How do you advertise with TikTok Ads?

What is TikTok Ads?

TikTok Ads is TikTok’s advertising platform, offered by TikTok for Business and run on a self-serve basis, with no sales representative needed for an auction campaign.

To set up a TikTok Ads Manager account, you need an email address or a phone number and a password, then your business and payment information. The ad account goes through a review, usually in less than 24 hours, and no ad runs before it is approved (TikTok help, June 2026). Signing up does not require a TikTok account: you use one later to run ads under your own identity, for example with Spark Ads.

Posting videos on your account is part of a social media strategy; TikTok Ads buys distribution. TikTok is one of the platforms compared in our social ads guide, and LinkedIn Ads also has its own detailed article.

Promote or TikTok Ads Manager?

Promote is the advertising tool built into the TikTok app: it boosts a video or a LIVE in a few taps (TikTok help, July 2026).

Promote works for pushing a video you have already posted. The detailed targeting, bidding and measurement settings described in this guide are made in TikTok Ads Manager.

How is a TikTok Ads campaign organized?

A TikTok Ads campaign has three levels: the campaign, the ad group and the ad. Each level controls part of the delivery (TikTok help, October 2025).

A Manual campaign leaves you in control of every setting; a Search campaign targets keywords. With Smart+, you provide your key performance indicators, creative assets, geography and language, and TikTok automates targeting, creative and optimization, shifting budget toward the best-performing creatives. AI creative generation can be turned off (TikTok help, June 2025).

The placement can no longer be changed once the ad group has been created (TikTok help, September 2026): to test another placement, create a new ad group.

Which objective should you choose on TikTok Ads?

The objective is chosen at campaign level and steers optimization, as well as the bidding method offered by default. TikTok Ads Manager has eight objectives in three categories (TikTok help, How to choose the right objective, April 2025).

Choosing Traffic when you expect purchases is a trap common to every ad platform, covered in the social ads guide. TikTok Shop and GMV Max belong to commerce on the platform: this guide does not cover them.

Which TikTok ad formats should you use?

Auction formats are bought on a self-serve basis. Reserved formats, such as TopView, go through a sales representative and are open to qualified customers (TikTok help, August 2026).

In-Feed: the video in the “For You” feed

The In-Feed ad is the basic format. The TikTok placement covers the “For You” feed, other feeds, TikTok Lite, TikTok for Web and, for some objectives, the Search results (TikTok help, September 2026).

Specifications of TikTok Auction In-Feed Ads other than Spark Ads (TikTok help, June 2026):

The 60 second limit still quoted by older guides no longer appears in the help. TikTok provides downloadable safe zone files, to keep text and visuals out of the areas covered by the interface. With no link or hashtag in the caption, the message rests on the video and on its advertising hook.

Spark Ads: sponsoring an organic post

Spark Ads are ads created from organic posts: those of the brand’s account, or those of other creators with their authorization. The views, comments, shares, likes and follows gained stay attributed to the original post (TikTok help, June 2026). The format works with every auction objective. For a creator’s video, the creator generates a code and chooses the authorization duration: 7, 30, 60 or 365 days (TikTok help, October 2025).

TopView, carousel and Search Ads

TopView shows a full-screen, sound-on video when the app opens, for 3 seconds, then the video switches to In-Feed. It is bought on a CPM basis, with guaranteed impressions and a minimum spend that varies by market. TikTok advises booking 60 days in advance for a 100% impression campaign (August 2026).

Carousel Ads bring several images together in one In-Feed ad; each image links to its own landing page (September 2026).

Search Ads place keyword ads in TikTok’s search results, through the auction. In France, they are open to the Web Conversion and Traffic objectives; Lead Generation is limited to the United States (April 2026).

TikTok Ad Network, formerly TikTok Pangle, runs ads on third-party apps, on a CPC, CPM or oCPM basis, with no interest targeting. As in programmatic advertising, the ad leaves its original platform. With automatic placement, TikTok spreads the budget across all placements based on performance.

How do you target an audience on TikTok Ads?

Targeting is set in the ad group, by dimensions: demographics, audience, interests and behaviors, device type, smart targeting (TikTok help, October 2026). Within a dimension, choices add up (OR logic); across two dimensions, they combine (AND logic). Checking two age ranges therefore widens the audience; adding an interest narrows it.

• Interests: long-term interests, predicted by machine learning.
• Behaviors: interactions with organic videos over 15 days, or following and visiting the profiles of types of creators over 90 days (July 2025).
• Location: countries, regions, departments, cities or zip codes depending on the market. TikTok does not allow you to exclude a location or a zip code (October 2026).
• Custom Audiences: customer file, engagement, website traffic, lead generation or shop activity, among others. You need at least 1,000 matched users (November 2025).
• Lookalike Audiences: built from a Custom Audience, ready within 24 to 48 hours (April 2025).

TikTok recommends not restricting targeting unnecessarily. An audience is “Fairly Broad” when it reaches 80% or more of a country’s accounts (April 2025). The audience size estimate counts the accounts shown ads over 30 days, excluding people under 18: it does not measure the population (September 2025).

Start from your marketing persona to choose a few interests and behaviors, then check the estimate before launching.

