Are You Wasting Money on TikTok Ads? (And What to Do)

A handful of years ago, I would have told you that the best go-to social media platforms to use for advertising were Facebook and Twitter. With the fall of Twitter and the AI saturation of Facebook, these days it's hard to say either one of them is really worthwhile. Instead, a new slate of social networks and community sites has taken the forefront. Among them, TikTok is one of the largest and potentially most attractive.

If you've decided to run some advertising on TikTok, you might be wondering if it's worthwhile or if you're just wasting money that could be better spent somewhere else. It might not be easy to tell, so I figured I'd write a guide on how to decide.

Defining Success

The first thing you need to do is figure out what success and failure mean to you.

If you're paying for ads and you get some returns, does that mean they're successful ads?

Some people aren't satisfied with ad performance unless they double their initial investment. Some aren't happy unless they effectively go viral over it. Some are just happy to get a handful of conversions and a bit of traction.

One of the most common metrics used to evaluate ad performance is ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend. I've talked about it before (in the context of Facebook ads in particular), but it applies to any ad platform.

Usually, you want to aim for a positive return on ad spend. But, depending on the industry and the products you sell, that might not happen. It also gets difficult to calculate when you consider the intangible benefits of ads, like fresh followers for your account, new newsletter subscribers, and just general awareness.

So, start by defining, in broad strokes, what you consider a success. Then, if you don't meet that bar at all, then your ads are pretty clearly wasting money.

What Makes a TikTok Ad Fail?

TikTok ads aren't universally going to be approved, and if they are, they aren't always going to do their job.

Why might an ad get rejected?

• You're trying to promote a product that is prohibited on the platform. For the most part, these are normal rules: no illegal items, no drugs, no tobacco, no adult items. Some can be tricky, though; weight loss products are prohibited and supplements are restricted, for example.
• Inappropriate language. I don't mean swearing, but TikTok has some rules about things like explicit (and misleading) before-and-after language, exaggeration in the claims you make, and overly-personal use of "you" in your ads.
• Bad videos. If you're using one of the video formats for the ads, TikTok expects vertical video without watermarks and without blurs or obvious attempts to get around copyright detectors.
• Bad landing pages. Even if your ad itself is fine, if your landing page is slow loading, sucks on mobile, or isn't related to the ad copy, they can reject your ads over it.

If you get your ad through and it runs, it can still also be very poorly converting, so that's worth looking into as well.

Why TikTok Ads Don't Work

Other than rejection, there are plenty of reasons why ads on TikTok can run but won't get attention and won't result in conversions. If your ads aren't converting, then you're certainly wasting money, and it comes down to how much and figuring out why it's happening.

One big reason is that you just aren't providing content that hooks people. TikTok is already a short-form video platform, and the people who habitually browse it are prone to swiping past videos in just a couple of seconds. Ads that don't have something to hook a viewer immediately aren't going to get much attention at all. Spinning up something compelling in three seconds or less is critical.

Another reason is that your offer doesn't hook people. A lot of people make the mistake of using TikTok ads as a sort of passive, long-term strategy, but they're really best used for immediate offers. People on TikTok consume and consume, but they don't as often retain information about the videos they watch, so using them for awareness is often kind of a waste.

You also just have to consider whether or not your business is attractive to TikTok's average user. Most people actively using TikTok are young, from the youngest millennials to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They want fast creativity, they want innovation, and they very much don't want stodgy business talk, fine print, and B2B marketing. A lot of brands see "TikTok is huge" and decide to try to advertise there, despite their target audience having nothing to do with the site.

A surprising cause is actually investment. TikTok's ads are powered by algorithms that take real-time performance and learn what kinds of people respond best, and show your ads more to those kinds of people.

Normally, when your ads do well, you would increase your budget to take advantage of it while you can. Unfortunately, with TikTok, if you increase your budgets too much or too quickly, it "resets" the algorithm and can actually slow down your ad performance. Smaller increases are fine, but larger jumps cause problems.

And, of course, there's always the perennial "your targeting is bad" on the list. TikTok ads have some pretty strong algorithmic optimization behind them, so if you're trying to do a lot of that manually, you might overly narrow your audience and end up getting too little exposure.

