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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🎨The challenges with creative approval on TikTok.

⭕️What the safe zone is – and why it matters.

⬇️TikTok’s download card – and why its timing matters for marketers.

🤔What happens when you click on the download card – as compared to when you click on the ad or when you swipe up.

⚖️The pros and cons of automatic creative optimization

⚡️How to use and optimize TikTok’s ad tags

🏷 How interest-based audiences with relevant ad tags can be mapped to ad creatives.

💡Thinking outside the box to build an organic presence even if you aren’t ready to run ads

🔐The components of high-performing creatives 

👩🏽‍💻Crafting a cost-efficient influencer marketing strategy – by reaching out directly to TikTok users.

KEY QUOTES

It is very important to understand the ad structure

If you just click on an ad, it will actually pause the video. If you swipe up, it’ll take you to the next page. It’s kinda like you’re scrolling through the feed. So again, I think it’s really important for marketers and creatives to be familiar with how the organic content is, and it’ll help draw inspiration for creatives as well.

So just swipe up, swipe left actually will take you to the App Store landing page. 

How auto creative optimization can yield great insights

I think that with auto creative optimization, what helped us quickly identify creative and text copy that worked right off the bat was the combo to use an evergreen.

The challenge in getting insights on creatives

With the logic that TikTok has and how the algorithm pushes the ads, it’s based on an eCPM rank, so it’s your bid times your click through rate times your conversion rate, and it’ll force traffic on those winners. The rest won’t get any traffic. 

Using ad tags to drive interest in the app

An example could be you have a game that has a new update that just went out. And it has a level that features ice cream, so you create an ad around this level, and you use an interest audience for food. Then use relevant ad tags like ice cream cone or waffle. 

Testing aggressively reveals wins

What we’ve been doing is just looking through TikTok. You can search by users, top content, hashtags. So we’ve been looking at hashtags, and it gives you a number of views for each hashtag. And so we’re finding ones with millions and billions of views and just loading them up. Anything that’s remotely relevant that has more than a million views. So far, we’ve found a win. We’ve tested a ton, probably over 20 different audiences, and so far we found one win with a relevant, like I said, doing that type of relevancy with the add interest and ad tags. 

Some viral levers are surprisingly simple

There’s this sound on TikTok that you can use that I’ve seen a ton of people doing with their content. It’s something not even that crazy that you wouldn’t think would go viral — something like a satisfying sound like someone cleaning their window. And it’s like, look, that was just 1000 views right there. It’s just so easy to go viral. 

It is easy to get started on TikTok

We were starting to build an endorsement pipeline really of people to make these videos. If you can’t find anyone or you don’t have a budget to do it, just see if you have friends who are willing to do it and have them record themselves, and the TikTok video editor is super easy.

How to approach best practices for videos

I think that their best practices are at least 9 second videos, max is 60. I just noticed that they updated their best practices for short videos to be between 9 and 15 seconds. For us, we find probably an average of 25-30 seconds that works. 

Look beyond the established influencer pool

We’ve really just been reaching out to people who have funny, creative content with over 10,000 likes on a couple different videos. Basically their audition tape is their profile, so just DMing them, seeing if they’d be interested in making some content and working with you. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Natalie Rozenblat to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Natalie, welcome to the show.

Natalie: Thank you, Shamanth. Thank you so much for having me. I’m very honored and excited to be part of this. Super excited to dive into talking about TikTok and really appreciate you having me on.

Shamanth: Indeed. I’ve definitely been very keen on having you because you and your team have experimented and tested and tried a lot of things with TikTok. And all of that is absolutely something that I’m very keen on diving into today. You know, we can start off with something that you would think shouldn’t be a problem with a platform at this scale, but it is a big challenge: creative approval. So, why is this a challenge? What should marketers be mindful of when it comes to TikTok policies?

Natalie: Unfortunately, creative approval is probably the number one challenge and the biggest roadblock that we’ve experienced for getting up and running and just keeping the account, continuing to spend, and gain learnings. My team has faced a couple different challenges — one being definitely that their ad policy does cover most illegal activity that you can’t portray and the ad’s political, sexual content that maybe in other channels you can get by or it makes it through review that is maybe a little bit more questionable, but in TikTok, it doesn’t pass the review. I think that the biggest challenge is probably going to be for games or apps that have that actual type of content within the app itself. So, just being cautious of the types of levels or the type of gameplay or the type of in-app footage you show to make sure it really does not violate their ad policy has been very challenging for us. 

