TikTok Ads for Mobile Apps: Spark Ads and Best Practices for Creatives

Also with this example that I made after maybe two or three days the performance was declining. It was going back to normal basically. So you have only a very short moment in very uh many cases. Um and this puts a lot of pressure on you to produce a lot of creatives, right? So you need to have a constant flow of production and this is quite an investment time, effort, u ideation, production, overlay, sounds and so on and so on. That's a lot of labor that you have to put into this. Um, and then of course also you need to Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Tangent AOI 111. I'm Roman from Tangent and today I have a special guest, Andre from Admiral Media. Hi. Hi, Andrea. Nice to meet you. Yes, pleasure. Pleasure. It's I I think we've always been connected but I guess it's the first time we are face to face on the

online and it's good that it's recorded so I need to behave. Okay. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Um what is the topic of today's video Andre? Uh we will uh talk a little bit about uh Tik Tok and how we use Tik Tok to promote mobile apps. Nice. Uh and why Admiral Media and why Tik Tok for this video about the Tik Tok. Well, maybe a quick intro about myself. So, Admiral Media is a performance marketing agency which I founded like six years ago. We are like 20 people fully remote and we are super specialized on apps. We do a lot of e-commerce and search and shopping campaigns as well, but the origin is clearly um and our stronghold is clearly app marketing. Um so, we have a lot of experience in that field. I mean I personally I started when there were ringtones on the market. So it's really long time ago and since that since then I've done a lot of mobile app campaigns

for huge startups in Europe. Uh went to South Africa did this for the biggest food delivery business down there. Switched uh from there to Spain and founded Admiral Media back then. And yeah we became one of the um certainly one of the best uh app marketing agencies in Europe I would say. And why Tik Tok for mobile apps? Um it's pretty clear. Uh Tik Tok has become one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. Um point this is where you reach your customers no matter which age, which demographic, which income class. Uh you name it. Um everyone is on Tik Tok in some way or one day uh they use Instagram, the other day they use Tik Tok. Um so we also see this across clients um that the volume that we are buying on those platforms switches between the two basically for some clients because of their special use case it's maybe Google or some other platform. Um but in general most of the

clients that we are serving use Meta and Tik Tok in parallel and then the volume is typically um switching between the two. Super. Um, I'll ask you a first question even before you share the slides. Um, how difficult it is to run ads on Tik Tok compared to any other ad network? Oh, wow. Um, it's not the easiest platform. Let's put it this way. Okay. Um, I I think uh to reflect, it's pretty much the same with the organic traffic, right? So the algorithm of Tik Tok is extremely challenging. Um no matter if it's paid ads or organic traffic, um it doesn't really matter how many many followers you have as a person or as a brand. It doesn't matter how many followers uh your account has. It really depends on how engaging your particular video is that you are posting. Um so this makes

it very often very difficult to create content that uh sticks and uh engages either organic or paid. We in admiral media are specialized in paid uh performance marketing. So we only look into uh that but we know of course uh from the conversations with influencers and content creators how how they feel about the organic production. Um, other than that, the campaign setup, the tracking, attribution, measuring, this is pretty much standard uh across the industry. Um, I would even say Tik Tok has a little bit mimicked uh what Meta was doing back then. Um, down to the different ad formats. Um, yeah. So, it's pretty much the same, I would say. Gotcha. Gotcha. Um, yeah. Then, thanks for covering this. This is just immediately popped up in my mind when you mentioned Tik Tok. Uh so I know you that you prepared some slides. Maybe you could kindly share your screen. Mhm.