If you're watching your metrics, a good set of rules for when the alarm bells should start ringing is:

• If your ROAS is under breaking even.
• If your CTR is under half a percent.
• If your CTR is high but you aren't getting conversions.
• If your CPM is very high (over $10-15 or so).

These are general indicators that your performance is poor and you need to reevaluate.

What to Do if You're Wasting Money on TikTok Ads

If you've determined that you're wasting money on TikTok, something needs to change.

The first big decision you need to make is whether or not you think TikTok is right for you.

• If your audience is primarily older, TikTok might not be for you. The majority of their user base is under the age of 35, and most are under 24.
• If your audience is mostly male, you'll have a harder time. TikTok swings more female at 54%; there are still plenty of dudes on the site, though.
• If your product is business-oriented, B2B, or less fashionable, it might not be for you. People are more likely to buy a cool shirt than a business app.

As much as I like to say that anyone, with sufficient cleverness, can advertise successfully anywhere, the truth is, there's going to be a lot working against you. No amount of cleverness can surmount the fact that trying is going to cost money, and at some point, that money is just too much to be worthwhile.

So, there's option one: just stop. If TikTok ads really aren't for you, it's not worth throwing money into a hole in hopes of getting some mediocre returns. Instead, spend that money on content marketing, or social ads on a platform more suited to you, or on print advertising, or on customer support, or any of a thousand other avenues for value.

On the other hand, if you've decided that the problems are fixable, you can take action to try to improve your ads to better hook your audience.

Make Sure Your Budget is Set Correctly

TikTok ads have minimum budget requirements to function at all, so if your budget is too low for "testing," you'll find that they won't work. You need a minimum of $20 per day per ad group and $50 per day per campaign.

Realistically, you'll probably end up wanting 5-10x that to keep your ads rolling, as a bare minimum. There are certainly people out there spending six figures weekly, and it works for them at their level.

Allow Broad Targeting

A common mistake with TikTok ads is to try to treat them the same way you would treat ads on a platform like Facebook or Google. On those platforms, you need to layer a bunch of targeting options to get a narrow, defined audience so you can advertise to them.

TikTok is pretty different. One of their biggest advantages is a process that refines itself as you run ads. As your ads are shown to people, TikTok learns who is most responsive and focuses on showing your ads to those people. This process takes around seven days or 25 conversions, whichever comes first.

If you overly narrow your audience from the outset, you're going to restrict who can see your ads and, consequently, hamstring the algorithm. Instead, allow broad targeting to let the system refine showing your ads, and use that information later for more refined targeting to start new campaigns.

Refresh Your Creative

TikTok audiences have short attention spans, but they also have enough memory to know if they've seen the same basic ads before, and they'll tune them out if they get saturated. Generally, my first action when I take over TikTok ads for a client is to pause any campaign that isn't performing and perform a full creative refresh.

It can also be pretty killer to have ads running along outdated trends. TikTok is a trend setter, in that internet-wide trends often start there, but that also means by the time you recognize a trend, make some new creative to capture it, and run that as an ad, the site has already moved on. This gets worse the longer you let an ad linger with outdated creative.

Don't forget the mechanical elements of TikTok while you're at it. Little things like the use of hashtags, mention of current trends, and the use of user-generated content can all be valuable.

Make More Interesting Ads

It's difficult for a lot of brands to admit, but TikTok ads require a specific kind of creativity that even a lot of marketing managers just don't have. Ads on TikTok are very sound-forward, they're active and mobile, they're based on storytelling and resonance, and they can get all of that across in just a handful of seconds. It's a very particular set of skills that a lot of marketers just don't have.

The truth is, sometimes you might just need to pay someone to make good TikTok ads for you, even if the rest of your marketing is done in-house. There's no shame in that. It's a different world out there.

If all you've been doing is running voiceover snippets of podcasts or repurposing Facebook videos and Instagram reels, you're gonna have a hard time. Focus on quality video and audio, hook-first framing, and a soft sell for the best effect.

Finally, make sure you're monitoring all of your metrics as you go. You want to see tangible improvement when you make changes. If things don't get better, it might be time to reassess again whether or not TikTok is right for your brand at all.