The essential guide to TikTok Ads for subscription apps

Known as the digital advertising solution from ByteDance, TikTok Ads is the ad infrastructure advertisers use outside of China. With its vast reach and dominance in the market, it’s a key player in the mobile industry for apps and games to expand their user base.

What’s under the hood

Reach

In nine months, TikTok could achieve what Meta achieved in 4.6 years: reach its first 100M monthly active users (MAUs). Since its foundation in 2016, the platform has experienced exponential growth, reaching 1.6B MAUs. This reach expands globally and across both OSs, providing a massive opportunity for app developers to find new ways to monetize their products.

TikTok’s region distribution as mobile inventory covers six, with almost 100M users each. This means the chance of hitting channel saturation and their expanding user base makes TikTok a must-try when launching your user acquisition campaigns.

However, users are not the most important metric here. As app developers, we survive based on revenue, and this is the best evidence that shows how attractive TikTok users can be:

• The highest average time spent per day
• +75% of users are above 24 years old
• +1B of its users are adults that have purchase power (in correlation with region)
• The US is by far the most attractive country in terms of revenue generation and reach
• Highest social media engagement rate per post at 4.25%
• With over 150M new users worldwide every quarter, the opportunity to find the right audience becomes accessible

Audience

Uncovering some of the myths behind TikTok Ads audience structure:

1. The myth that TikTok was only for teenagers was overthrown long ago. Endless apps achieved a substantial growth lever with TikTok across all the available categories on the App Store. Nonetheless, the younger generation tends to be unprofitable most of the time. It’s up to the developer to identify this and block this cohort. So keep an eye on it.
2. B2B apps have also invested heavily in TikTok, specifically apps (e.g. PDF scanners, Invoice Generators, VPNs, GPT replicas, and many more) from the utilities and productivity categories. The myth that it was only for B2C also came to an end.
3. For indie/small developers, targeting their audience at a reasonable price is a great option, especially in developed nations where Instagram lacks penetration, like the UAE, Indonesia, or Brazil.

Platform

Depending on the size of the app you are working with, there are two different ways to start running ads on TikTok.

1. Small/medium apps (on average, apps that generate less than 200k/mo) will follow a standard process through the official website.
2. For big apps with a vast MRR, TikTok may have you on their radar, and they will contact you (or you can even try reaching out to any partnerships/salespersons through LinkedIn) to set up the account for you.

After you create the business center, you must check these tasks:

• Add members
• Create an ad account (use one for both OS)
• Add the payment details
• Connect your apps
• Connect the TikTok account of the apps you own (optional)

Over the last two years, the platform has received several updates and deployed new features at a pace never seen before compared to Google or Meta. If you are new to it, prepare to adapt and discover the new functionalities TikTok offers advertisers. 

The truth is that most of them are useless “AI” recommendations, like,

However, helpful productivity features like a faster and optimized campaign creation process flow tend to benefit everyone, saving time and reducing errors for performance marketers on the way.

Dark side

Not everything that glitters is gold. When working with TikTok Ads, consider these things:

1. Ad approval delays: when launching a campaign, sometimes the waiting time to start spending some money tends to take too long, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
2. Content moderation: because of political reasons, categories like Dating and Gamling are hard to get through (only for big budgets most of the time)
3. Learning curve: compared to Meta, TikTok still goes behind. Don’t expect the same performance on a short period at scale. However, this has been improving over the years.
4. Performance volatility: advertisers often saw their winning ad fall apart in less than 24 hours. How performance behaviors are sometimes too aggressive could create uncertainty in your strategy.
5. Native SDK limitation: still under development, and with few developers included in the beta, advertisers that want to invent must implement an MMP

Understanding its uniqueness

Creativity

The best way to explain how creativity can completely change the expected output is to use the audience’s aura.

Peter Thomas Roth understood this and shifted the rules. Instead of finding the prettiest UGC content creator, they hired an older woman and shot a three-minute video without naming the brand. They understood that using stereotypes and finding an appearance that seems like an expert in their field could bring attention and generate engagement. The result? They went viral. 

On top of this, these are some tips to become more creative:

1. Benefit from TikTok programs to request new creatives and find inspiration
2. Innovate with sounds
3. Read a lot of comments! Great script hooks can be done with that 

Pangle

Known as the audience network of TikTok, it was explicitly designed to serve in-app ads.

These are some interesting facts about it:

1. Its inventory has an extensive reach of devices worldwide, excellent targeting capabilities, and decent fill rates, making it a good competitor in the ad mediation stack.
2. Solid quality on the publisher side. Above-average standard controls and transparency into where their ads are being shown, control over the types of apps and placements, and 
3. Global reach with over 100,000 apps using it across different regions.
4. Easy to integrate through adapters and support of bidding 

TikTok is one of the few ad networks that can provide performance outside their central platform. With an expanding user base and sophistication, testing Pangle’s performance is necessary during your planning or roadmap. 