Sure. Of course. Maybe as um a quick intro about that. The slides that I've prepared and the talking points that that I will make are probably addressing an audience that is um already a little bit into paid ads on Tik Tok. Um, but the hardcore specialists can probably move fast forward um or look into the summary um in in the show notes or something um and happy to get uh your questions later on. You can always reach out to me on LinkedIn or anything um and I'm happy to dive deeper into your challenges on Tik Tok. But for now, let's maybe uh switch into the presentation. I will try to turn this on now. And here we go. Slideshow. I hope you can see my screen. Yep. Super. Yeah, we are uh as I said fully remote. Um but we have a couple of people in Berlin and Copenhagen. I'm personally now in Dubai. Um we have been winning a few awards for our campaigns and success that we've delivered for the

clients. Um and yeah, we are very long in the industry. We've seen basically every channel, every challenge um on on the market um and u so far solved most most of them on the way. Um, so you were asking me um about the big differences between Meta and Tik Tok and I made a point already about the algorithm and it's pretty clear on those um graphs where um I've tried to give give a little bit of an understanding um what happens with your campaigns between the different platforms while you're probably spending relatively linear in a relatively linear way on meta. It's the um top left graph. Um and uh at the same time your campaign performance develops in a kind of linear way. You can see this um on the top right graph. Um you can always iterate and optimize. Meta stays more or less stable unless you implement some major Um meaning

dramatic budget increases, dramatic creative changes, um ad policy violations whatsoever, then of course you will have spikes. Um but otherwise it's relatively predictable um what you are getting on a day-to-day basis from meta. The bottom two graphs show a little bit what's happening with Tik Tok. Here for example the red arrows are showing uh at which uh week for example we have um implemented a new ad. Again these are not real data. It's really just so for visualization. Um I didn't want to share any client data or anything. Um the point that I'm trying to make here is at this given day you're uploading an ad um Tik Tok can go crazy and it the it doesn't know a limit basically meaning we have seen campaigns also long time ago and it repeats um throughout the years. you upload an ad that is really good performing and it's this one cherry ad um that you want to

have um and the algorithm just pushes so much volume on this creative because it's performing so well for Tik Tok it engages the audience a lot and therefore they are putting a lot of pressure um on the paid ad and you get so much volume so many downloads so many um inapp actions and revenues um the the sky's is the limit really um we've seen campaigns with a,000% overnight scale and it could have been even more if the client would have unlocked more campaign budget in that very moment. But it was basically uh for example this example that I'm making here I remember I managed back then the campaign myself even uh because it was going so crazy um that we basically had a daily budget set and on Saturday um suddenly uh the algorithm kicked in um but I couldn't reach the client over the weekend. we were really limited by the given budget that was approved beforehand and of course I couldn't just unlock more capital

because I don't know the funding situation of the client exactly right so we were really limited by that moment um just by the campaign budget otherwise it would have been a super crazy campaign for sure um so yeah you quickly summarizing um expect crazy ups and downs with Tik Tok um one downside here is uh does my mouse worry. There we go. The downside of this is um it can go um in the other direction as well, right? Meaning the duration an ad is performing is very shortlived. So um also with this example that I made after maybe two or three days the performance was declining. It was going back to normal basically. So you have only a very short moment in very uh many cases. Um, and this puts a lot of pressure on you to produce a lot of creatives, right? So, you need to have a constant flow of production and this is quite an investment, time,

effort, um, ideation, production, overlay, sounds, and so on and so on. That that's a lot of labor that you have to put into this. Um, and then of course also you need to support it with budget. Every ad needs its own budget in some way. Um, otherwise, uh, you will never find out if it works, right? So yeah, um this may be about the creative performance, but there's also some special format that you can use on Tik Tok that's called Spark Ads. Andrew, quick super quick question. Um what would be the minimal budget amount that advertiser can start uh advertising on the Tik Tok? It just like at what point does it make sense? It's not easy to answer. Um because it depends on so many uh variables. Um do you already run on other channels? Do you already have a budget there? Um or are you starting from scratch? Have you evaluated other channels? What is your

anticipated um cost per acquisition for example? Mhm. Um to make a maybe a comparison. Uh it doesn't matter. Let's say I'm ignoring you if you did spend something already or not. Um I'm ignoring if you are new to the market or not. I'm just comparing industries to make a point. Let's say you're promoting a game and the cost per acquisition is maybe I don't know 20 cents, 30 cents, 50 cents, whatever it is, very low. Um, in that moment you don't need a lot of budget to um, uh, get, let's say, statistical significance on the conversion side of things. Um, it is enough to maybe produce 20 conversions a day, um, on a given campaign. Um and then you spend minim minimal amount of dollars and it's already making sense for you maybe right um maybe it's financially already good for you to see if the ads work if the message is working um if my app is actually converting into anything are

