Top 5 ways to use custom audiences for TikTok advertising

September 27, 2024

TikTok is one of the most popular video-sharing platforms, particularly earning the loyalty of the young

TikTok advertising has quickly become the "new" Instagram or Snapchat and a highly effective way to reach young, affluent millennials and the early adopters who like to stay current on all the trends.

Many marketers have maxed out their spend on other social channels or it may have become too cost prohibitive.

With Facebook CPMs ever increasing, targeting the same people on TikTok using a custom audience will improve your return on advertising spend (ROAS) due to lower CPMs.

Although not actively discussed in the executive ranks for brand advertisers, TikTok already has 800 million active users globally – more than Pinterest, Reddit, Snap and Twitter – with close to 50 percent between ages 18 and 24 (Hootsuite).

The opportunity to reach your target customers cheaply, however, only exists before more advertisers figure out the bargain to be had and drive up CPMs.

Younger audiences enjoy the raw authenticity of TikTok videos, so developing a creative strategy and executing campaigns on TikTok will be different than your typical social media manager can handle.

Influencer agencies such as Influential can help find the right influencers for your brand and execute a winning campaign matching creative content to custom audience data and measuring the impact post campaign.

Top five reasons to advertise on TikTok

Scale
TikTok has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times already, so reaching your desired audience where they get their entertainment is not a problem.

The problem with too much scale, however, is targeting the right TikTok users or else you waste ad spend.

If your target demographic contains consumers ages 18-34, you need to include TikTok in your media and data planning.

Engagement without investment
TikTok is unique from other social platforms in that any individual post can go viral and reach millions of people very quickly regardless of how many followers the account has.

The addictive quality of TikTok keeps users coming back for new and fresh content so higher quality videos get more play.

Competition and cost
Newer platforms mean fewer advertisers, less demand and therefore cheaper CPMs.

TikTok's ad platform is progressing, but is also fairly new. It does not have the native targeting options of a LinkedIn or Facebook, but does have the ability to build custom audiences instead.

In Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) this works out well, so you can upload your own highly defined list of prospects for targeting or customer for remarketing efforts.

Viewability
Viewability on TikTok is 100 percent. No BS below-the-fold inventory.

You may only get a second of attention span from this generation, but they will see your content. Think of those brief views as acceptable subliminal advertising.

Use your customer's content
Does your company have raving fans? If producing content is too hard or costly for your company, look to your customers.

The power of user-generated content creates value based on authenticity, third-party credibility and the production cost is hard to beat.

Sometimes just documenting the inner happenings or the process that your company goes through to deliver your products or services is interesting enough.

It might seem mundane to you, but even mixing paint can attract attention nowadays.

Find customers or influencers willing to create content featuring your brand and products.

Mike Ford

How to create TikTok custom audiences
TikTok allows advertisers to create different types of custom audiences in ad groups.

Website traffic: Standard retargeting option to plant a pixel on your website and create custom lists for retargeting later.

Engagement: Create segments based on TikTok interactions with your account.

App activity: Create custom segments based on certain events that happen within your company's app

Customer file: Create custom audiences based on uploading a list of "customers."

Many marketers do not have access to their mobile identifiers – MAIDs, IDFA, GAID or AAID – so creating a custom audience for exclusion can increase your advertising performance by not advertising to existing customers.

TikTok custom audience best practices
If your campaign objective is about apps, I recommend using a custom audience to contain only IDFA or only GAID so that you can choose the operating system accordingly when setting up the campaign and avoid unnecessary data loss.

Your IDFA and GAID data should be from the same geographical location where your ad is targeting.

For example, if you want to advertise in Japan, both types of data should come from Japan. This way, your data can make most of its value and avoid data loss when delivering.

Recommendations

Advertisers can continue to upload customer file with GAIDs.

Additionally, they can create Lookalike Audience based on GAIDs for a broader reach.

App Activity Audience
The App Activity Audience solution relies on mobile measurement partners (MMPs) posting back app events with TikTok as the foundation of this type of custom audience.

Previously, mobile measurement partners have relied on IDFAs to attribute conversions to different marketing channels.

With the likely decrease of IDFA usage, each mobile measurement partner is currently developing their own solution to mitigate impact.

In general, you can expect smaller audience size due to the decreased volume of IDFAs available for mobile measurement partners.

Recommendations

Advertisers can continue to create App Activity Audiences, but the audience size is expected to decrease significantly. As a result, this audience solution is likely to be ineffective.

Website Traffic Audience
The Website Traffic Audience solution relies on post-back events from TikTok Pixel.

Advertisers should expect a smaller audience size when creating Website Traffic Audience due to decreased volume of IDFAs, emails and phone numbers available for audience matching purposes.

Recommendations

Advertisers can continue to create Website Traffic Audiences, but the audience size may be smaller.

Mike Ford is founder/CEO of Skydeo, Austin, Texas. Reach him at mike@skydeo.com.

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Top 5 ways to use custom audiences for TikTok advertising

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