and you push posts to them and run them from there.
How we work with creators
- Brief the idea, not the script. Give the creator the problem, the angle, the three things the video must show and the opening line to try. Let them say it in their own words.
- Ask for several openings. Three or four different first lines on the same video is the cheapest way to test hooks.
- Get usage rights in writing. Agree how long you can run the video as an ad, where, and whether you can edit it. Match the authorisation code to that period.
- Keep the comments clean. Comments travel with a Spark Ad. Answer questions, hide spam and pin a helpful reply.
- Test Spark and non-Spark separately. Comments and profile trust change how a video performs, so compare like with like.
TikTok Search Ads
People don’t only scroll TikTok, they search it: for reviews, recommendations, “best X for Y” and how-tos. Search Ads put your video in those results, next to the organic videos people are looking for, and they catch people closer to buying than the feed does.
- Australian availability. Search Ads campaigns run in Australia on the website conversion objective only. Traffic and lead generation versions aren’t available here.
- Learning. TikTok says a search campaign needs about 15–20 website conversions to learn.
- Keywords. Start with your product category, problem searches (“how to get rid of…”), comparisons and your brand name. Check the search terms report every week, add the ones that convert and exclude the ones that don’t.
- Creative. A search result should answer the search. A video that opens with “If you’re looking for the best…” beats one made for the feed.
Start with a small share of your TikTok budget, around 10–20%, and grow it if the cost per purchase holds. TikTok has also announced Search Ads inside Smart+; check your account to see whether it’s switched on in Australia yet.
Budgets and bidding
TikTok’s minimum budgets are low, around $20 a day per ad group and $50 a day per campaign in your account’s currency. The minimum isn’t the number that matters. The number that matters is how many purchases each ad group can buy.
The 10x rule
TikTok’s own guidance is a daily budget of at least ten times your target cost per purchase for each ad group. At a $40 target, that’s $400 a day. If that’s more than you can spend, run fewer ad groups rather than smaller ones, or optimise for add to cart until purchases build up.
Bid strategies
- Maximum results
- What TikTok used to call lowest cost. Spends the budget and gets as many purchases as it can. Where to start.
- Target cost per result
- What used to be cost cap. TikTok aims for your cost per purchase on average. Use it once you know your real numbers, set near your actual cost rather than a wish.
- Highest value
- Optimises for order value rather than the number of orders. Worth testing when your basket sizes vary a lot.
- Minimum ROAS
- Value bidding with a floor on return. Set it at or just above your break-even ROAS.
The learning phase
A new or heavily edited ad group goes through learning, where results swing while TikTok works out who buys. TikTok’s current guidance is that this settles after about 25 results or seven days. Don’t judge an ad group before then, and don’t make big edits during it: a new budget, bid or targeting change restarts the clock.
How to split the budget
- 70% to the core ad group and its proven creatives
- 20% to testing new concepts
- 10% to Search Ads, growing if they hold
Testing and scaling
How to test
- Launch three to five new concepts a week into the testing ad group.
- Give each one a fair run. Wait until a concept has spent about one to two times your target cost per purchase before you judge it on sales.
- Read the early signals first. If almost no one watches past the first two seconds, the opening is the problem. If they watch but don’t click, it’s the middle or the offer. If they click but don’t buy, look at the landing page.
- Graduate the winners. Move proven concepts into the core ad group, and make new versions of them: same idea, new person, new opening.
How to scale
- Raise budgets in steps. After learning, increase a winning ad group’s budget by about 20–30% at a time and give each step two or three days to settle.
- Feed it more creative. On TikTok, scale comes from new videos more than new settings. A campaign that’s stopped growing usually needs fresh concepts, not a new structure.
- Add search and catalogue. Once the feed is profitable, Search Ads and catalogue ads pick up people your videos have already warmed up.
Measuring TikTok properly
TikTok almost always looks worse in Google Analytics and Shopify than it does in Ads Manager, and neither view is the whole truth.
Many TikTok buyers don’t click. They watch an ad, close the app, and later search for you or type in your website. Last-click reports give that sale to Google or to “direct”. TikTok’s own analysis says more than one in four of the purchases it attributes come after someone watched an ad and went straight to the website. TikTok’s reporting, on the other hand, counts views generously and claims sales that other channels also claim.