the users staying in the app and so on so you can already find something out right now look into a let's say pharma or insurance product or uh let's Say uh you're promoting something uh financial products. If it's a crypto app or whatever it is, getting a loan, credit scoring, whatever it is, the cost per acquisition is usually so much higher than a than a game because audience is so much more narrow. The competition is different. Um the sales cycle, you need to convince the users. Uh they need to have a lot of trust in the product and so on. So, the cost per acquisition is maybe, I don't know, $200 for just one signup. Um, not not even maybe a fully converted user that is actually paying or doing a first-time deposit or something. Um, when you then still consider you need like 20 conversions a day, your minimum budget is already so much higher. Um, and I'm not even talking

about um you need Android, iOS, web, you have five different creatives and so on, right? So if you see this as a cascading um yeah graph um every ad needs its own budget. Every ad needs to have a significant amount of impressions, clicks, conversions. Then you can anticipate a much much much higher starting budget than uh the game that converts at 50 cents, right? Gotcha. But even with the stuff that you mentioned like to update the creatives regularly to produce more creatives, I think this is uh not something that indie game studio can afford. Um I've seen a lot of uh gaming studios but also other clients any any industry where the founder is doing the first ads him or herself, right? Yep. and they often perform quite nicely um because

they know the product, they know their users pain points already because they have started the company um with this given pain point in their mind, right? Um so they don't to to get started you don't need a lot of budget. You just do it yourself with a phone um edit a little bit with the native Tik Tok functions and then you promote that ad. Gotcha. Gotcha. Cool. Then let's see what is a spark ads. Um as I mentioned for those who are already deep into um the marketing topics paid social whatsoever sparets is nothing new. It's on the market since quite some time and it's something that Tik Tok has basically also just copied from Meta um which was a branded post. No, how was it called back then? That's long time ago um uh promoted posts or something like that. um where you were as an influencer posting content and a brand could say I want to promote that post from the influencer and put some

money behind this post and then in the feed of the usual user it would look like an organic post because the sender um is the influencer and not the brand right so like the this little icon that is always there like who is doing this ad this was then the face of the influencer and not um the insurance company or whatever, right? And this is the same here with spark ads um on Tik Tok where you can put money behind organic Tik Toks that uh some user has posted and you basically just need the ID from that video and the permission um from that creator to actually uh put in your ads manager the ID say please promote this with $100 a day and then um his or her video will be posted um across Tik Tok. So that's a functionality of u spark ads. Um what's important here is that when you hire creators um when you reach out to them um you need to do your

research very well. Um there are some tips uh on on the market where to find uh influencer in your specific niche. This is the most crucial point like you need to find the right uh matching influencer or creator um that that is able to communicate your product. Of course, if you have a mass market product like a game, in the end of the day, you can just try to find anyone. Um but very often you have a product or an app or what what'sever that speaks to a certain audience. And here you need to find someone who's able to communicate um in with the right terms with the right uh trends that are going on on Tik Tok um to transport the message well. So you want to find influencers um for example in the fitness niche. So what you're doing now is you create a new Tik Tok uh account um and you only start watching you're searching for some fitness content and start following and liking um some fitness influencers. And

from that moment on, basically as every other algorithm, you know it from YouTube or whatsoever, you will only see fitness content the whole day. Right. Right. And this is your influencer database. Just go through them um contact all of them um and try to uh convince them that they should promote your product um or your app and then you have um 100% matching uh creators with your uh fitness product or app. Um so but then you should also try to find people that are able to understand um the current trends on Tik Tok right like because this changes every day which music which hook um whatever uh funny thing funny dance is happening on Tik Tok that they are able to immediately implement and transition this into a brand communication or a product communication. Right? So this is uh something you should focus on. Of course, you need to provide a a nice brief that gives them a little bit of room for creativity, of course. Um, and