We’ve had a lot of communication with the account managers that we’re working with, a lot of back and forth, and a lot of follow up to make sure that ads even make it through review, let alone if there was an ad inconsistency. That’s a lot of what we’re seeing too where there are two different ad review teams. So one review team is a quality control review team and then another review team makes it through inspection. So, sometimes you’ll see an ad that maybe, you know, is borderline with their ad policy – that gets approved in one ad group, but you launch it in Android, and it doesn’t get approved there. 

You need to do a lot of follow up, and something else too that was challenging that we experienced in the first two to three weeks of being live in TikTok was that when we would launch an ad in an existing ad group, it already had some learning somewhere else, so it would actually pause the entire ad group for review. So, we missed out on some high volume days, but they changed the logic effective of April 28th, so that was great. Now, If you go in the ads manager and launch an ad in an existing ad group, it will just pause that ad. That ad won’t start serving until it makes it through review. 

And something too that I really like about the ads manager with the creative challenges is it’s nice that they give a reason as to why the ad was disapproved, which is helpful. If you think that, “oh, maybe you can sneak something through,” and it gets caught then it’s pretty helpful when it identifies what it is that got flagged. We’ve been working really closely with a lot of follow up with the TikTok account management team, and they’re super helpful too with giving a reason as to why ads don’t make it through review. 

I would say the creative is going to be your keys to success. So really work diligently with the account team, your TikTok team, and follow the ad policy guidelines. There’s a checklist that you can use. Make sure that the creative team has it, and both marketing and creative teams know what’s gonna work and what’s not.

Shamanth: And creatives can be idiosyncratic on TikTok. Just last week, we got rejected, and we found out, we couldn’t show kids in an ad. And this was an app for kids. So, we’re like, “what do we do?” They’re like “show parents.” So we’re going to try that, but you’re right. It’s very tricky to figure out exactly how to make this work. And something else that’s very specific to TikTok is what’s called a safe zone. So tell us what the safe zone is and why marketers should be aware of this?

Natalie: So, that’s kind of funny that you said that about kids too because if you’re in the app itself, you see that the content is violating every type of policy — probably their own guidelines. You see as you’re scrolling that somebody, it’s something that’s pretty inappropriate, and they’re like “this got deleted at a million likes or views, so I’m reposting it.” So, it’s happening on the organic side that there’s more stuff that’s going through there. 

And kind of to your question on the safe zones, I think that it’s really important for marketers and creative teams to be really familiar with the organic content because as you’re scrolling through your ‘For You’ page, on the right side, you have your buttons like your Comment, Like, Share, and then at the top, it’s who you’re following and the ‘For You’ page. The bottom has website name, and then the description, the text copy that you’re going to use, and then differently from the organic content, there’s a bar at the bottom to a download card, which is interchangeable. 

You can have a couple different CTAs. I think there’s Play Game, Learn More, Download–a couple other ones – Read More. But, the biggest thing I think with the download card is that, unlike any other channel, when you click on the ad, it usually takes you to the App Store or the landing page. With TikTok, you have to click on that download, that CTA button at the bottom, and then it’ll take you to the landing page or the App Store.

So if you just click on an ad, it will actually pause the video. If you swipe up, it’ll take you to the next page. It’s kinda like you’re scrolling through the feed. So again, I think it’s really important for marketers and creatives to be familiar with how the organic content is, and it’ll help draw inspiration for creatives as well. So just swipe up, swipe left actually will take you to the App Store landing page.

So we should definitely learn that a lot of the CTAs that work with other channels, you know, either leaving them out or just making them more subtle, is probably the way to go. But with the download card, it’ll be there, but then it’ll pop up after the nine second mark. And that’s a little bit more prominent and in your face then. So, you really want to make sure that there’s nothing important at that bottom half of the bottom quadrant of your video.

Shamanth: Yeah, which also means that it’s important that videos are at least nine seconds long, so users can actually see the download card, which is what drives their CTAs. In the actual setup, you could have automatic creative optimization, or you could disable it, which we call manual optimization. What do you recommend at different stages of a campaign? And why do you pick what you pick?

Natalie: That’s a really good question.

I think that with auto creative optimization, what helped us quickly identify creative and text copy that worked right off the bat was the combo to use an evergreen.

When we first launched, that’s what we launched with an auto creative ad group, and I think we had three or four ads and three text copy options. So, I think it was all a total of 12 ads, but we worked with TikTok on a recommended starting point and recommended bid point, which helped us determine the number of creatives to use. So obviously, if you have a bigger budget, you can get a little bit more aggressive with the number of creatives you throw in; lower budgets, maybe limit to like two or three. 

