Are you ready to start paid advertising for your Shopify store on TikTok? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
We’re going to jump right into paid advertising in this article, so if you haven’t yet set up a profile and started growing your presence organically on the platform, you can check out how to do that and how to create an engaging strategy in our article about creating an organic plan for TikTok.
For anyone who has been promoting their Shopify store by posting on the platform and is now ready to take it to the next level by putting some budget behind your TikToks, read on.
Shopify SEO audit for your online store TODAY ⬇How Do I Set Up A TikTok Ad Account for Shopify?
Step 1: Create a login
- Go to https://ads.tiktok.com/i18n/signup/
- Create a login using an email address/phone number and set a password
- After you agree to the TikTok terms & conditions and click Sign up, you will be asked to verify a code sent to the email or phone number provided.
- You can also log in via your current TikTok business profile details here by clicking Sign up with TikTok
Step 2: Create an advertiser account
- Provide some basic information about your Shopify business, including:
- Country/Region - This ensures the platform gives you the best experience based on your local regulations & requirements
- Industry - Knowing your industry lets the platform give you more relevant and effective advertising tips
- Legal Business Name - TikTok uses this to verify your business for legal and billing purposes. If your "Business Name" does not match the actual name of your business, your account will likely be disapproved, so it’s important to ensure this is an accurate and true representation of your business
- Time Zone - Your campaign reporting and scheduling will be synced to match your time zone. This cannot be changed after initial account set up so it’s important this is correctly entered
- Phone Number - TikTok will contact you at this number to provide you with information on how to optimize your ads
- Currency - Determines what currency you’ll be billed in and how your budgets display
- Agree to the terms and click Register
Step 3: Set up billing information
- Provide info related to billing and payment
- Your country's requirements will determine the exact information needed--it may include your billing address and tax information
- You may be given the option to select Automatic (Autopay) or Manual (Prepay) payment types. Automatic payments tend to be the least labour intensive option - you simply add a card and your card is billed as you run campaigns (either at a specific spend threshold or at a specific point in the month.) With manual pay, you link a card however you need to manually top up your advertising account balance whenever you would like to run ads
- Your ad account will then be automatically submitted for approval and if you’ve submitted all the required information, should get approved within 24 hours
Do I need a TikTok Business Center for My Shopify Store Ads?
TikTok’s Business Center is essentially like Meta Business Manager, but you don’t actually need a Business Center to run ads. However, we would recommend creating a Business Center as it allows you to manage all your assets effectively (such as your ad account, catalogues, pixel, methods of payment and audiences).
The Business Center also allows you to grant access to multiple people to support with running your advertising, and to partner with other Business Centers on the platform, for example, if you want to work with an agency.
To create one, you can follow the steps below.
Step 1: Sign in to TikTok Business Center
- Go to the TikTok Business Center homepage
- You can go directly to the page from your browser, or by clicking the suitcase icon on the top right hand corner of the TikTok Ads Manager dashboard
- If you are a TikTok For Business user, but you don’t have a TikTok ad account:
- Click Log In to log in to your account
- Click Enter Business Center once you are logged in
- If you are not a TikTok For Business user, you will need to sign up as a new user
Step 2: Create a TikTok Business Center account
- After logging in, click Create
- Name your Business Center and select your time zone
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to connect your new channel to your Shopify store.
Connecting TikTok with your Shopify Store
Once you’ve logged into your Shopify store, you want to go to Sales Channels, and select TikTok.
From there click Set Up Now and follow the instructions to connect your newly created TikTok Business Center and Ads Manager.
Next you choose your data sharing levels, and can select Standard, Enhanced or Maximum. We would normally recommend the Maximum option, as it will share the highest and most accurate level of data between your Shopify store and your TikTok Business Center.
You can then create and connect a Shopify pixel via one click, or you can create a pixel in TikTok Business Center and install via code on your website, though this is a longer and more arduous endeavour with no real additional benefits. Instructions on how to do this are here.
Once you’ve completed this initial set up, you’ll have the opportunity to create a marketing catalogue, which syncs the products in your Shopify store directly with your TikTok account.
Choose the Business Center account you just set up to sync your marketing catalogue to, and the products you’d like to include for TikTok ads. We’d normally recommend using your full catalogue of available products to market.
It will normally take a couple of hours for your catalogue to sync with the platform (depending on how big your product range is), however once this is done, you’re all ready to start marketing on the platform.
How Should I Advertise my Shopify Store on TikTok?
The platform makes a key recommendation for how to think about ads on the platform - ‘Don’t make ads, make TikToks’.
The benefit of this approach is that if you create content for the purpose of advertising, but make the ads look like regular TikToks, they’ll be more likely to blend in with organic content in users’ feeds, and consumers will be more likely to interact and engage with them.
Bearing that in mind, there are several different campaign objectives you can use when advertising on the platform. Similarly to Meta platforms, objectives fall into the categories of Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.
The awareness objective should be used to showcase your brand and reach new colder consumers. Using Reach allows you to show ads to the maximum number of people and should be used to increase touchpoint frequency. Touchpoints are the number of times a user needs to see something about your business (such as an ad) to consider buying from you.
After awareness we have the Consideration stage, which includes objectives like Traffic, Video Views, Lead Interaction and Community Engagement. These objectives are designed to get users to perform a specific action, for example, clicking through to your Shopify store to find out more about your products.
An additional benefit to optimising for these objectives is that campaigns designed for these objectives can often generate higher intent level audiences for you to retarget later on - for example an audience of website visitors generated by traffic driving, or an audience of people who have watched X% of one of your videos who can then be retargeted to drive traffic at lower costs and with an expected higher click through rate.
The final category to optimise for is conversions, which includes product sales, either from your Shopify store, or via your shop on the app.
When you start advertising on the platform, we would recommend working to deliver campaigns at all levels, through awareness, consideration and conversion phases, to nurture consumers along their buying journey.
How To Set Up Your First Campaign
Setting up your first campaign is quite simple - for the purposes of this set up walkthrough we’ll use the reach objective.
Firstly, log in to your ads manager and choose Create New campaign, then choose your objective.
Then name your campaign and choose a budget. Budgets can be set as ‘daily’ which will spend a specific amount per day, or ‘lifetime’ which will spend a specific amount for the duration of the campaign.
When you start marketing on TikTok, you’ll normally have to spend circa £50 per day or £20 per ad set if the budget is set at ad set level to ensure continual delivery of your campaign.
Then click Continue.
Next, name your ad set and choose your audience. You can select different demographics, such as location, gender, age, languages, and additionally; select interests, hashtags, behaviour or creators relevant to your brand.
Once you’ve decided on your audience, simply choose your delivery schedule (how long you want your ads to run for) and budget if choosing to set the budget at ad set level rather than campaign level.
You can also then select a desired frequency for Reach campaigns, and a Bid Control if you want to - however if this is your first campaign we’d recommend removing the Bid Control and using a lowest cost bidding strategy to start with while the platform becomes familiar with your new account and product offering.
Now, you’re ready to create your ad. Simply add in the creative, copy and link (destination page) if you want to link to your site.
If you’ve integrated the Shopify pixel with your account, following creation of the ad you can then set up pixel tracking by selecting your new Shopify pixel.
After that is all complete, you can click Submit, and once your campaign is reviewed by TikTok, your ad should start delivering!
Hopefully our guide helps you get up and running with TikTok advertising; however if you need any further support when it comes to managing your social media campaigns for your Shopify brand, give us a shout - our experts are always on hand to assist.