The State of TikTok Ads in 2022 with Ben Lisca

[00:00:00] Jarrett Fleagle: Um, welcome to another exciting edition of the growth clinic, uh, for those of you that have never been here before, we have a lot of new faces today. So welcome. Uh, this is a community event we host every week at 12:00 PM. Eastern time. We invite invite our friends, colleagues, and partners to join.
And each week we feature an expert from our team, uh, to share insights and answer your questions on the latest and greatest digital marketing topics. And the whole goal is to help you guys grow and succeed in your business or marketing career. Um, if you guys enjoy this session, encourage you, uh, to invite your colleagues and friends, you can send ’em the registration link via the calendar invite to sign up.
[00:01:00] And if you guys have any questions about any of the tools or resources we talk about, um, on the session. We’re here. Uh, I’ll leave my, uh, email in the chat. Feel free to follow up and ask any questions we’re here to help. Um, uh, without further do just quick intro. I’m Jared Flagel. I’m the director of marketing here at web mechanics, uh, joined by our fearless leader, uh, and CEO, Chris mechanic.
Um, hello? Yep. And we have a special guest with us today, uh, who will introduce here briefly? Uh, cuz today we are talking about TikTok and specifically TikTok ads. So as you guys know, TikTok is blowing up. It is, I believe in 2021 surpassed Google in terms of overall web traffic, which is crazy to think about.
Um, so the question is how can we leverage TikTok to grow our business, to drive our marketing? Um, and TikTok is a very different platform. It’s very unique in a lot of ways. So, um, we really wanna get an expert on here that has experience with the platform or can help us leverage ads in particular to start getting, um, help us drive more business in ROI through, through this new emerging channel.
And, uh, that guest we have with us today is, [00:02:00] uh, actually an. Deep expert in paid social. He came from the affiliate marketing world. And for those of you that are familiar with the affiliate marketing world, you live or die by the performance of your dollar, right? So every dollar you put out there onto an ad channel has to deliver an ROI.
So Ben’s been through the trial by fire. He knows how to make these channels work, to deliver results. And, uh, Ben Liska is our special guest today. Joining us, our paid social manager, Ben, welcome to the
Chris Mechanic: party.
Benjamin Lisca: Glad to be here.
Jarrett Fleagle: So let’s dive right in. Let’s talk TikTok. So, um, I guess first off, why is now the best time for brands to start running TikTok ads?
Like why is now a good time to get started on a platform?
Benjamin Lisca: So as of right now, I mean, TikTok is surpassed Facebook. It’s surpassed Instagram as the most time on platform. And in 2022 they’ve they’re forecasting to, for users to spend on average 38 minutes. I mean, the biggest thing that [00:03:00] stood out to me, I was research.
I was reading a study by neuro insights, TikTok, outperforms, all other social media platforms and approach and engagement responses. So what are those approach correlates with likability and like spontaneous in the moment. Action. So an unplanned purchase, you know, filling out a form to get more information about a product.
And, uh, TikTok was shown to be 44% stronger than other social media platforms. On average in this department, the other thing that stood out was engagement, which quantifies personal relevance of the content people are shown. And mostly it correlates with memory and retention of content. So this helps us predict, like in the future, How people are gonna like future buying and decision making processes.
So people see a product on TikTok. Then they go to, you know, [00:04:00] Kmart or whatever down, you know, two weeks later and see the same product on the shelf and they decide to buy it. So in this category, TikTok was 15% stronger than other platforms. The other thing is, I mean, cheap CPMs. I mean, I saw four to $12 CPMs, you know, I’m sure it’s a little higher, you know, depending on vertical, um, So,
Chris Mechanic: and Ben, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but what does that, how does that compare to other channels?
Like how does that compare to Facebook or LinkedIn CPM wise
Benjamin Lisca: on Facebook and lead gen? I’d be, I’d be ecstatic. If I saw, you know, 15 to $25 CPMs, I’d be jumping for
Chris Mechanic: so more than double basically.
Benjamin Lisca: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In some cases it’s triple.
Chris Mechanic: So, so, so TikTok has more engaged traffic. That’s more likely to approach.
They’re spending more time on the platform and you can get in front of them for half the cost [00:05:00] basically,
Benjamin Lisca: and they’re spending more money
Chris Mechanic: and they’re spending more money. have you been on TikTok personally? Have you ever been on the platform or used.
So I have as well, but I’ve, I have to limit myself. It’s like super addictive, like going on there, it’s like hard. It’s like literally hard to get off and there. Um, so usually I go on there for work purposes only, but I definitely like, it is very, just compelling and catchy like it.
Yeah. And it looks like most of you have already been on it. So, you know, back to you.
Benjamin Lisca: So that, that also kind of feeds into why TikTok works so well. Their algorithm is super, super, super good at predicting what type of content you’ll like. So if you’re into cars, I’m into cars. So naturally I, you know, engage and watch.
One of the factors that TikTok looks at is actually whether or not you watch a video for specific hashtags to, to the end, whether you like it, what type of creators you engage? [00:06:00] and it continues to show you videos in that specific community. And they call, you know, car talk or mechanic talk, whatever the, you know, specific talk community may be.
And this also kind of allows us to hyper target, you know, hyper target ads to specific hashtags and niches as well. I mean, and because of this, we’re showing people, ads, they wanna see ads, they wanna engage with products. They, you know, might have a need for this also leads to like a 23% higher detail memory than like TV ads or E.
And I believe it was 15% higher than Google, so it’s, it just works.
