Identifying the target audience is the key to the success of any advertising campaign. TikTok Ad is not an exception. When it comes to advertising on TikTok, many marketers use the Ad Targeting feature as an effective tool to ensure their ads reach the right audience.
So, what is Ad Targeting and how does it work? All of your concerns will be answered below, let’s keep reading to find out the target audience for your ads.
Table of Contents
What is TikTok Ad Targeting?
Ad targeting is a series of targeting options such as demographics, interests, and behaviors to identify what your potential customers look like for your marketing objectives.
You can apply ad targeting in the Ad group when creating a TikTok ad campaign to make sure your ads will be shown to the right users at the right time.
Why does Ad Targeting matter?
The most obvious benefit is to determine your lookalike audiences. Particularly, when you set up Ad targeting, the TikTok system will optimize Ad delivery based on your advertising objective.
As a result, you’re more able to target consumers who are interested in your products and services. That also means you can decrease the chances of reaching uninterested users and minimize marketing costs for your brand.
TikTok Ads Targeting options
Demographics targeting
In demographics targeting, there are three targeting options: gender, language, age, and location.
You can choose to target the audience of specific gender depending on what products you provide. The audience age may vary from 13 to over 55 years old and the users’ language is based on their app language.
Location
With the help of TikTok Ads, marketers can target their potential customers in specific locations including cities, countries, regions, counties, departments, districts, DMA Regions, oblast, provinces, states, and urban communities. Keep in mind that some targeting options are not available in all countries.
Utilizing location targeting could be challenging as there are various signals that affect users who are matching your location-targeting choices. Additionally, because of unpredictability, TikTok Ads Managers can not ensure ad deliveries.
Interest targeting
If you want to target a group of people that are relevant to your ads, Interest Targeting is definitely for you. With the Interest Targeting section, you can find your potential customers depending on what they are most interested in and how they interact with your TikTok content.
There are two categories of Interest Targeting: Interest Categories and Additional Interest. If you want to specify the target audiences, let’s select Interest Categories. However, if you can’t find your viewers’ preferences, just type it into the search bar, and the system will automatically give you relatable options.
For further details, we will show you how to use Interest Targeting in TikTok Ads Manager :
Firstly, you visit Campaign > Ad Group
Step 1: In the Targeting option, choose your customer’s interest under Interest and Behaviors.
Search additional interests
Note: Pangel doesn’t allow Interest Targeting so you can’t find out any users from it.
Behavior targeting
With the support of behavior targeting, you can define the audience based on their recent interaction in the platform through organic and paid content. Importantly, it’s quite different from Interest Targeting which concentrates on long-term content consumption.
There are two types of behavior, and we will go through each one in more detail below:
- Video-related Actions
We can only record users’ interactions with organic video content from the last 7 or 15 days (video completion, likes, comments, and shares).
- Creator Following Actions
They offer 2 kinds of engagement under the creator’s following actions:
- Following: Brands can approach more audience that follows particular kinds of influencers.
- Viewed Homepage: You can get more users who have visited the profile pages of particular creators for the last 30 days.
Let’s take some simple steps to set up Behavior Targeting below:
Video-related Behavior
You can select users who have recently watched, liked, commented on your post, or shared a certain genre of material.
Let’s see how to set up it:
Source: TikTok
That’s how you can set up Hashtag Targeting.
Followers Behavior
Step 1: Select Add behavior: Creator interactions.
Step 2: Choose how they interacted with the creators.
Step 3: Select the kinds of creators they’ve interacted with.
Hashtag Targeting
Using hashtags is an easy way for the audience to find content that fits their tastes. With Hashtag Targeting, TikTok users can easily find your brand based on specific hashtags.
We will walk you through the detailed instructions to set up Hashtag Targeting below:
Step 1: Click Add Behavior: Hashtag interactions
Step 2: Search relevant hashtags.
That’s how you can set up Hashtag Targeting.