The biggest thing with auto creative optimization was that it’s good for getting really rapid learning. Then on the other hand, for learning, if you have a lot of ads, you might get little to no impressions on these ads. So for us, initially that’s what we used, but then we switched over to using standard creative serving and just single ads. Then you can manually pause and force learnings on others or if something’s high cost, you can pause that. But with auto creative optimization, you can’t toggle these ads on or off. So, you can turn them off, it’s deleting them. The way that we’ve been thinking about it is to think of UAC. You know how you can’t pause an ad there, you basically remove it — that’s pretty much what it is with TikTok. I think that we used it sometimes for thumbnail testing or for text copy — rapid testing. But more so, the way we scaled the campaign so far has been with non auto creative on.

Shamanth: Sure. Would you say the auto creative is helpful for testing and the non auto for scaling? 

Natalie: Yeah, I think it depends. Sometimes, we’ve seen that we’re just trying to get really quick learnings with creatives. We’ve had a creative fatigue, and we need to get something new — we need a new one really quick. So we’ll force it through that auto creative ad group to gain some learnings. For the most part, we’re using non auto creative even for testing because it’ll pick one or two ads, and force spend on those until the rest, they’re gonna have little to no impressions. And the way we’ve talked about it with TikTok is — how or why aren’t these getting impressions? How do we force learnings on them? 

With the logic that TikTok has and how the algorithm pushes the ads, it’s based on an eCPM rank, so it’s your bid times your click through rate times your conversion rate, and it’ll force traffic on those winners. The rest won’t get any traffic.

We’ve definitely struggled with that, but kind of a workaround we’ve been dealing with and curious if this is kind of what you’ve been doing too. 

We would just restart with either single ad group creatives to force learnings; another workaround has been using max conversions, which is TikTok’s equivalent to Facebook’s lowest cost strategy running uncapped. But this is in beta right now too. We’ve seen some interesting things with this too, where a lot of times it doesn’t hit its daily budget cap on uncapped. So testing very different methods to try and gain learnings and then giving it a couple days — if it doesn’t see improvement, turning it off. If it is seeing improvement, then keeping it going, and then moving what’s proven. Proven creatives that have high click through rates, high conversion rates, low CPIs, good ROAS as an evergreen have been the strategy for us.

Shamanth: With regards to targeting, there are many options in TikTok. You can have interests, ad tags with something that’s unique to TikTok, or lookalikes, which is common to a lot of other major platforms. Yeah. What do you find effective among these, so you can target users? And why do you think that this is effective?

Natalie: There’s a lot of targeting options. It’s pretty similar to Facebook, the campaign structure and the ad set targeting options, but for us, we’re still in an exploratory phase where we’re mass testing every possible dimension — every possible relevant interest with a relevant ad. I think that the most unique thing about TikTok is that it has a field for what TikTok calls ad tags. 

And that’s what’s – up to 20 keywords, comma separated, and it’s required. So you have to have at least, and it’s supposed to match your ads to more relevant audiences. We haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from TikTok on what they’ve seen if the ad tags really do make much of a difference or not or the success stories with case studies that show, yeah, optimizing your ad tags makes a difference. But like I said, we’re really in an exploratory phase where we’re just testing every possible dimension, so using interest audiences with relevant ad tags with relevant ads can be helpful. 

I think

an example could be you have a game that has a new update that just went out. And it has a level that features ice cream, so you create an ad around this level, and you use an interest audience for food. Then use relevant ad tags like ice cream cone or waffle.

A lot of the organic TikTok content is challenges, so I don’t know, there’s probably an ice cream challenge out there, waffle cone challenge. 

So,

what we’ve been doing is just looking through TikTok. You can search by users, top content, hashtags. So we’ve been looking at hashtags, and it gives you a number of views for each hashtag. And so we’re finding ones with millions and billions of views and just loading them up. Anything that’s remotely relevant that has more than a million views. So far, we’ve found a win. We’ve tested a ton, probably over 20 different audiences, and so far we found one win with a relevant, like I said, doing that type of relevancy with the add interest and ad tags.

Testing is what it’s going to take to find what works and what doesn’t for your app.

Shamanth: Certainly. And a lot of the strategy that makes sense for marketers is just a function of how the user behavior within TikTok is so distinct. How is the user behavior fundamentally different in TikTok? Can you speak to that – because I think that influences most marketers’ strategy significantly.

Natalie: Yeah, I think that it’s definitely so different from anything that I’ve… I don’t know if you’ve ever used Vine, but I think a lot of people think that TikTok reminds them of Vine. But I think that the algorithm is a lot different where it’s just continuously never ending scrolling. The way that I think about it is in a three stage process of you feel like everyone’s talking about TikTok, you’re like, I’m not gonna get it, I’m not gonna get it, and then you get it. 