Jarrett Fleagle: Wow. So it’s like sticky it like, like sticks in people’s brains, more strongly, and it gets them to. More readily, which is, which is wild. Um, so, so nuts on, uh, one actually tactical question. Um, Jack asked as, how do we [00:07:00] know what constitutes an impression on TikTok?
So for running ads, is that like a half second or something like that? Like how does TikTok
Benjamin Lisca: measure that it is a six second view. I believe that’s what they factor as an impression. Six second view.
Chris Mechanic: Interesting. Gotcha. Which is that’s higher than I think Facebook’s three second ISN.
Benjamin Lisca: Yeah, I believe so. It is three seconds actually.
Yeah. So,
so yeah, so
Jarrett Fleagle: that’s, that’s fascinating. So, so what are some things you mentioned, some things that are fundamentally different in terms of the value proposition of TikTok as like a, um, an advertiser, how is TikTok fundamentally different and are there some similarities
Benjamin Lisca: with other platforms? Yeah, I mean, there are definitely similarities.
Other platforms in terms of the ads dashboard, but as an environment, as a user environment, if Sandy Hawkins from, which was, is the head of [00:08:00] advertising for the us department TikTok, she put it best. I mean, knows people check Facebook, but they watch TikTok. So that just tells you everything. Like you check Facebook, you scroll through for however long.
But when you go on TikTok, like Chris mentioned, you’re engaged. You’re stuck to it because they’re showing you things you wanna. So that’s kind of like the, the biggest thing in terms of the environment, uh, in terms of how the ads appear, they appear the best performing ads appear more native to the platform.
You know, like let’s say it’s a product, it’s more so I’m reviewing a product or saying, Hey, I just bought this or TikTok made me buy. It is the most recent hashtag trend where people are. Reviewing products they saw on TikTok. And then as a business, you can feed off of this organic traffic and just continue to promote to hashtags that are regarding your product.
Chris Mechanic: Gotcha. [00:09:00] So real quick and sorry if I’m a little off script here, but let’s say Ben, so you know, Facebook, you know, LinkedIn, you know, other platforms, let’s say I’m an advertiser. I’m running on Facebook and LinkedIn already. I want to try TikTok. I wanna get started with TikTok. Where’s the learning curve. I know in terms of the interface, it looks almost exactly like Facebook mm-hmm where’s the big learning curve.
You.
Benjamin Lisca: The biggest learning curve I’d say is in content creation. So one of the big reasons why TikTok is such a big opportunity is that many advertisers may either not have the resources to continuously produce, you know, engaging video content. They may not be cost effective for their business. That’s the biggest learning curve.
And the biggest also kind of like the hardest thing to snap out of is that marketing, you know, digital creative mentality where you’re trying to get a nice professionally produced clean product [00:10:00] and get something that’s more user generated looking. So it looks like, you know, somebody that, you know, I went out on my iPhone to the gas station and filmed it, and that that’s what works on TikTok is something that looks like, Hey, I’m.
Joe Schmo and I’m reviewing this product and I think you should try it too, because if you like cards, you’re gonna like this wrench or whatever, you know? Yep.
Chris Mechanic: So it’s safe to say you can’t take your highly produced, like 32nd TV spot that you’re running on national TV and just run that on TikTok and hope for the best like that.
Definitely. Won’t. It’s basically like selfie videos. I know most of the ads that we’ve done have basically just been very lofi unproduced just kind of selfie videos.
Benjamin Lisca: Well, I’m always, I’m always about testing. So it, it might, you know, the general best practice though is yeah. To do like, I, I don’t wanna say unprofessional looking because if you look at the top content creators, they.[00:11:00] Work really hard and have professional skill sets to make the videos look unprofessional. You know, they sound good. They’re not grainy. They’re edited well. So, but like user generated content is what works best. And that’s been my experience. One of. and I know we’ll touch on this a little bit later on as well, but one of my top performing creative, when I ran a lot of traffic in the auto insurance vertical, we were touching on the extremely high prices of gas and the angle was, Hey, we’re helping people save money on car insurances on car insurance services.
And then in turn, they’re getting free gas cuz they’re using those savings to pay for gas. So our top creative was we walked up to people, random people at the gas station. Handed them $20 and told them, Hey, we saved so much money on our Gar on our car insurance that we’re paying for your gas and then had them sign a consent form and, you know, film a little like snippet, Hey, they paid for our gas today or something like that.
[00:12:00] I forgot exactly what it was. That
Chris Mechanic: is so clever. I imagine that pulled like crazy.
Benjamin Lisca: It did. It performed really, really well. And the other thing that you have to consider for TikTok is the fact that. TikTok works on con on constant new content and stuff, going viral, new trends, going viral, new content going viral.
And if you’re shown the same TikTok over and over, you don’t wanna see it. You know, people don’t wanna see it. That’s a part of the big reason why, you know, some Facebook, the sentiment toward Facebook ads. Not as good cause people are seeing the same scam ad all the time. And they’re like, well, this is a scam.
Why doesn’t Facebook ever take these down? You know, stuff like that. So that leads me into my next point. In order to succeed on TikTok, you constantly have to like upload fresh creative. And, uh, part of that is because there’s such a [00:13:00] thing called AI creative fatigue. So it’s when TikTok AI is seen an ad so often that it kind of like, doesn’t give it as good of a placement in their feed.
So it doesn’t show it to the users most likely to, to engage with it. After a while, I, I don’t want to set a hard date on it cause it varies. So one easy way to remedy this is take that same core video that. Was working and add, you know, viral trends to the beginning of it. So one of the biggest trends that for lead generation has been what’s one website you’ve seen that sounds like it should be illegal to know, but isn’t, and then you just take your video where we talked about how, you know, we paid for somebody’s gas using the savings, and we just put an intro of a creator saying, Hey, here’s one website that, you know, should be illegal, but isn’t, and then you run that.