However, you must be aware of:

1. Because of its target audience and different ad unit sizes (9:16), expectations should not be at the same level if the same ad is utilized for TikTok. A drop in performance could be expected.
2. It could be affecting your TikTok Ads effectiveness.
3. A dedicated campaign targeting only Pangle as a placement could be a good opportunity.

Machine learning models

Even though TikTok’s efforts are considerable in this short period when it comes to paid optimization and finding the best users for your product, it still sits behind Meta’s long experience in the market.

This topic could lead to misinterpretation or vague conclusions since no rule applies to everyone; however, after auditing multiple app portfolios and managing ad spending of over $100M, TikTok is not the best option for validating or investing your first thousands of dollars.

These are some of the reasons why:

1. High creative production cost compared to Meta. (#ProTip, try out TikTok carousels with the best static content you have to reduce the risk)
2. Volatility even after the learning phase ended.
3. It’s hard to find average creatives that perform relatively well. In most cases, you will have assets you won’t spend and a decent one that gets +90% of the budget. For reference, a good ad creative winning rate sits around 15%. 
4. Audiences, look-a-likes, and interests are still not the best levers for improving the performance of your campaigns. Most of the time, going broad is the safest way to start.

Programs (TTCX/TTCC)

TikTok offers two main programs depending on your contacts and ad spending level.

The TTCX (AKA TikTok Creative Exchange) is one of their most well-known initiatives. It connects users with agencies to create user-generated content.

Based on multiple experiences, the results are poor and a waste of time. The available agencies move slowly, create problems, and are expensive for most companies. It’s a waste of time if the goal is to find a creative partner for the long term. So, don’t feel FOMO for not using it.

The TTCC (AKA TikTok Creative Challenge) is a program where advertisers get to request ad briefs from a pool of creators. They allow up to 40 unique weekly ads and create unlimited briefs if needed. However, the minimum ad spending threshold to access it is around $10,000.

This is the best program from an ad network I’ve seen. Check out my LinkedIn post to learn more about it.

How to create a TikTok app campaign

Set the goal

Most of the time you will go with app install as your conversion objective. It’s the safest and only option if you invest in an iOS app.

A few times, I saw massive success with campaigns optimizing for app retargeting; however, it’s a must to test if Android is a leading OS for your case.

It’s essential not to forget to enable the iOS 14 dedicated campaign toggle. If not, SKAdNetwork won’t measure anything, and +99% of the audience won’t be measured.

Define the structure

Placements

Most of the time, I recommend letting the ad network choose the proper placement (i.e., Meta). Still, for TikTok, I strongly recommend targeting only TikTok unless you are sure that Pangle and Global App Bundle are a great option that won’t hurt your user acquisition efforts.

I don’t recommend turning off any ad settings options like user comments, video downloads, or 

shares. I tested all of them with multiple accounts, and the results were conclusive:

1. There is no direct correlation between ad success and any of the features that disable
2. Massive drop in user engagement
3. On average, ads where users were not allowed to engage saw a decrease of +28% in unique views.

However, this is generally speaking, so I encourage you to try it but don’t expect this to be a game changer, so that I won’t put it at the top of my priority list.

Targeting

Say no more. TikTok nails this recommendation on the campaign creation process when choosing the demographics, audience, and interests/behaviors. Keep it broad; the chances are that it will work. If not, move on to finding that specific target that will be a game changer. 

Demographics is the only one that could be edited to a certain degree. Still, regarding audience and interests/behaviors, I saw it working for specific types of apps and only for secondary campaigns. The primary (campaign with the most budget targeting the principal market), most of the time, relies on broad targeting.

#ProTip, don’t be fooled by agencies or consultants when they sell you a magical hack for targeting on TikTok

Optimization

The next critical setup choice is the optimization goal. The most used options are:

1. Install: a safe choice if you don’t have enough budget or a great goal for creative validation, among other benefits.
2. In-app event: suitable for scaling primary campaigns and medium/large budgets.
3. Install with in-app event: it could be a sweet spot, but app advertisers do not commonly adopt it.

Creatives

TikTok is not only a video platform. Image content is getting bigger daily, with the landscape’s carousel style dominating. An easy way beyond video content is to import Meta’s winning static content into TikTok to reduce cost and test with high velocity.

Interactive add-ons are a native selection of call-to-action you can add to any asset. Depending on the type, you must upload different content to publish it. 

Based on my experience, it’s hard to find an add-on that scales since it goes against principle number 1: don’t make ads, make TikToks. It signals that it’s an ad and not an organic post. So, be aware of the impact and measure its performance in different cases.

