TikTok's global and domestic growth trajectory has been impressive and now leads any other social platform in daily time spent. This is an exciting opportunity for advertisers, especially in the face of Meta, Google, and Amazon's stranglehold on media dollars. From a platform perspective, TikTok Ads had the advantage of being built after the other more mature platforms found the best strategies and worked out many of the kinks inherent to platform-based advertising. While TikTok hasn't reached Meta and Google's must-have media mix status just yet, there are plenty of opportunities for brands to test the platform and take advantage of the engaged audience that Tiktok provides.

The team at space150 is well-versed in a variety of online ad platforms, including Google Ads, Meta for Business, Pinterest, Linkedin, Snapchat, Reddit, various DSPs, and more. As we're now live with TikTok ads for a few clients, we wanted to share three key nuances of the platform we've uncovered during our initial test campaigns.

CRM match defaults to Mobile-ID.

While platforms like Meta for Business usually allow for manual upload of customer matches with phone and/or email, the default in the Tik Tok platform is mobile ID, which fewer advertisers have access to.

Recommendation: You can request to be white-listed for phone OR email upload beta. Given this is still in beta, we are cautious about the impact this will have on performance.

Website retargeting audiences start populating after campaign launch.

Typically, placing a platform pixel on your site starts populating a retargeting audience immediately, but the TikTok pixel starts collecting data once Tiktok Ads are clicked on.

Recommendation: If retargeting is a major pillar of your social targeting strategy, be aware that retargeting audiences can only be launched after an initial campaign is driving traffic from TikTok and will take an extended period of time to ramp up.

The platform doesn't allow adding ad groups to campaigns.

There are many limitations to editing a campaign once it's live but the most surprising is that you cannot add ad groups that are common on other platforms for the purposes of easier optimization and reporting across targeting or creative strategies. The only alternative is to create a net-new campaign. This is not only time-consuming, but limits optimization strategies, and may impact the learning phase and subsequent performance of the campaign.

Recommendation: Plan ahead to duplicate/rebuild campaigns vs. making edits in the platform. This impacts time but also reporting as certain metrics could be fragmented across campaigns.