TikTok AI sees that as a fresh creative it’s [00:14:00] metadata is all different and it just, it, AI picks up different words in it and it just sees it as a fresh creative
Chris Mechanic: now, Ben, um, and I’m sorry, I’m like derailing way off script here, but I wasn’t a believer really in, uh, with TikTok until probably probably around the time that you started here.
Ben probably like a, you know, a year or so ago when you told me the story of. Uh, car insurance and you were pulling long form leads, meaning like many fields S uh, including 17 page 17 page form, including a vehicle identification number in the auto insurance niche, uh, and or vertical. And what, what was your CPA or your cost per lead on that?
Benjamin Lisca: So just a little correction on that. It was automatically pulling the vehicles based on the user’s address. And then users were selecting the address, and I think it was. Have to check a six in between a six to $8 cost per [00:15:00] completed form.
Chris Mechanic: So I was like, oh my goodness. Like you might get a six to $8 cost per cost per lead on Facebook on like a lead ad, but on a 17 page form.
And then he showed me the creative and I was like, whoa, like this is a new world. So at some point, like I wanna get to the rest of jar’s questions and I wanna take some questions for the audience, but I would love to show everybody here, like an example of one of those creative pieces, cuz that was kind of like the aha moment for me.
And I was like, we could do that. Like we could walk up to someone in the gas station. Why not?
Benjamin Lisca: Right. It. It’s literally as simple as that it’s as creative as you can get, you know, and the better. And, uh, the other thing, you know, you have to, I, I would say one of the biggest things for success on TikTok is you kind of have to be an avid TikTok user because that way you can get a better feel of what’s trending.
What sounds are working, you know, and especially if you engage [00:16:00] with a lot of content in your specific vertical, then you can start to see what hashtags are working. What sounds are being shown in that vertical. I would almost go as far as saying, if you have a separate account just for your business and just engage with only things related to your business and in that vertical.
So you only get shown videos for that vertical.
Chris Mechanic: So a real quick reminder, if anybody has any burning questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. Yep. Danielle wants to see the creative. I wanna see it too again. Um, so we can definitely do that at some point, uh, but feel free to drop your, any, any specific questions you’ve got in the chat and we’ll do our best to get to ’em here, um, including the creative, uh, which do you have that handy bin or I think I have it saved.
I could pull it up real
Benjamin Lisca: quick. Uh, Or do you not wanna show it? Oh, I don’t care.
[00:17:00] Um, I’m looking for it. I have it somewhere. I have something similar if that works. Sure.
Chris Mechanic: Yeah.
Jarrett Fleagle: Yeah. While we’re pulling that up, learn as a question about average video time suggestion for the ads. Like how long should they be?
Benjamin Lisca: So TikTok recommends between what was it? 24. And gimme one second. I have the exact data here in my notes.
It’s, uh, TikTok recommends between 21 and 34 seconds. Personally. I’ve tested that and found four lead generation, depending, you know, 45 seconds has worked best for me. So it’s not that far off. Like, like, you know, it’s one of those things that you should always be testing, you know, just test shorter videos, longer videos run ’em in a one to one test and see, see what happens.
See what your audience likes.
Chris Mechanic: So I do have one of your ads pulled up here.
Benjamin Lisca: What’s a crazy hack. You have found that has saved you money. Okay. Check this out. I’m gonna show you how I afforded this car. Okay. [00:18:00] All right. You guys ready? Car insurance? $118. That’s what I was paying. Yes. I, I picked up the car a few months ago and washed this ready. $97 premium. My fees were $20. Okay.
$118. And I cover up my private information guys. $39, $118, $500 for comprehensive 500 for collision. 500 comprehensive, 500 for collision. Right. You see there’s the exact same model. The Hyundai ionic Hyundai. It’s the same policy, $118 to $39. As you can see, I have full coverage. I have a premium policy. I love my coverage and I love my insurance company, but I was paying a lot and I didn’t even realize it.
Scroll down, you go to yours, take two minutes, guys. It’s free. Stop overpaying. Fill this out.
So yeah. One thing, if you notice the biggest thing is the language, [00:19:00] you know, that’s being used in the video. It’s not super prof, uh, you know, professional, it’s not super polished. It’s kind of like how I would be talking, you know, to a good friend of mine. Like, Hey, you all need to check this out right now.
You know? So that’s kind of what I mean by looking unprofessional, but the production quality of the video was actually pretty good.
Chris Mechanic: Yep. I also noticed in that ad and the other one, you did a couple of things. There was a small bit of education. Like it was like, Hey, here’s the type of policy, like, see this as a deduct, you know, it’s like a small bit of education, but it also, and I think this is important is it shows the landing page.
So that’s like a sent trail type of a thing. So the extent to which your ad can kind of set expectations and look similar to that, to what the landing page would look. And I noticed in Ben like the various ads that you had sent me, like, there’s always some portion where it’s like, guys, like look here and you’re showing the actual landing page experience, which I imagine has to contribute to probably pretty [00:20:00] dramatic, dramatically high conversion rates.
Cause I’ve already been there. I’ve already seen it. I know
Benjamin Lisca: what to expect. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, one of the biggest things in a lot of these ads, if you notice, especially for products like insurance, insurance products and stuff, people wanna save money. If they can, they wanna, they want to like. Not miss out on things.