Now, TikTok supports playable ads: interactive videos that allow you to showcase a preview of your app before someone downloads it. 

Based on some initial tests, it generated better engagement and decreased the cost per result for a specific subset of gaming apps. Still, this is not a strong option chosen by subscription apps.

Measurement for iOS

SKAdNetwork accuracy and adoption

For app developers who rely on iOS revenue and SKAN as their to-go option when running user acquisition campaigns, TikTok is the best in terms of measurement capabilities. 

These are some of the reasons:

1. SKAN 4.0 adoption: There has been a faster adoption rate than other SRNs and fewer bug-reporting issues overall. There is still a long way to go, but after auditing multiple apps, TikTok outperformed its peers.
2. Reporting capabilities: Connecting with an MMP and creating the schema mapping is straightforward. Thanks to no custom modeling reporting, the data tends to match between TikTok’s dashboard and the MMP.
3. Low discrepancy rate: the difference between the ad network SKAN aggregated data and the sum of raw postback copies tends to be non-existent. Even though there are no public records of this fact, after analyzing this with +10 mobile apps, I can confidently tell that TikTok’s discrepancies rate regarding SKAN reporting tends to be below 5%. This means that most of the time, you can trust TikTok, and there’s no need to look at MMP data to make decisions.
   

Alternatives (SDK)

If you do not use an MMP or plan to remove it from your stack, TikTok offers certain advertisers an SDK based on their relationship with them. You need to have a dedicated account manager to request access.

TikTok started to feel the need to accept advertisers without an MMP, so they are in the latest phases of testing. Currently, Beta 3.0 is closed.

Things you must consider before using the TikTok SDK:

1. Constant anomalies on the reporting side for SKAdNetwork. 
2. It’s not possible to optimize towards in-app events.
3. Their SKAdNetwork conversion value mapping interface is not the best yet. 
4. Their end has low support since it’s not their top priority project.
5. Bugs and issues may appear when debugging the integration.

Proxies

App Profile Pages (APP) are among the best systems for closing the gap between probabilistic modeling and deterministic data from SKAdNetwork. APP’s allows advertisers to prompt a fake app store listing within TikTok’s app to provide high-intent signals to the ad network before the user leaves the app.

Even if you rely only on SKAN to report a decision, enabling this feature could increase signal quality and feed the algorithm with an extra proxy.

However, not everything that glitters is gold since you are technically adding an extra step (install button tap) to the user flow experience, which could lead to a drop in overall performance. I recommend testing it before assuming a big win and running aggregated data discrepancies issues to validate the accuracy of TikTok’s attribution capabilities.

Helpful tips to implement

Low budget? Install campaigns tend to work

Against all odds, optimizing towards app install is better than expected. This positively impacts low-budget developers who need to feed the learning with as many signals as soon as possible. However, it can be a double-edged sword and block you from being open to testing app event optimization, which sometimes performs better than app installs. 

Remember the trade-off between event prioritization and event signals, and don’t always follow TikTok’s reps’ advice. My recommendation? Start with app installs if you need to be conservative. 

Deploy as many creatives as possible

Success = (quantity > quality). Building a solid ad creative development pipeline to deploy dozens of assets per week improves your chances of success. However, I recommend setting a strategy where you focus on creating high-quality content one week out of four.

A good cadence for a solid creative pipeline is to launch at least 15 new quantity ads and five quality ads per week. Following this concept, you should ship 50 new ads per month.

This way, you diversify your chances of hitting a winning ad and get the ball rolling.

Here is an example of a winning asset coming from a quantity sprint that got over 9M views and thousands of likes and comments:

A pro tip for quantity ads is to make “fake” mistakes like mispronouncing a word, setup errors, filming inconsistencies, etc.

And this one elucidates an asset that is built to focus on quality:

Keep it simple

The KISS concept (keep it simple, stupid) is an excellent piece of advice when structuring any TikTok account, especially for mobile apps.

Some of the benefits of doing so:

1. Focus on max liquidity: This Means consolidating the campaigns and ad set to focus the daily budget across fewer options, forcing advertisers to exit the learning phase fast, avoiding audience overlap, and helping the algorithm make better decisions by reducing the number of poor signals.
2. Scalability: Think for the future. Keep this easy to handle and manage to scale whenever needed. Owning two operating systems, a worldwide reach, multiple apps, dozens of user personas, and different objectives can be hard to organize without a simple foundation that allows you to grow.
3. Manager transition: Since you won’t be there forever, building a simple structure with a straightforward naming taxonomy, logic, and implementation will help if an offboarding is needed or a new member joins the organization.

