What to pay attention to when creating an advertising creative for TikTok — in your column for App2Top.ru Mikhail Larionov, the team leader of AdQuantum for the purchase of mobile traffic in TikTok and Google Ads, told.
Mikhail Larionov
The market of marketing services is going through difficult times.
Mobile platforms are tightening their data collection policies (the IDFA restriction on iOS is the most striking example), and some tools are becoming less effective.
In the current situation, it makes sense to diversify marketing spending more actively. This includes working with those sites that were considered new until recently, and work with which is less debugged compared, for example, with Facebook.
TikTok is just one of such sites. Relatively new, relatively less studied, but at the same time fundamentally important for successful scaling, given the MAU of 1 billion.
About what things to pay attention to when working with it — I share in this material. I prepared it with the support of the Apptica analytical platform.
1. The format of creatives
When choosing a format for creativity, it is necessary to keep in mind those approaches that are most popular on the platform. It doesn’t make sense to use niche or outdated solutions. They are likely to show a smaller percentage of transitions.
Last year, the following creative formats performed best:
As a rule, this is the core mechanics of a casual project or a video from a hyper-casual product.
Since we started talking about gameplay videos, Newzoo recently released a large-scale study in partnership with TikTok. More than 10 thousand respondents were interviewed. One question concerned which game videos on the social platform users prefer. The majority — 42% of respondents — noted that they prefer walkthroughs and gameplay videos.
2. Subject matter
The performance of the video also depends on the genre of the advertised game. For example, in October-December of last year, the best results were demonstrated by the creatives of casual games. As for non-gaming applications, creatives for Entertainment and Lifestyle categories worked best.
3. Creative length
It is important to keep in mind that the TikTok audience is people with clip thinking. They are used to quickly perceive information and do not like when they have to concentrate on one thing for a long time. Therefore, the commercial should attract the user’s attention from the first seconds. The optimum is 15 seconds. This time is enough to convey to the user the most important thing.
Actually, the length of most mobile app creatives in TikTok is just 10-15 seconds. But in the last months of 2021, the number of promotional videos longer than 30 seconds began to grow.
As a rule, the longest videos are mobile game creatives. It takes more time to show both the game mechanics and the plot of the game.
The minimum length of a creative on the site is 5 seconds, and the maximum is 50-60.
4. Active advertising audience
Advertising in TikTok works best for young users from 13 to 25 years old. When choosing an audience for targeting, it is recommended to focus on this age segment.
At the same time, users aged 45+ are rated as the least amenable to advertising on this site.
Interesting fact: TikTok gamers have less developed banner blindness – that’s why advertising works better on them than on those who don’t play games.
As for the geography of advertising consumers in TikTok, the creatives perform best in the USA, Great Britain, Germany and France. Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Italy and Russia are in second place in terms of involvement.
In the fall of 2021, the geography also partially shifted to the East. TikTok creatives have become better perceived in Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia.
By the way, in a number of regions TikTok gives advertisers the opportunity to get to the most “hard-to-reach” relevant users, who are difficult to get through other traffic sources. First of all, this concerns the developing countries of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
5. Creative burnout
To ensure that the effectiveness of advertising campaigns does not decrease, you need to update the creative in them at least once every 2-3 weeks. But often TikTok commercials are “tied” to trends that lose popularity as quickly as they win it. Therefore, the launch of a new commercial even once a week is quite justified.
It also happens that the creative burns out in just a few days. Recently, we witnessed a situation where the creative burned out in just a few days. For three days we got into the KPI with the help of this creative, and on the fourth we stopped.
We associate the short-term nature of a number of creatives with the niche nature of the content they advertise. In other words, the lightning speed of burnout is due to a small number of relevant users.
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In this article, I touched only the tip of the iceberg on working with advertising content for TikTok. I will be glad to answer your questions in the comments. Plus I can always write to m.larionov@adquantum.com .