So if everybody else is doing it, they wanna do it too. I mean, that’s the biggest thing. And they also, if people feel like they know something that not a lot of other people know, or they’re in the know on something that also gets people to engage really well. So to answer your question, uh, I’m not sure what the product is, but if you can do something like that, then you can probably increase your engagement rate significantly.
Love it.
Jarrett Fleagle: So hands on keyboard, like, like say I wanna get started. Like I wanna run a campaign, I guess before we talk about like ad formats and things like that, what are some things I should do before setting a
Benjamin Lisca: campaign [00:21:00] up? Uh, I get the pixel set up and integrated into your website or e-commerce platform, whatever it is that you use.
That’s number one thing. Start collecting as much data as you can prior to sending any. Any, any, you know, traffic from TikTok then I would also, honestly, like I said, spend some time scrolling through, see what works, get an idea. I would also play with the creative center and So if you check out the creative center, I mean, you can do a bunch of things. One of the biggest thing is you can sort by country and look, you know, for whatever demographic you’re targeting, you can sort by industry as well as campaign ejected, uh, objectives. You can like separate between conversion or app installs or just generic reach campaigns.
And then you can also. You know, [00:22:00] sort by click through rate. So you can find the highest click through rate ads and the view rate. So if you don’t know what to run, you can sort by your industry and just get a general idea of what’s working for your competitors. And at least have a jumping off point. And the biggest thing in terms of engagement, you can look at six second view rate, cuz if people are watching six seconds, TikTok will count that as.
An impression, dude. I wish Facebook had this.
Chris Mechanic: It’s amazing. It’s like a built in spy
Benjamin Lisca: tool. Yeah. Facebook has it. It just doesn’t work very well because it’s Facebook. Yeah, that’s good.
Chris Mechanic: Sand’s not there anymore, Pete. So very important question for you, Ben, how long do you think until TikTok hires? Cheryl Sandberg.
Benjamin Lisca: If I had to give an over hunger, I’m just kidding.
Chris Mechanic: Uh,
Benjamin Lisca: [00:23:00] and then there’s another tool where you can actually see the top trending. Uh, you can see like the trending hashtags. So if you, one second, let me see if you guys can see this. I don’t know if you have to have a TikTok account. Okay. A TikTok account to explore it or not, but it’s called kind of like their inspiration center.
If you scroll down, uh, Jarret. A little bit more and, and hit explore now.
So you can actually look based on what hashtags are trending in a specific industry. You can look at what songs are trending, what creators are trending, and the reason why, what creators are trending. Is important for your specific industries, because you can find popular [00:24:00] creators in your industry. And then through tos, uh, creative market or creator marketplace, you can actually reach out to these specific content creators and have them produce videos for you for, you know, they set their price or whatever their fee is.
And you can find, you know, a creator that fits your brand’s look and feel and go from there.
Wow. So
Jarrett Fleagle: they’ve got like an influencer marketing platform baked into their app. That’s well,
Benjamin Lisca: that is so cool.
Chris Mechanic: That is definitely useful. I didn’t know about that. Yeah.
Jarrett Fleagle: So once I’ve. So I got
Chris Mechanic: Chris, is there a rule of thumb bend for the going rate? Like how much does it cost to hire somebody with a million followers or 10 million? Or is it just like all over the board?
Benjamin Lisca: I mean, it’s whatever that person thinks they’re worth.
I would imagine, you know, it’s, I can’t say that there’s a [00:25:00] set, like average as to what they, you know, as to. The going rate would be obviously the more followers, the more people are gonna charge.
Yeah. So even if you, and then the hashtag piece is very important because it gives you the top hashtags, you can see the analytics and how this correlates to face, uh, to TikTok ads is that you can actually target specific, specific hashtags, TikTok, and it’ll show. Only two users that have engaged with that specific hashtag over a certain amount of time.
Wow. This is a
Chris Mechanic: really useful and insightful like market research tool. Yeah.
Benjamin Lisca: Yeah.
Jarrett Fleagle: So [00:26:00] once I’ve done my homework, um, got my pixel installed, um, figure out which creatives are
Chris Mechanic: working,
Jarrett Fleagle: what options do I have for, for ads? Like what are my different
Benjamin Lisca: ad formats from TikTok? Yeah. So TikTok actually has seven or so different ad formats. Uh, It’s falls under the three, like primary categories like Facebook.
I mean, it falls under, I believe it’s awareness, consideration conversions. And once you explore, I don’t know if, how much experience you guys have within tox ads dashboard, but it really, really, all the languaging feels like Facebook circa last year. I mean, they basically copied it almost word for word
Uh, The seven ad objectives fall onto three categories, awareness where the only like objective is reach. So you’re gonna try to show your ads as many people as you can for your budget. It falls [00:27:00] under consideration. Then the next category is consideration where the first ad objective is traffic, where you’re trying to drive as many people to a specific website link that you choose for your budget.
The next is app installs, which you’re trying to. Yet as many app installs as you can for your budget, which I think TikTok will be releasing like a, sort of a value based app install, kind of like how Facebook has, where you can optimize for the customer value after they’ve downloaded the app, uh, you can optimize by video of you.
So what percentage, you know, get people to watch your video and then you can create retargeting audiences based on percentage or time watched and then lead generation, which. Almost identical to Facebook lead forms. And I believe you can also have it like LinkedIn have it, where it prepopulates the user’s profile, email address into the form.
So it makes it even easier to collect that information. [00:28:00] Gotcha. And then finally you have conversions where, you know, you have your standard conversions campaign where you would optimize for a specific event, whether it’s completed form or purchased. And then you can do catalog ads, which is basically identical to Facebook’s catalog ads, where you show people a number of items from your catalog dynamically, and then they can click or they can choose whichever they’d like to more information on.