Attribution settings
You set the attribution window per ad group: a click window of 1, 7, 14 or 28 days and a view window of off, 1 or 7 days. TikTok also offers engaged view-through, which counts a purchase after someone watched at least six seconds. Pick your settings at launch and leave them, because they lock once the ad group is published, and switching view-through off later makes results swing for weeks.
The numbers we trust
- MER. Total revenue divided by total ad spend across every channel. If you add TikTok and MER holds or improves, it’s working.
- New customers. Is the number of first-time buyers rising since TikTok went live?
- A post-purchase survey. One question at checkout, “Where did you first hear about us?”, with TikTok as an option. It catches the buyers no pixel can.
- Holdout tests. Turn TikTok off in some regions and keep it on in others for three to four weeks, then compare sales. Keep watching for a few weeks after: TikTok’s effect often shows up late.
Metrics to watch
| Metric | What it tells you | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| 2-second view rate | Is the opening stopping the scroll? | Your best ads set the bar |
| 6-second view rate | Does the video hold people after the hook? | A big drop from 2s to 6s |
| Average watch time | Is the whole video worth watching? | Compare within the same length |
| CTR | Does the video make people want to see more? | The trend, ad by ad |
| Cost per purchase | What a sale costs in TikTok’s reporting | Below your target CPA |
| ROAS | Revenue per dollar in TikTok’s reporting | Above your break-even |
| MER | Total revenue ÷ total ad spend | Holding or rising as TikTok scales |
| Frequency | How often the same people see the ad | Rising frequency with falling CTR |
Work out your break-even ROAS and target cost per purchase before you launch. The ROAS calculator and CPA calculator do it from your own margins.
What do TikTok ads cost in Australia?
There’s no fixed price. TikTok is an auction, so what you pay depends on your category, the time of year, how many other brands want the same people, and above all how good your creative is. Ads people watch get cheaper delivery than ads they skip.
Be careful with the “Australian TikTok benchmarks” tables online. Most mix currencies and recycle global or US data, and none we’ve seen is reliable enough to plan a budget on. Work it out from your own numbers instead:
- Know your break-even. If your margin after product, shipping and fees is 40%, you need a ROAS of 2.5 just to break even on a first order.
- Set a target cost per purchase that leaves profit, or that your customer’s lifetime value can carry.
- Budget for learning. Ten times that target per ad group per day, for at least a week, plus the cost of making creative.
- Give it four to six weeks before deciding. Most accounts look worst in the first fortnight.
The cost most brands underestimate isn’t the media, it’s the creative. Plan for a steady supply of new videos from day one.
Common TikTok ads mistakes
- Running your Meta ads on TikTok. The single most common failure. Make video for TikTok.
- Stacking interests. Narrow targeting fights the way TikTok finds buyers. Go broad and let the creative do the work.
- Optimising for clicks or views. TikTok gets you exactly what you ask for. Ask for purchases.
- Turning it off after a week. Results swing during learning and TikTok’s effect lags. Judge over weeks, not days.
- Judging it on Google Analytics alone. Last-click reporting hides most of TikTok’s sales. Use MER, new customers and a post-purchase survey.
- Too few creatives. Two or three videos tire within days. Plan for new concepts every week.
- Editing during learning. Every big change restarts it.
- Leaving tracking half done. No Events API, duplicate purchases, missing order values. Fix the data before you scale the spend.
- Sending people to your homepage. Land them on the product the video was about.
Where TikTok fits with your other channels
TikTok is best at reaching people who weren’t looking for you yet. It works hardest alongside Meta ads, which turn that interest into repeat sales, and Google Ads, which catch the people who go and search for you after watching. Our Google Shopping guide covers that side. Add channels one at a time and judge each by MER, because every platform takes credit for the same sale.
TikTok ads quick-start checklist
Run your own account against these twelve before you spend seriously. Your ticks are saved on this device.
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Thanks for reading, and I hope that helps. If you’d rather hand it over, this is how we run TikTok ads for eCommerce brands. And if you just want a second pair of eyes on your own account, that’s what the call is for.
Sam Despo
Founder & Director, Pulp Digital