otherwise, just basically give them the dos and don'ts. Um, but not too much. Um, rather, uh, plan to get bad content, content you may not be 100% fine with. Um, instead of limiting the creativity of the creator too much and then you will never have converting video, right? Um any questions for one? Yeah. Do you do it like directly? Do do you use any sort of tools that help to contact with influencers or you just Yes, of course. Tik Tok has its own Tik Tok marketplace, a creator marketplace where you can reach out and then they also offer different programs um the creator challenge and some other thing. Um so Tik Tok is very keen that you are actually producing ads that look like Tik Toks. Yeah. So they do everything they can to support you on on that way. There's even programs where they help you uh with the financing of the

production and stuff. Of course, this needs some li amount of budget, right, in in the first place to promote. Awesome. Um so here are just some screenshots from examples we've made. Um you can see uh that text overlays are very tiktockish. Um the filters are very tik tokish and so on. So, it's important that you stay authentic and that you stay in the um with the design aspects uh within the design aspects of Tik Tok, right? You can see a little bit on the bottom of the videos how much reach they've got. Um this is promoted reach in this case, right? It's a little bit mixed between organic and promoted, but typically this was a creator that doesn't have a lot of reach. Um and we put money behind that. And with that you can see how how much uh uh views how many views you can actually uh achieve. Um this was too fast. So to give you an example, we've picked big view um as a

case study here. Big view is a um teleprompter app. It's actually a really helpful app um for people like us um or for creators uh in in the let's say uh courses area whatsoever like people that are trying to communicate um something very straightforward and with a given script. So you basically pre-write your script. They also have a lot of other features but this is the one of the main features. you pre-write your script and you basically have the script rolling like a teleprompter of a Mr. President um in front of you so that you always have eye contact with uh your phone or the computer and uh it doesn't look like you need to look to the side to actually read what you want to say. Um so this is an extremely helpful product but again they have a lot of other features. Uh it's actually a really uh fantastic um app and web product as well.

Um but what they had a big challenge um on the creative side um we managed the campaigns for them on Meta, Tik Tok, Google whatsoever. Um but today we are only talking about Tik Tok and what we've done on the creative side for them. So they had a challenge that they didn't have really native uh content and we're not really able to scale on Tik Tok and that's why we jumped in and tried to produce new things and I give you a little bit two examples here um of a before and after um and then you can see already on the numbers um what what was working was not working um but I will try to explain a little bit what the differences were. I will click play. Hey, I hope you will hear the sound and then let's see. Brand your story with a big view teleprompter. Easy as one, two, three. Script, shoot, caption, and style your video with Big View. Recorded with a green screen. It's one tap. Change your background with a stunning image or

video loop. Add your logo. Select a theme for your titling or caption. So, this this was client produced. Um to make a point, you may have seen what one second. Um you see that it's uh it looks quite professionally produced, right? With a lot of overlays um that and then the animations that are coming here at the end. One second. Where is it? Is it the same video? Teleprompter. Yeah, I think I jumped on the Yes. Like different video. brand your story with a um here with the animations where the um things fly in and everything. This is not native Tik Tok, right? You can see this girl is shutter stock kind of content. The uh uh the the copy here that flies in the animations that is all not native Tik Tok. So this wasn't scaling and performing. So what did we do? Let me play. Everyone always asks me how I'm

able to remember full scripts in my videos. So, here's my secret. I'm using Teleprompter Big View. It's a teleprompter pro app to help you remember your lines while recording your video. Keep your eyes on the camera while reading your scripts on your screen. Nobody will know you're reading. Download now. Quick and simple. You can see even the camera is shaking a little bit in the scenes, right? So, it's like a native content piece from someone who is not a professional producer where no motion designer was involved, no Photoshop was used whatsoever. Um and and this is key to success on Tik Tok. Um this is something that many people still don't understand and you still see a lot of super high professional produced content on on this uh platform. That was even like AI voice, right? Yes. Yes, we do a lot of that. We do a lot of that. Uh AIGC is the next level, right? So uh I will talk about that a little later maybe. Um but this year is still UGC as a userenerated