And then you’re like, I’m not gonna get addicted to it. I’m just doing research, and then you’re addicted. The type of content is so unique compared to what you see on Facebook and Instagram. And even now on Instagram, my Explore Page is just filled with different TikTok content. So it’s creative, funny. It’s all user-generated content. It’s so new that you can really do anything. There’s no rules as to what can go viral and what doesn’t. 

There’s this sound on TikTok that you can use that I’ve seen a ton of people doing with their content. It’s something not even that crazy that you wouldn’t think would go viral — something like a satisfying sound like someone cleaning their window. And it’s like, look, that was just 1000 views right there. It’s just so easy to go viral. 

I would definitely say again, downloading it, getting familiar with organic content because, right now, TikTok is limited to select advertisers. Building that organic presence is a huge opportunity. For the apps that we’re working with, we’re in discussions with a couple of potential prospects, and we were just looking at which competitors were out and have an account made, and they’re regularly posting. And there was one, and it only had 50 followers or something. So, there’s a lot of opportunity with the organic side. 

Even if you can’t get into advertising right now, I would say start creating a regular posting cadence on the organic side, and curating it. Not what you post on Instagram — it needs to be videos, it needs to be engaging, it needs to be something crazy. Honestly, there’s no rules of what works and what doesn’t,  so you can really think outside the box. And a lot of stuff that goes viral can get what TikTok calls a duet. So, it’s basically a reaction style split-screen where people are talking about your content, and that blows up. So coming up with duet this and create some sort of challenge around your brand. There’s just endless opportunity. And it’s pretty crazy, the stuff that does go viral, and how quickly.

Shamanth: And you’re right that it’s so easy to make something that looks viral. And it’s easy to take for granted the fact that you can add music, you can add effects, you can add overlays. I actually say to my team, oftentimes, TikTok has probably the best video editing tool out there. Even for a lot of our other platforms, we just use TikTok to add effects that look really really cool.

Natalie: Their video editor is great. 

Shamanth: Yes, totally. Speaking of creatives again, what do you find to be the elements of high performing creatives? I know that there is no formula, but are there certain ingredients, certain elements that could be contributing to performance?

Natalie: Definitely sound on. Definitely portrait videos. You can have landscape and square, but we’ve tested a couple, and we haven’t found anything that works better than portrait. So with portrait, I think our rep said too that, there’s like 7x more engagement on portrait videos, so definitely utilizing that full 9×16. It’s more native, as you’re scrolling. Definitely UGC and influencer style videos. You know,

we were starting to build an endorsement pipeline really of people to make these videos. If you can’t find anyone or you don’t have a budget to do it, just see if you have friends who are willing to do it and have them record themselves, and the TikTok video editor is super easy.

I will say the one thing with the TikTok editor is when you save the video, it saves with the TikTok logo, and it moves around in the corners. We did take that approach, and we’ve gotten flagged for it. It’s in the ad policy, you can’t use their logo. Then at that point, you will need a creative team or somebody — we’ve just put a gray bar over it on top and bottom. So that’s been a little bit of a nuance, but again, it’s helpful for just getting something out. 

I think that their best practices are at least 9 second videos, max is 60. I just noticed that they updated their best practices for short videos to be between 9 and 15 seconds. For us, we find probably an average of 25-30 seconds that works.

But, they say this too, just test different increments, find what works for you, test shorter versus longer. Something that we’ve been doing is, on creatives that have high click through rates and conversion rates, or just meet that benchmark, but don’t get a ton of spend, maybe we can’t scale them out. We’re testing trimming them at the 9 second mark, so creating different cuts of it, thumbnail testing, for sure, text copy testing — whatever works or whatever you can test to find what works. 

I think that they have a pretty intuitive creative library too. You can upload, you can create your own videos. I think all channels have their own creative editor that you can make videos from. But they have a smart music library feature where if you upload an ad, and it doesn’t have sound or you just want to test a new sound, they have a pretty big library where when you upload the video, it’s supposed to match by the pacing of the video. I’m not really exactly sure how it works, but it gives you a suggested song to use. So we’ve tested a little bit of that. A mix of showing in-app footage has been better than not showing enough footage. We’re still, again, really exploratory, so we haven’t tested a ton of videos without in-app footage. We tested some dancing ones, they didn’t really seem to pick up too much. Right now our biggest thing is building an influencer pipeline of people to make different cuts of videos, reaction videos. Just get creative with the type of content that you put out.

Shamanth: All of that definitely makes sense. Definitely I think the native influencer UGC style can definitely do well. Out of curiosity, when you say native UGC influencer content, are these influencers that are already making influencer videos, and are you taking cuts off of that? What’s the workflow typically like for you guys?