Jarrett Fleagle: Gotcha. Makes sense. And how do I target these ads? I know there are hashtags, but how does that work in, in
Benjamin Lisca: TikTok? So you have a number of different targeting options within TikTok. You can actually do. Matched audiences. So custom audiences like you would in Facebook, you can do lookalikes based off of those custom audiences.
You can also do what they call automatic targeting, where TikTok kind of decides where what’s best. [00:29:00] And part of me, I’ve never really tried it because I have no faith in, you know, them knowing my consumer better than I do. Uh, but part of me almost feels like maybe it’s worth the test because TikTok is so good at showing, you know, specific videos to people that they’re interested in.
Maybe it might work extremely well. It’s worth testing. Uh, you can also target based on interest and behavior, so you can target based on how much time they spend on platform. You. Test, you know, or you can, uh, target based on what if they have interest in like tech e-commerce, whether they’re engaged shoppers, whether they have interest in financial services and then within the financial services, you can further drill down.
You can do like securities insurances, credit bureaus, but the two biggest things that I like is you can actually target people. So, if they’ve [00:30:00] interacted, let’s say you can select categories of videos they’ve interacted with. So if they’ve interacted with video with finance videos and watched it till the end for the last 15 or 17 days, you can target these people and same way with the, with the creators.
So if you go back to your, you know, the top creators thing, you can find the list of the most engaged with creator. in your vertical and target people who have actually watched videos in the last seven days. So it’s fresh on their mind. Wow. Wow. And, and then further, you know, drill down with some hashtags, you know, to, if you let’s say you want to target people with debt and then you want to target, you know, you would, uh, target people who are, you know, in the financial service have watched and interacted videos in the financial services.
Category then you could target by like unsecured debt and further drill down to like your ideal customer. [00:31:00] Yeah. And then of course you have the standard, you know, operating system, you know, targeting where you can split out iOS and Android. Uh, the one thing worth noting in terms of campaign structure, and this is kind of a TikTok best practice and I’ve always adhered to it and it’s worked well for me in the past is separating out your iOS 14.5 plus campaigns into their own campaign level.
Campaign. So that’s what I would do. Traditionally. I always run CBO. Like it’s just worked way better in the last year, compared to when compared to asset budgets, I’ll run lowest cost. Unless I notice that. My costs just like shoot up significantly over the couple days, in which case I might pause it and launch a manual bid campaign to try to like bully my competitors out and make them spend more money than [00:32:00] they want to, to kind of like back off.
But that’s obviously dependent on client budget and. Whether or not it we can afford to spend, you know, that increased cost for a couple days to bully people
Chris Mechanic: out. That’s funny, bullying them out of the auction. I am curious. So, so it sounds like, so I guess what’s, what’s your playbook in terms of, uh, targeting, like, let’s just say a lead gen, like the lead gen objective, are you always using the lead gen objective or do you like start broad with awareness and then build an audience and retarget? Like, is there, is there a go playbook that you have in terms of, in terms of targeting?
Oh,
Benjamin Lisca: that depends on. The vertical, the, you know, the client’s goals. My, if it’s a new account, a new TikTok account or a new TikTok pixel, I should say, if it’s a new TikTok pixel, traditionally I’ll want to start a campaign with that’s more targeted and [00:33:00] hyper focused on my ideal consumer to try to get, you know, that initial data, I would say TikTok recommends 50 conversions.
I like to get at least a hundred conversions if possible, on the pixel of my, you know, as close to my ideal consumer as possible. And after that, you know, obviously the more targeting you layer on the more expensive traffic gets, uh, after that, after that initial like learning period, I want to call it, uh, you can switch over to broad targeting and TikTok will do actually a pretty good, pretty, pretty good job of.
Getting your consumer. The only targeting I would do on broad is age. You know, if I wanna drill down to a 25, you know, 25 and up, I would target by age, I would leave gender, everything, you know, let TikTok decide. I mean, it’s TikTok is 60% female, so you’re gonna, you know, naturally get a higher female than male.[00:34:00] It’s interesting, but now,
Chris Mechanic: um, talk to me about lead quality. So I have a buddy named G uh, he’s a French guy and founder of lend list, which is an email platform and he uses TikTok for recruiting. So he like did a video where he was kind of in this mansion. And it was just kind of like a catchy video where he like pointed up and it was like saying the benefits of working there.
So he says he. Thousands of applications like thousands and the cost per application was like 50 cents or something. Um, but, but he said most of ’em were just junk. He, they like, he found several good ones and I think made some hires, but he had to like wave through a bunch of junk. Like, do you find that the lead quality, obviously it won’t be like Google search, but is it comparable with Facebook or like, like what are you see in lead quality
Benjamin Lisca: wise?
I would veer to say that it it’s as good as Facebook, if not better, a big portion of [00:35:00] what factors lead quality is your value proposition and creative. I mean, if you’re making a creative that, you know, you’re telling people, if they sign up for this website, they’re gonna get, you know, a check in the mail that gives them free money from the government or whatever.
Obviously your leak quality is gonna be junk, but if you accurately describe your. Product and give like a truthful review, then chances are the lead. Quality’s gonna be pretty, pretty good. And I mean, obviously it’ll get better as the pixel gathers more data. And as time goes on that lead quality will also improve.
But I mean, 50 cent leads and just tons of junk. And it sounds like either a creative problem. They weren’t optimizing for, they were maybe optimizing for like a, what’s the word I’m looking for for like a lower objective, like a traffic or lead generation objective, because even Facebook lead ads, I don’t know if [00:36:00] you guys have any experience with Facebook lead ads when they initially came out, you couldn’t fire, you know, you couldn’t fire an.
