TikTok’s advertising system provides us with various targeting options to locate the exact audience we want our ads shown to. Targeting can be selected during the ad group creation process. In this post, I will discuss different segmentation options, such as interests, behavior, demographics, custom audiences, and lookalike (similar audience), so let’s get started:
Types of Targeting on TikTok
Custom Audience
Custom Audiences is an ad targeting option that allows you to find people who already know or have visited your business’s website.
This type of targeting is a powerful tool for remarketing, reaching potential returning customers, growing your followers, increasing app engagement, or creating lookalike audiences.
- TikTok Engagement – Anyone who actually interacted with one of the sponsored ads we created – meaning only once we have created an ad group for an existing campaign on TikTok can we actually target those who engaged with the ad. Engagement can include any action – clicking the ad, impression/content exposure, 2-second view, 6-second view, 25% video watched, and more.
- Customer Files / Lists – We can upload existing lists of people who know us, leads, mailing lists, and whatever you have that contains details of your audience such as email, phone, name, and more…
- Website Visitors – In short, remarketing: audiences that know us and have taken various actions on our website – an excellent audience that is highly recommended to use.
- Lead Form – If we created a Lead Form, we can target people who opened the form but did not submit it, as well as those who did submit it.
- App Activity – People who downloaded our app (if we decided to promote an app); we can create an audience of people who engaged within the app itself (made an in-app purchase, searched, started trial periods, etc.), provided that we have installed the TikTok SDK
Lookalike
A very, very powerful tool is the Lookalike audience, which is essentially an audience similar to the original audience we created. This way, we can expose our video to new audiences that behave similarly to the audience we defined (if we chose an audience of everyone who converted on our website, we can create a similar audience from it, and then user behavior will be oriented towards a converting audience).
Most advertisers are familiar with this type of audience from other platforms.
*Very important – use an audience of at least 10,000 users to allow TikTok’s algorithm to learn and understand your audience’s objectives.
Targeting by Demographics
Audience based on age, location, gender, and language
It must be remembered that TikTok is an app with a large user base of kids, so of course we will want to filter out irrelevant age groups to reach a super accurate audience.
Location – We have no option here other than Israel (next to each country, you can see a small arrow, a sort of “subcategory” through which we can choose several cities if we want to target a specific city)
In Israel – we can see targeting by major cities only – Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beersheba
USA – we can choose by states
Age – We can choose the relevant age or several relevant age groups.
Languages – App language – we will choose the languages relevant to us (for advertisers in Israel, naturally only Hebrew)
Targeting by Interests
What is interest targeting? Interest targeting is a way to find people based on their interaction with content on TikTok. Using interest targeting is a way to reach a relevant audience for us. There are two types of targeting: categories and subcategories. If you cannot find the relevant interest, you can type it in the search bar, and the system will open additional interests for you. The list of interests is short, which gives us limited segmentation options
* TikTok recommends choosing as many interests as possible to ensure we get a broad audience.
* Recommended especially when we have no assumption regarding who our target audience is.
* Choosing main interest categories will help us pinpoint the audience better.
In TikTok’s reporting system, you can view your campaign performance by that interest, meaning you can analyze what worked well for you and what didn’t, thereby drawing conclusions and performing better optimization:
Targeting by Behavior
Behavior targeting allows you to serve ads based on users’ recent behavior inside the TikTok app. The difference between this option and interests is that in behavior targeting we use users’ recent interactions with TikTok content. This is an audience that is somewhat more engaged by nature. In this section, we can choose whether the audience we want to target watches until the end of the video, likes, comments, shares, in what timeframe, in which categories, and we can also choose if we want an audience that follows people, views their profile, and more.
Behavior targeting is an excellent method for gaining insights. If you notice that a large portion of conversions comes from a specific behavior, adding this behavior to targeting can help optimize our ads.
There are 2 behavior categories:
– Video-related actions – Behavior related to videos (video view, like, comment, share) with organic video content in the last 7 or 15 days. Based on users’ recent behavior, users will be associated with video tags, which are then provided as category options under behavior targeting for us advertisers when creating campaigns.
– Creator-related actions – Targeting users who follow specific creators, or targeting based on users who viewed creators’ profile pages in the last 30 days.
What is the difference between interests and behavior?
In interests, TikTok essentially learns over time, using Machine Learning, the audience that engages with our content.
In behavior, we essentially base targeting on people who have already interacted with one of our chosen categories. The interaction timeframe is up to a total of 15 days, referring to users who took actions very recently, which increases our chance for better engagement.
Targeting by Device Type
Another option is device targeting (iPhone, Android), and there is even an option to choose which OS version is installed on their device. We can even choose which iPhone model they use, and even how much money they spent buying their device (if you want to target people with expensive iPhones only). We can also choose what internet connection speed they use: 2G, 3G, 4G, Wifi – it all depends on the campaign goals and what we want to achieve.
Summary
In this article, we reviewed the targeting options that TikTok Ads Manager has to offer before we start working on TikTok advertising. You will see that we do not have many options for segmenting our audience. You can combine different targeting types together in order to try and refine our relevant audience as much as possible, whether it’s a combination of demographics, interests, behavior, and devices. Therefore, what is important is to invest in high-quality video ads that will filter the relevant audience and bring you the right people to the website / landing page / lead ads, thereby driving quality conversions.
About the Author
Ben Knaani, 26 years old, lives in central Tel Aviv, manages digital campaigns across a variety of different channels. His motto: “Sports is a way of life!”