Targeting recommendation
Targeting recommendation is a powerful tool that allows advertisers to find the right audience through ads. Evaluating and analyzing the performance of similar ad groups and your current ad will list some of the suggested Interest & Behavior categories you can apply to your brand.
Setting up this feature is super easy, everyone can do it. Let’s take some simple steps below:
Step 1: Click Apply to use all of the suggested Interest & Behavior categories.
Step 2: Tap View Recommended to view the recommended Interest & Behavior categories before submitting.
You can edit and delete any categories unsuitable for your brand.
Step 3: When you finish reviewing, select Apply.
If you want to go back to the original suggestions, tap Reset to Original Recommendation.
Finally, you can see the targeting options for your ad group appear in the suggested Interests & Behaviors categories.
Targeting expansion
You must choose the targeting settings from the original selections if you want to set up targeting expansion:
- Audience: Reach further your Custom or Lookalike Audience.
- Gender: Consists of both males and females.
- Age: Extend the age group of your potential customers.
- Interest & Behavior: Discover more users’ preferences and behaviors.
Note: Pangle does not support Targeting Expansion.
There is no set time as the system will automatically implement Targeting Expansion.
How to enable the targeting expansion
Once you visit Ad Group > Targeting
Step 1: Select the information from the Demographics, Audience, Interests, and Behaviors
Step 2: Turn on the Targeting Expansion toggle under Device
Targeting expansion has been set up for your account
Automatic targeting
Automatic targeting is a feature that will automatically target the right audience for a marketing campaign without needing much involvement from advertisers.
Specifically, it will optimize the targeting settings based on some factors such as marketing goals, ad delivery, ad content, and previous campaign information.
How to make use of most of this function for your campaign? Let’s take a look at some steps below to set up Automatic Targeting:
Step 1: Campaign > Choose advertising objectives
It’s important to note that just some objectives that support Automatic Targeting: Traffic, App, Lead Gen, Community Interaction, and Conversion Web.
Step 2: Go Ad group > Targeting > Automatic Targeting.
Best tips for ad targeting
Set up custom audience
If you want to target views on TikTok who have already interacted with your business in order to utilize the effectiveness of social media, creating a custom audience would be the best option.
Moreover, custom audience has four facets Customer File, Engagement, App Activity, and Website Traffic.
We will get to know more about each one below:
- Customer File: It’s a place where you can add your current customers’ device ID, then TikTok will match those customers to the users on this platform. Importantly, you don’t need to worry about the privacy of users’ information due to the supported hashing methods.
- App activity: You can collect a list of users who have finished certain events within the app as view content, join groups, register, and fill out the contact form,…
- Engagement: You can create a group of users who have interacted with Ad creatives on this platform by viewing or clicking your ads. So, this would be a useful source of data for marketers in their retargeting objectives.
- Web traffic: In here with the support of TikTok Pixel, you can select users who browsed your website or took some particular actions. More importantly, the audience size needs to reach at least 1,000 to be able to use it in the Ad group.
Test different audience segmentation
You can keep all advertising setting the same, and just adjust one aspect like click, engagement, and action. After that, you can compare and analyze the results to see which kind of users are more profitable.
You can do the same with the split test function where you can compare 2 target settings of your ads. This will determine which one has better performance and also optimize your future campaign. Here’s how you can apply this function for your campaign:
Just turn it on and you will get its analysis and evaluation for your campaign.
It’s time to find the right audiences with Ad Targeting
Finding your target audience for your TikTok Ads is quite easier than you have ever thought with the support of Ad Targeting. Using it can deliver your products and services to the right users as fast as possible. In addition, including this function in your marketing campaign will broaden your brand reach and drive fantastic results.
Want to run your TikTok ads campaign effectively with the right strategy and dedicated support from experts? It’s time to try NestAds – the first TikTok ads management software, tailored-made for your e-commerce.