Based on how that user acted down funnel. So BA Facebook would just try to get you as many cheap leads as possible for your budget. And then most of them would be junk, you know? Yeah. So if you optimize for like a completed registration and have a form, you know, like a thorough form that asks qualifying questions and then score the lead and pass that back to, to TikTok, then your quality will be higher.
I. It’s the platform’s not inherently bad. It’s mostly set up and creative a lot of the times I find great.
Chris Mechanic: Makes sense. So I know probably a lot of people on this call are some people are wondering. They’re thinking about trying TikTok. Maybe they haven’t tried it yet, but they may be wondering like, Hey, will this work for my business?
Right? Because TikTok generally skews [00:37:00] younger, you know, it’s kind of, uh, it’s an up and coming platform. So, so what would you say, like
Benjamin Lisca: if you, I just wanted to excuse younger, but I was actually extremely surprised as to how. How the demographic is getting significantly older. I mean, I believe com score reported 38% of users as being 30 plus in my traffic.
I actually saw 41% of my users on a broad targeted campaign being 30 plus. Wow. So I just found that. Interesting. So if you
Chris Mechanic: could fill in the blank, like if your business is blank or blank, you absolutely gotta get on TikTok like today, if it’s blank or blank. Think about it, add it to the roadmap, but if it’s blank or blank, like it’s probably not for you.
Benjamin Lisca: So off the top of my head, I can’t think of any business that I wouldn’t run on TikTok unless it’s like expressly [00:38:00] prohibited by TikTok, which I think certain, I think payday loans and certain stuff like that is prohibited, which you can’t run on TikTok for very long. You’ll get banned. Uh, If you run eCommerce, definitely you need to be on their lead generation.
Definitely need to be on there for B2B, any B2B related product. You should also have a presence, but you’re gonna have to think of it as more so like an education and awareness platform, as opposed to a bottom of funnel. So you would, you know, obviously be collecting engagers and then retargeting them, retargeting them, uh, you know, via other means.
The, yeah. I mean, I, e-commerce definitely like if you have an e-commerce website and you’re not running, or if you don’t at least have a presence, organic presence on TikTok, then you’re missing out. So eCommerce,
Chris Mechanic: definitely B to C lead generation, [00:39:00] absolutely. B to B. It might be iffy. Like I could see maybe if you’re, you know, some, like if you offer, like, if you’re an accountant, for instance, would you consider TikTok like say you’re a CPA or an accounting firm?
Professional service. Yes, I would.
Benjamin Lisca: Yeah, I would. Yeah. I mean, so you can also hyper target just by, based on DMA and zip code. So target only people in your region that you service and go from there, you know, just do a video. Hey, and I would take an educational approach to that. Like what is that tax law that if you own your own LLC, you know, you can actually.
And you work from home. You can actually rent a portion of your house to your business for 14 days out of the year and write that off, you know, for whatever market rate is on the rent. So you do a video like that and then say, Hey, if you want more tax tips like this, subscribe to my newsletter and then collect a lead form, opt in and start just remarketing them like that.[00:40:00] And then eventually sell ’em. Hey, come try us out today and go from there and see what your rate is there. I mean, I would do accountant. I would even say recruiting. I mean, lately I’ve been seeing DoorDash has been doing a really, really big, big recruiting campaign to find drivers. I mean, I have to say, I see at least 10 door dash ads a day, and I don’t spend that much time on TikTok ads on TikTok, like scroll maybe in 30 minutes a day.
So they’re pushing it big right now. So it must be working. Interesting.
Jarrett Fleagle: Lauren has a question. Um, has anyone run into any security issues or scams on the platform and is it safe to provide credit card info for paid ads?
Benjamin Lisca: So. Their platform is extremely buggy. It’s gotten a little better. I’ve had no. So are you talking about actually inputting your credit card into the platform and having it be [00:41:00] leaked or something like that?
I just wanna understand the question a little better.
Yeah, cause, um, to pay for ads. Oh yeah. So, no, we haven’t had any issues. Uh, whenever we ran as affiliates, we. Obviously we wouldn’t use like our primary, primary, uh, business card. We would use a service called trade shift, go it’s powered by, uh, Amex. And what that allows you to do is you can actually put a MasterCard on file and then generate VCCS with unique vis.
So you could theoretically run an infinite number of accounts, and that also protects you because you can shut down the card at any time. So. Long story short, you can also pay with the VCC. If that makes, you know, if it gives you that extra level of comfort that, you know, you can always shut it off to prevent charges.
If your account ever gets hacked, we’ve never had an issue though. [00:42:00] We’ve actually had Facebook accounts be hijacked, but never TikTok.
Interesting
Chris Mechanic: now in terms of regulation and ad approval, being that it’s all video content, it would seem like an even more difficult challenge than Facebook is having in terms of ad approval. But after the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, Facebook just got like super strict on approvals and they would disapprove everything how’s TikTok on, on approval.
Benjamin Lisca: Significantly better. I mean, uh, so Facebook does most of their initial ad reviews via AI. So, you know, AI is good, but it’s not perfect. So even if it flags certain elements of a video that might possibly match a video that was run a band ad account, you know, It’ll ban you, even if it’s not the same video.
And I mean, Facebook also has that celebrity policy, which [00:43:00] it does a good job of detecting celebrities. And we figured out that their AI does that via the eyes. You know? So if you cover up the eyes on a celebrity, you could actually sneak ads through with celebrities in them. Uh, so we’d be Photoshopping, sunglasses and stuff, and all sorts of crazy stuff.