What changes in France and the EEA

Since July 2023, European users aged 13 to 17 no longer see personalized ads. TikTok announced this measure as part of its compliance with the DSA (TikTok Newsroom, August 28, 2023). If the audience includes people under 18, the Lead Generation and Sales (TikTok Shop) objectives become unavailable. Detailed targeting then applies only to people aged 18 and over (TikTok help, October 2026). France is also one of the markets with additional age targeting restrictions, with no details published (April 2025).

Paid political advertising is banned on TikTok, including through Promote and paid branded content (July 2026). Before importing a customer file as a Custom Audience, check its legal basis and its quality with regard to data protection.

How does the TikTok Ads auction work?

The TikTok auction ranks ads based on the bid price and the relevance of the ad to the user (TikTok help, Available bidding methods, August 2025). An ad judged more relevant can therefore beat a higher bid.

For bid strategies, the English help pages say either “Maximum Delivery” or “Maximum Results”, and either “Cost Cap” or “Target Cost per Result”: this guide uses the first term of each pair.

• Maximum Delivery: no bid to enter, the system seeks as many actions as possible for the budget. TikTok recommends it for a conversion campaign that needs to spend its whole budget.
• Cost Cap: you set a cost per action, ideally based on the suggested bid. If it is too low, it can prevent the budget from being spent.
• Minimum ROAS and Highest Value: value-based optimization, for web; the minimum ROAS is targeted without any guarantee (March 2025).

Maximum Delivery is similar to Google’s automated bidding: you set the budget, the algorithm sets the bid. With standard delivery, the budget is spent as evenly as possible. Accelerated delivery, limited to Cost Cap on some objectives, spends it as fast as possible; the CPA can then vary sharply during the first three days (August 2026).

What budget should you plan for TikTok Ads?

TikTok publishes no rate per click, per impression or per view: the cost comes out of the auction. The only amounts published are budget minimums, in US dollars, with no euro equivalent in the help.

An ad group lifetime budget is at least $20 per day of delivery, i.e. $620 for 31 days. Delivery stops when it is reached, and the budget is not necessarily spread evenly. The budget type (daily or lifetime) is locked at launch, and the campaign budget cannot be lower than the ad group budget.

Beyond the minimums, TikTok recommends a budget based on the optimization (August 2026). These figures come from the platform, which sells the ad space: they are recommendations, not technical thresholds.

• Upper funnel or shallow conversion: 50 times the current CPA, or $100 with no known CPA.
• App install: 20 times the CPA, or $200.
• Deep conversion (add to cart, purchase): 10 times the CPA, or $200.

During the learning phase, volatility usually declines after 25 results or 7 days; pauses and edits restart it (June 2026). After that, two help pages disagree. “About budgets for ads in TikTok Ads Manager” allows increases of 40% during learning and 30% after. “Best practices for budget” advises against any change during learning, then allows a 50% variation. Both ask for at least two days between two changes.

1. Set your target CPA: the cost per result that your margin or the value of a lead can absorb.
2. Apply the multiplier recommended by TikTok (50, 20 or 10 times the CPA).
3. Check that the result exceeds the minimums published in dollars.
4. Launch with a daily budget, without any change until the end of learning.
5. Then increase in steps, no more than every two days.

Payment is made in advance (Manual Payment), by automatic charge (Automatic Payment) or, for eligible businesses, by Monthly Invoicing. Switching to Automatic Payment is permanent (June 2026).

How do you measure TikTok Ads conversions?

The TikTok Pixel is a piece of code placed on your website that shares events with TikTok. Among other things, it sends the timestamp, the IP address, the user agent, cookies and button clicks. Third-party cookies are on by default; first-party cookies are optional (TikTok help, June 2026).

The Events API connects TikTok to the advertiser’s data (web, app, offline, CRM). The Pixel or the Events API is a prerequisite for the Web Conversions objective, and TikTok recommends both, with event deduplication (April 2025). The web attribution window is 7 days after a click and 1 day after a view with Advanced Matching. Without it, it is limited to 1 day after the click (September 2026).

Include the Pixel in your tracking plan, with at least three events (upper, middle and lower funnel), as TikTok recommends. Its attribution windows differ from those of your analytics tool: the figures will not match.

Where can you see your competitors’ TikTok ads?

Top Ads, in TikTok’s Creative Center, gathers high-performing ads that can be filtered by region, industry and objective. All of them have been authorized by their advertisers (TikTok help, May 2025): it is a showcase for inspiration, not a complete registry.

On May 15, 2025, the European Commission took the preliminary view that this repository did not comply with the DSA (ad content, targeted users, payers, limited search). On December 5, 2025, it accepted binding commitments from TikTok. The repository will display the full content of ads with their URLs and will be updated within 24 hours at most. It will also give the targeting criteria chosen by the advertiser, aggregated data (gender, age range, Member State) and additional search filters.

For a first TikTok Ads campaign, choose an objective aligned with the result you expect and keep more than 1,000 people per ad group. Pick Maximum Delivery to spend the budget, calculate that budget from your target CPA and fire the Pixel after consent. Elev8 Lab has no commercial relationship with TikTok.