Natalie: With us, we’re not necessarily reaching out to people who are considered influencers or working with them. I think we have a mix.  Some of them are that make content for us, but

we’ve really just been reaching out to people who have funny, creative content with over 10,000 likes on a couple different videos. Basically their audition tape is their profile, so just DMing them, seeing if they’d be interested in making some content and working with you.

You know, we set up a contract to work with them, but they don’t necessarily have to be considered influencers. 

They could be just normal people who…. their content went viral, and it seems like they resonate with TikTok users. And so reaching out to them directly and just getting creative with the type of content that we’re asking for, letting people who we reach out to…. One of the girls that we’re working with, she came up with a couple of her own ideas on how to create these ads for us. Our art director and creative producer had set up an informational Zoom with her and had an outline of “Okay, here’s what’s working, we want to build more of this.” And she was like “Now, well, I have some ideas too.” And so we actually went with her ideas. We’ll be flighting that actually this week, so we’ll see how it does. 

There are really no rules right now. Fanbytes is an influencer directory, and they’ll work with you. So there are paid options, if you want more of a company to do it, or I’m sure there are other ways out there. I think before, a couple of team members had just messaged people on LinkedIn and just started building connections there. So there’s definitely a lot of options and again, if you don’t have the budget for it, you can always find somebody at the company who would be willing to do it, a friend, a relative — just start to get that type of content out there and see what starts to pick up. That’s really been our approach though.

Shamanth: I think what I hope people will take away from a lot of what you said is that they don’t need a big influencer marketing budget to be able to make TikTok videos. They can just DM people on TikTok, which is a simple, straightforward option. They could post on Craigslist, or they could just have somebody in their office do it. I think that there are ways to make these happen fairly cost effectively. And as you briefly alluded to it, oftentimes, you do have to make sure there’s a creative strategy that you have to communicate to these people. Sometimes you can get lucky, and they can come back with something far smarter than anything you would have thought of. Our experience has been that in the vast majority of cases, we do need to provide that type of guidance. But you definitely do not need a massive influencer marketing budget to make this happen.

Natalie: Like you said, even if you have a really small budget, and concerned with “Well, is this not enough?” I think start small. Find somebody with 1000 likes,  a lot of people won’t even be expecting that you’re going to be reaching out. So, they’ll be excited for any work. And then you can sort of frame it like if this starts to pick up maybe you can work, depending on how well it goes, with other apps — whatever it is. But I would say there’s just so much opportunity, like you said, DMing, they have their profiles linked. A lot of people have their Instagram linked, and then they have their emails in there. You can reach out that way, so it’s really endless opportunities. 

Shamanth: I would also point out that with a lot of the models or actors on TikTok – you find that they want to build a portfolio. We have found that they’re like, “Oh, I’ll shoot this video for you. Could I just put this up in my portfolio?” They ask that, and it means a lot for them to be able to use that. And I think for marketers, that’s helpful to keep in mind that they don’t need somebody with a million likes and followers. Somebody smaller that can make a funny, engaging cool video is perhaps enough.

Natalie: Really it’s like whatever that you can think of that you want to try. Do it. It’s really in your court to make any sort of idea come to life. And it’s so easy to connect with people, and they’ll help. Like you said, that’s a really great idea to have these people post it on their own pages on their own profiles to start building their profile. It’s a win win at that point. Definitely reaching out to people is going to be the best way to build this influencer pipeline.  

Shamanth: Natalie, I think this is so in depth, so tactical, and I thought this was so very instructive. So this is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap up. Before we do that, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and your team and everything you guys do?

Natalie: Yeah, of course. Well, thank you so much first of all to you for having me. This was great to talk through with another marketer too who’s had these challenges and pain points and successes. So this was a really great conversation. To learn more about me, I work at Incipia Mobile Marketing Consultancy, and I did write a blog post on TikTok summarizing like a case study of different findings and takeaways that we’ve learned from working with one of our apps, and that’s posted on Incipia’s website. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. And yeah, definitely look forward to connecting and learning more about other people’s TikTok experiences and other creative and marketing teams’ challenges and wins. And I think that right now, TikTok is this brand new hot topic, and it will be for a while. Especially as it opens up to more advertisers and then eventually becomes self-serve, then there’s just going to be a lot more content of what works and what doesn’t work. And I’m excited to grow this TikTok knowledge base and network that we’re starting to create within the mobile marketing industry.

Shamanth: Indeed. Thank you again, Natalie, for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Excited to put this out into the world very soon.

Natalie: Yes, me too. Thank you so much, Shamanth.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

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