TikTok is better than that. Like, you can’t get away with that stuff, but if you follow their policy, They’re actually pretty, pretty lenient and they’re fast too lightning fast. So I think it’s AI as well. There’s no way that, you know, they would be able to approve ads that fast on TikTok if it wasn’t AI based.
Yeah.
Jarrett Fleagle: Are there any like upcoming features that we should know about? Like what are some, um, down the pike
Benjamin Lisca: roadmap as teachers. Yeah, I’ve been kind of hearing, you know, from a few people, actually, I haven’t confirmed from a TikTok rep, but I’ve heard that they launched a beta for select partners, you know, managed partners.
I’m assuming of [00:44:00] search ads. So search ads, native within TikTok platform. And I mean, I’m excited. This is big because if you can target on specific search terms, you now have intent and interest. So this automatically goes from like a middle of funnel, you know, Hey, I’m just kind of exploring, I want more information to I’m ready to buy this cause I’m searching it.
And I want more information. Give it to me now. So. I can’t wait for that to come
Chris Mechanic: out. Wow. That is exciting. Yeah. And Melissa Castro commented earlier that she uses TikTok as Yelp slash Google search already. Yep. So that’s, that’s really
Benjamin Lisca: interesting. Yeah. And I mean, I’m guilty. I’m, you know, the ideal marketing consumer, I bought a bunch of random stuff off of that I’ve seen on TikTok and I’m like, this looks cool and they’ve TikTok like reviews and have never steered me wrong so I can.
See why a lot of people would feel that way.
Chris Mechanic: Brilliant. Well, Ben, [00:45:00] you are amazing, man. I’m so happy to have you, uh, not just cuz you know, TikTok, but I just love the way you think, you know, like with your affiliate background, I think it makes you really kind of feisty and scrappy, but then you also just have this great business acumen. So props to you.
Thank you. Uh, for coming here today, I would love to just hang out with you for a whole day and watch over your shoulder as you’re just like killing these ad accounts. Um, yeah. If, if any of you guys would like to hang out with, uh, with Ben Moore or if you want. Some advice or an approach on getting started with TikTok.
If you want some ad concept ideas or things like that, like Ben was just saying right off the top of his head, just this fire, Hey, if you’re an accountant, like talk about this, you know, potential loophole. Um, so we can definitely hook you up. We’re here for you. We want to help. You can, uh, get in touch with us.
I appreciate everybody coming out here today. Uh, we do have probably about five or 10 more minutes. If you guys wanna stick around, we can, we can [00:46:00] continue talking. Yep. Uh, we do this every week on Wednesdays at noon, Easter, just O PM. Yep. So, uh, and we’ll be doing different topics. We’re open to topic ideas, if there’s any, anything that you guys want us to cover, but, uh, but it’s fun time.
So we hope to see you guys back, let your colleagues know, and we. See around looks. Oh, we got a bunch of new messages coming. Yeah. And, uh,
Jarrett Fleagle: Melissa actually had a question in terms of content creation. Do you find using the stitch or duet tool helps
Chris Mechanic: engagement?
Benjamin Lisca: Yes, it does. And I’ve actually been noodling around the few ideas in my head to like utilize this even more.
The biggest thing is there’s been a trend going on lately where it’s like, what’s now that you no longer work for this company, what’s one secret. You can. So like dueting that and then sharing like, Hey, use our pro use this, you know, auto insurance service. Now that I, now that I no longer work for company X, use this service and save this and this on the form and you can save X amount of [00:47:00] money, you know?
So doing something like that. And that’s one of, with the like stitch tool and. The other idea I’ve had is a lot of times you’ll get, if you allow user comments on your ads, you’ll get negative like comments. So what, especially like in a B2B scenario, let’s use a marketing agency as, you know, a case. Let’s say somebody asks a question.
You can actually make a video that directly responds to that question and run that as an ad. If it’s a common question. So like kind of stitch it where it shows the comment in like a little chat box and the video. I know you guys have seen that. I forgot what it’s called. Exactly. Yeah.
Chris Mechanic: So I’m sorry.
Rewind for me. What is the Stitcher duet tool? Exactly.
Benjamin Lisca: So stitch is like, let’s say you start a trend where it’s like the share, what one thing, you know, that sounds like it should be like the creative you showed earlier. Then you splice in a video where it’s like, Hey, I’m user responding to this, to this like challenge.
That’s a [00:48:00] stitch duet is where like somebody shares an opinion and then it’s like a picture and picture like a split screen, two where you’re responding to this person’s opinion.
Chris Mechanic: Ah, interesting. And that’s an. You can run those as ads or
Benjamin Lisca: just organic they’re video styles, but you can kind of like stylize your, your ad creative to look kind of like that.
And that add one more, like step into looking more native and organic. If you notice the best ads on TikTok, don’t look like ads. Like you you’ll sit there and watch them for like a good, you know, 20 seconds before you even see the sponsor and realize it’s an ad. Cause I know I’ve done it. And the, that that would definitely help engagement and it has for me, so.
Chris Mechanic: That’s awesome. Yeah. Ads that don’t look like ads seem to be a trend that aren’t going away, useful ads, engaging ads. And it would seem that there’s not a [00:49:00] ton of, uh, learning curve for anyone that knows Facebook or, you know, paid social in general in terms of the platform itself. But it would seem a good time to invest in the content capabilities to create set ads.
Cuz it sounds like you need to create them at a fairly high velocity. How long does it take for an ad to burn out usually? Like, is it like a day, a week, a month? Obviously it depends on spend and such, but what’s your rule of thumb where you expect an ad
Benjamin Lisca: to start burning out? I generally look at indicators like when, you know, when CTR starts to drop and cost per cost, per whatever you’re optimizing for goes up.
