TikTok has recently been very quietly introducing a search ads beta for certain TikTok partners. This is a way for advertisers to reach a whole new audience of customers on the platform.
Although plans to release the project to more users have not yet been officially confirmed or announced, TikTok seems to be very quietly introducing the implementation of paid adverts within its page for displaying search results. Amongst regular TikTok search results, users are beginning to find sponsored adverts included in search results. This has so far mostly been found by TikTok partners and has not been reported by casual users as of yet.
Digital media buyers have reported sponsored ads appearing in the first four results on the TikTok search results page, and similar cases have been reported in several different search areas such as house cleaning and makeup tutorials, with adverts appearing within the first four search results every time.
What does this mean for advertising?
If this new feature is rolled out to the general public in the near future, it will allow businesses a brand new way to expand their marketing campaigns and target specific user queries towards your brand.
This will result in businesses having significantly more control over their own marketing campaigns, including the reach and targeting of their different adverts, as well as the ability to reach wider audiences. It also means that there will be a wider range of “bottom of the funnel” options, meaning that there will be significantly more opportunities to turn public awareness into conversions through the implementation of targeted and personalised adverts.
This new model will also provide businesses with the ability to make use of TikTok’s targeted algorithm to not only understand user interests better but understand audience intentions and find ways to use this information to curate even more effective advertising campaigns in the future.
Introducing the TikTok Ads Manager
This is increased by the implementation of the TikTok Ads Manager interface which is made available to any users who are also receiving the trial of the search ads feature. This will allow advertisers to view statistical data such as reports on search term click data as well as which search terms are providing conversions and how successful these are.
Looking beyond simply paid advertising strategies, there are a variety of benefits created by the introduction of search ad targeting. It allows advertisers to take measured steps forward when it comes to their TikTok marketing campaigns, including not only paid campaigns but also in regards to SEO and other forms of content creation vital to business marketing strategies.
Including some of the most successful search terms for your business within your most popular TikTok videos can be a way to reintroduce audiences to this content and make sure that it is reaching the widest audience possible, or target it to the audiences that are showing the most efficient conversion rates.
This can be implemented into SEO and content creation to help you gain higher rankings on the platform and increase your reach without having to pay the premiums associated with paid advertising campaigns.
You will be able to use the data provided by the TikTok Ads Manager feature to analyse data including the most frequently searched terms, which can help you to improve your business’s SEO implementation.
Examples of how to use this data when businesses are creating their marketing plan could include taking note of the frequency of particular search terms in relation to your product, such as “how-to”. If you are seeing a high volume of searches asking how to use your product, it may be a good idea to create some content to share on the platform which advises users on how to interact with your product and solve any common user problems. Make sure that you are including the most commonly searched terms in the titles of your content to make sure that your content is appearing first in searches from users. This can be a great way to engage with your audiences and introduce them to your product in a friendly and accessible way before they have even travelled any further down the marketing funnel.
The other benefit that arises from this new data is that it can help businesses to use converted users to expand audiences, and target any future campaigns towards audiences you know statistically are highly likely to interact with your content and be more likely to convert. Alternatively, it could spur a business to target other audiences who they have not yet managed to reach to greatly expand their reach.
Affiliate marketers will be able to take advantage of this feature to understand their audience behaviours better. This means that businesses will be able to better choose the right affiliate for each new campaign they introduce, resulting in a higher success of affiliate campaigns.
All in all, TikTok seems to be taking the right steps toward introducing much more opportunities for monetization by including this new advertising feature. Although this beta software is not yet available to the public as a whole, it looks like if the pilot is successful this could be an extremely beneficial feature that businesses would be able to use to their advantage in the creation of TikTok advertising campaigns in the future.
If you want to learn even more about affiliate marketing techniques and how to make use of them in your business, it’s your last chance to get tickets for the Elevate Summit taking place next week, on the 14th and 15th of June.