content. The next level is AI generated content where we are using um AI avatars that look like real people. Um they sound like real people but everything is AI basically. Um, two more examples, but um Imbling your text will know that you're reading. Set the speed to match your page to the camera so no one will know that you're reading. Keep your light up before hitting record. Record while reading off the teleprompter on your screen versus teleprompter is probably one of the most useful things that I use because it has automatic captions. It's a great tool for personal branding, a huge timesaver as I don't need to waste time and energy memorizing scripts. I just read them off of my screen and record at the same time. It's that easy, right? Yeah. I think the first one is like TV ad. Mhm. And the second one is

like Tik Tok, Tik Tok. Exactly. Exactly. And you see in the numbers like uh it's going through the roof u with this uh more uh amateurish type of content. Yeah. Um so yeah um I think I've said everything already. We don't need to uh go too much into this slide but uh one important point here is I didn't mention that yet uh the creative safe zone. Um when when you're scrolling through Tik Tok you always see on the bottom there's nowadays also an ad. Um they show a little banner ad and then there's the who which channel is that? There's a little icon. There's a little bit of text here and there. Um, so if you're making text overlays for example or if you're showing something on the bottom of the screen, keep in mind that uh the these overlays are still there, right? So things will not be visible. Many people also ignore that um and forget the creative safe zone. That's super important. Got you. So bottom of the video will be

occupied with this native text from Tik Tok. So whatever text we want to overlay, it should be somewhere correct. Gotcha. Correct. Um, so yeah, uh, native content, promoting it as spark ads. So having this creator posting it organically and then asking for permission to promote it with paid ads. This is key to success basically. Um, what else? You should, as I mentioned, uh, already understand Tik Tok's DNA. Um, how to design and how to build the content with hook, body, call to action. um following the trends on Tik Tok, speak the language of Tik Tok, um these kind of things. But you should of course also understand users motivations like what is the pain point um that you're trying to solve? Why did you create this company in the end of the day, right? Um or why did your uh CEO create the company? Um this needs to be uh transported ideally at at the very

beginning of the video. Hey, I have this issue and by the way, here's a solution, right? Um so this is how it works and this is how people get hooked into something because they can identify themselves with that problem uh very often and if you then offer them a solution that is nice they tend to interact with the ad very nicely. Yeah. Even with the with one of those ads uh at the one that you you've made the lady said no one will know that you're reading from prompt. And I think this is one of the pain points. Yes. Right. So you Oh no, they will see that I'm reading but like you're addressing it. Exactly. It looks very natural as if you're doing free speech. Right. So that's super nice. Um the bonus tip, I actually mentioned it already. Uh creative fatigue, meaning that the ads decline very quickly. Um and you need to constantly reproduce. um where you need a lot of effort in in

the research and communication with the creators and so on and so on. Um I think there's not not much else to say. Uh same here. I think I've made most of the points already. Um to use app footage same as BigQu showed uh where you showcasing what the app actually does and so on. or if it's a product then show it into the camera obviously or open the bag and show how many other pockets are there in the bag um whatever product you're uh showcasing right um there's something where we can talk about maybe um in a follow-up session ADC and SPC um on Tik Tok this is something um where maybe more experienced uh people would ask or would talk about um so ADC are advanced dedicated campaigns. They are only ava available for iOS and um it has a lot of

um potential to improve your campaigns. But again this is something for for a deep dive session I would say same for the SPCs reach out ask us happy to um tell you a few more details about that. Um, app profile pages is also something that is very very common and very good for the performance of your campaigns when you're promoting apps. And carousel ads, no-brainer, something you should definitely try um when you run on Tik Tok. That was basically it. Um, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Here's a QR code if you want to scan it from your screen. Um, otherwise just search for me. Happy to uh tell you more. Super. Uh, yeah, QR code is there. questions, feel free to reach out to Andre. Feel free to leave the uh comments under this video. Uh give us likes. Uh we agreed with Andre uh to do uh another one but on more advanced topics. So if we get

more likes that will happen sooner than later just to kind of prove this is something that you guys want. So please don't forget to give us a like. Um, super Andrew. I I didn't know most of the stuff that you explained, so this is great. Um, I learned a lot. Hope everyone learned a lot, too. And, uh, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Until next one time. Take care. Cheers. Bye. Bye.