Uh, generally, it’s not so much that, you know, it’s not so much like actual banner blindness that causes ad fatigue in my experience, it’s more, like I mentioned earlier, AI ad fatigue where tos, [00:50:00] AI just gets tired. Like, Hey, you need new content. Like this is boring now, you know, like they’re they’re and not to say that it’s boring, but you know, I would say.
A good strategy, maybe have four or five different creatives to start out and then rotate every 10 days, obviously, you know, based on performance, then there’s other things that you can do to make the video look new in tos eyes. You know, you can add different intros to the video, different books and to get people to engage with.
Or you can even. Add like a sound like a subtle musical track over it. And that kind of, uh, models it in such a way that it looks different in tos AI’s eyes when they scan and analyze that video. So there’s little ways where you can extend the life of, but I would say on a big budget, anything, $1,500 a day, or over rotate creatives, every 10 days you can reuse the same creatives, you know, [00:51:00] Just don’t, you know, you can’t expect to run the same creative for, you know, three months on end, like you would for, with Facebook because TikTok will prioritize new content.
Chris Mechanic: Interesting. So it’s not so much about engaging people as it is engaging the
Benjamin Lisca: robots. Yes. I mean, you know, there’s engaging the robots in terms of placement and deliverability. Yes. But you know, in terms of performance, you obviously wanna people. Right, right. Robots. Don’t
Chris Mechanic: fascinating. All right. Well, I think I’m gonna go download the TikTok app again. I’m gonna put on my blue light glasses, just so I don’t make . Uh, there you go. But this is really fascinating. Um, uh,
Jarrett Fleagle: Casey has a question. Um, do you send, uh, calendar invites or emails each? Oh, yes. So for the growth clinic, um, yeah, uh, there’s a, you can.
Uh, once you’ve [00:52:00] registered, you can add it, uh, as a calendar event through the registration link. Um, or I can just manually add you to, we have an ongoing, uh, calendar event every week. Um, but yeah, and then you’ll be on, uh, the sessions to
Chris Mechanic: come. Yep. Yeah. And if you want, just drop your email in the chat here and we’ll make sure that you get on the list.
Jarrett Fleagle: Yep. And if you guys have any questions, I’m dropping my email on the check here. Now feel free to hit me up and we will get you taken care of.
Benjamin Lisca: I had, uh, one final thought to add before everything. Uh, geez.
Chris Mechanic: I’ll sit here and listen to you. As long as you want to go to
Benjamin Lisca: same. I don’t have much experience with it, but I’ve been noodling a lot with it. It spark ads. So. Basically, what this allows you to do is if you find the creator that you like in your specific vertical, and they have a post or they post, let’s say you reach an agreement with them to make an ad, and they post it to their organic post, to their organic, like, uh, actual TikTok [00:53:00] creator profile, you can actually, within the platform, reach an agreement with them to.
Let me boost your post as my ad. So it looks like it’s coming, you know, let’s say web mechanics is TikTok. And we post for a client. Let’s say we can make it look like the ad is coming from our profile. So it’s not look, it looks even less like an ad. It just has a very little sponsored, but it looks like it’s coming from the creator’s profile.
So that adds in that extra layer of making it look organic and making it look like, Hey, this isn’t an ad. It’s just me telling you about something I found out. Wow.
Chris Mechanic: So is that almost like a way to license other people’s content in a way
Benjamin Lisca: it’s. Yes. And no, it’s more so licensing the use of their like name and likeness, you know?
So cuz you’re, it looks like it’s coming from their profile and it looks like they actually, you know, they’re promoting the ad and said you’re paying for the ads on the backup.
Chris Mechanic: Interesting. And [00:54:00] those are called spark spark ads. Spark
Benjamin Lisca: ads. Yeah. They’re relatively new. I wanna say last eight months or so.
Chris Mechanic: Interesting. And how are, how do you pay for them?
Benjamin Lisca: You would pay for them like you would any other ad, I mean, you’re not, you’re reaching through the creator marketplace. You can contact these creators and reach an agreement to their, through their, you know, usually it’s. Usually it’s people who have created content for you through the creator marketplace, you can ask them, Hey, can I use, you know, promote this as it were through your page.
So that’s how it works. Interesting.
Chris Mechanic: Interesting. Interesting. Cool. Well, I think I’m in the wrong business. I’m gonna hear by retire from web mechanics and become a TikTok creator. All see, just kidding.
Benjamin Lisca: Yeah. Right. so they’re actually offering a $5,000 incentive. If you have a following [00:55:00] another channels and you can become a.
Really, there you go. They’re they’re bribing people to grow their creator base. Wow.
Chris Mechanic: Fascinating. All right. Well, any other closing thoughts or last, last moment questions here. We’ve got about one minute here.
Jarrett Fleagle: And you can catch the recordings. Um, I just dropped the link to our YouTube channel. If you subscribe there, we usually post them one to two days after. Um, so you can catch those all there. And folks who drop their email, I’d add you to the invite. So you should be, uh, good to go for next week.
Chris Mechanic: Yeah, we should talk about YouTube sometime too.
That’s a, that’s a big opportunity. Oh, All right. Y’all well, much love. Thank you for your time here today. We look forward to hopefully seeing you again next week or hearing from you. Otherwise we’re here for you. Just give us a shout. See you seeing rock stars. Thank you, Ben. This was amazing. Thank you.
Appreciate you fun. [00:56:00] All right, cool. We’ll see you guys next week. Take care.
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