In a real-life example, this translates to following this checklist:

1. Create a naming convention for the campaign to the ad that contemplates multiple variables like country, OS, optimization goal, etc.
2. Have a few active campaigns.
3. Avoid having multiple ad sets per campaign.
4. Let the algorithm do its job and avoid guessing about audiences and fancy look-a-likes.
5. Group by countries (tiers) if needed.
6. Avoid having TikTok and Pangle combined into the same ad set.
7. Disable dynamic creative testing to reduce the amount of ad variations and data treatment issues.
8. Instead of having endless columns within a single dashboard setup, keep an eye on the most critical soft ad creative metrics, such as CTR retention, Average drop-down second rate, and 6s view retention.

Ask for incentives

Nothing hurts more than leaving “free” money over the table, so there are three main incentives you could be taking profit from depending on your ad spending level, but first, you need a dedicated customer success team that has ownership over your app portfolio.

These are the programs you should be aware of

1. As mentioned above, TikTok Creative Challenge (AKA TTCC) is an essential lever for many small/medium businesses that could see tremendous success and be fed a constant pipeline of creative ideas. The minimum monthly amount you should spend is USD 10,000.
2. TikTok Creative Exchange (AKA TTCX) requires at least USD 30,000 per month and gets advertisers access to a pool of agencies that will deliver free assets to test.
3. For big players that spend multiple millions of dollars per year, signing a Joint Business Plan (JBP) is a great alternative to take dominance of a strong negotiating position. It is a private deal between the advertiser and the ad network where, the advertiser agrees to spend a certain amount, and the ad network gives the advertiser a percentage of the ad spending in ad credits.
   As a reference, in southern Europe, there are estimated to be around 10 JBPs signed between advertisers and TikTok.

Don’t hesitate to ask if you don’t meet the requirements or ad spending thresholds at a specific moment. I recommend using your user base and existing business as collateral to get your desired access.

For example, these are some of the things you could tell TikTok to try their programs:

1. Use SensorTower data from other applications you own or past revenue spikes to show your product’s potential to scale on TikTok.
2. Share an estimate of how much money you spend on other ad networks (#ProTip, don’t feel bad for lying and inflating the number to get what you want) to justify that you have money in the bank to start working with a new partner.

Organic goes first

Since ads are an investment and not a cost, the chance of this investment not working could be high if things are not done correctly. Investing in what your audience has already validated is a great solution to minimize the impact and reduce the chances of things going wrong.

This translates to using social media, AKA organic content, to validate scripts, hooks, sounds, music, creators, and endless possibilities that could work for each case.

Just post TikTok’s. And when something pops up, invest your money in it.

The process is simple:

1. Focus on growing your TikTok follower base
2. Create content for your feed
3. Get your first winning asset
4. Upload the video to TikTok Ads
5. Scale 

The metrics you should care about the most

Focus on their new reporting capabilities, such as the video retention rate, fatigue index, and many other analytics dashboards TikTok provides. Beyond that, it’s almost the same as its competitors.

For instance, this is the column setup that I used when working with TikTok Ads breakdown by metric type:

1. Basic: it includes essential information like campaign cost, budget, etc. 
2. Performance: it focuses on KPIs like installs, in-app events, conversion rates, etc.
3. Soft: it has ad network performance metrics like CPM, frequency, etc.
4. Creative: the goal is to understand the ad asset by looking at retention, CTR, and engagement metrics.

Then, if using different add-ons like App Product Pages, Cards, or Stickers works for you, you could profit from that by getting first-party data by looking for data reported by “Interactive add-ons” under the video insights section.

Avoid all placements

Be aware of excluding all placements except TikTok. Seeing bad performance on multiple campaigns is normal because someone forgot to disable Pangle. This tip aims to warn you that Pangle’s performance is not the best on average, but not to avoid testing it.

Most of the time, the assets that perform well on TikTok are not considered for Pangle’s vast inventory, so its purpose gets lost along the way. 

A #ProTip would be to run Pangle on an isolated campaign and see the publisher apps that drive high-quality users to your app, then sign private deals and get a better eCPM or even a fixed CPA deal. 

Don’t be afraid to try “Betas”

TikTok’s go-to-market testing approach is one of the best. If you are a small/medium advertiser and get a new feature enabled, don’t be afraid to test it. 

One of the latest deployments was the Advanced Dedicated Campaign (ADC) feature for iOS and the Smart Performance Campaign (SPC) for Android. Overall, the results these features deliver were better than expected and higher than your business as usual.

Key takeaways 

TikTok is an excellent option to unlock a new level of growth and a must that every app developer should test in their lifetime. With all its pros and cons, TikTok is still a good choice for most advertisers. However, consider all the trade-offs and limitations mentioned above to surf the wave safely.

Every year, the platform closes the gap against the duopoly (Meta and Google) and becomes necessary for most advertisers. So, follow the best practices and go beyond them to experiment with new things.