How to Create TikTok Ads

Ready to get your brand in front of millions of highly engaged users? Creating ads on TikTok is more straightforward than you might think, and it’s one of the most effective ways to reach new audiences today. This guide gives you the complete step-by-step playbook, from setting up your Ads Manager account to launching a winning campaign and making creatives that feel like they belong on the platform.

Before You Create Your First Ad: The Essentials

Before you can run a campaign, you need to lay the groundwork. This involves setting up two critical pieces of infrastructure that will allow you to run, track, and optimize your ads effectively.

Step 1: Create a TikTok Ads Manager Account

Your TikTok Ads Manager account is your control center for everything ad-related. It's where you'll build campaigns, define target audiences, manage your creative assets, and monitor performance. Setting one up is simple.

Head over to the TikTok for Business website and sign up. You’ll need to provide some basic information about your business, including your industry, country, and billing details. The process is quick, and once you're done, you'll have access to the full suite of advertising tools.

Step 2: Install the TikTok Pixel

If you plan on driving traffic to a website, the TikTok Pixel is a non-negotiable step. The Pixel is a small piece of code that you place on your website. It allows TikTok to track the actions users take after clicking on your ad, like making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter.

Why is this so important?

• Conversion Tracking: The Pixel tells you which ads are actually leading to sales or leads. Without it, you’re just guessing.
• Audience Building: You can create audiences of people who have visited your website and retarget them with new ads.
• Ad Optimization: Over time, the Pixel feeds data back to TikTok’s algorithm, helping it find new people who are more likely to convert.

Don't let the word "code" scare you. If you're on a platform like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or WooCommerce, there are easy, one-click integrations that let you install the Pixel without touching a single line of code. You can find these options under "Assets" >, "Events" >, "Website Pixel" in your Ads Manager dashboard.

Understanding the TikTok Ad Structure: Campaign, Ad Group, Ad

TikTok organizes its ad campaigns into a three-tiered structure. Understanding this hierarchy is fundamental to setting up your ads correctly and managing them efficiently.

1. Campaign: The Big Picture

At the highest level is the Campaign. This is where you set your primary advertising objective. Every ad and ad group within a single campaign will work toward this same goal.

TikTok offers several campaign objectives, typically grouped into three categories:

• Awareness: The goal here is visibility. The main objective is Reach, which shows your ad to the maximum number of people possible within your budget.
• Consideration: If you want people to engage more deeply with your brand, you’d choose one of these. Objectives include Traffic (clicks to a website), App Installs, Video Views, or Lead Generation.
• Conversion: This is for driving specific actions on your website. The objective is simply called Conversions, and you'll rely on your TikTok Pixel to track a desired event, like a purchase or sign-up.

Your choice at this stage will determine which bidding strategies and optimization options are available to you later.

2. Ad Group: Your Targeting Hub

Nested inside a campaign, you can have one or more Ad Groups. The Ad Group is where you define who you want to see your ads, how much you want to spend, and where your ads will appear.

This is where you'll set your:

• Placements: Where your ad is shown (TikTok, Pangle network, etc.).
• Targeting: Demographics, interests, behaviors, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.
• Budget & Schedule: How much you’ll spend (daily or lifetime) and when your ad will run.
• Bidding Strategy: How you’ll bid in the ad auction (e.g., aiming for the lowest cost per conversion).

You might create different ad groups within the same campaign to test different audiences or targeting strategies against each other.

3. Ad: The Creative Itself

Finally, at the bottom level is the Ad. This is the actual video creative, caption, and call-to-action (CTA) that your audience sees. You can have multiple ads within a single ad group, allowing you to A/B test different video styles, captions, or CTAs to see what performs best with a particular audience.

A Practical Walkthrough: Creating Your First TikTok Ad Campaign

Now that you understand the structure, let's walk through building a campaign from scratch. For this example, we’ll create a campaign with a Conversions objective, as it’s a popular choice for e-commerce brands and businesses looking for direct results.

Step 1: Choose Your Campaign Objective

In your Ads Manager dashboard, click the "Create" button. The first thing you'll be asked to do is select your objective. Since we want to drive sales on our website, we’ll select Conversions.

Step 2: Name Your Campaign & Set a Budget

Give your campaign a memorable name (e.g., "Holiday Sale 2024 - Conversions"). You'll also see an option for "Campaign Budget Optimization." While helpful for advanced advertisers, it’s often easier for beginners to set the budget at the next level (the ad group) for more control over spending for each audience you target. Keep it off for now and proceed by assigning a budget per ad group.

Step 3: Configure Your Ad Group

This is where the magic happens. A well-configured ad group is what separates a successful campaign from a dud.

Promotion Type & Placements

Choose "Website" as your promotion type. For placements, you can leave it on "Automatic Placement," which allows TikTok to show your ads across its broader network. Or, if you want your ads exclusively on the TikTok app, choose "Select Placement" and uncheck the others (like Pangle).

Targeting Your Audience

This is arguably the most important part. Let’s say you're selling sustainable yoga mats.

• Demographics: You can select locations (e.g., United States, Canada), gender, and age brackets.
• Interests & Behaviors: This is powerful. Under "Interests," you could add things like "Yoga & Pilates" or "Health & Wellness." Under "Behaviors," you could target users who have recently watched, liked, or commented on videos with hashtags like #yoga, #mindfulness, or #sustainability. You can even target users who have interacted with specific creator categories. Get creative and build a profile of your ideal customer.
• Custom & Lookalike Audiences: Once your Pixel has gathered enough data, you can build a "Lookalike Audience" to find new people who have similar characteristics to your best existing customers. This is one of the most effective scaling strategies.

Step 4: Set Your Ad Group Budget & Schedule

You can set either a Daily Budget or a Lifetime Budget. A daily budget gives you consistent spending day after day, while a lifetime budget gives TikTok more flexibility to spend your money when it thinks it can get the best results. TikTok requires a minimum daily ad group budget of $20. For beginners, a daily budget is often easier to manage. You can also set start and end dates for your campaign.

Step 5: Define Your Bidding & Optimization

Since our objective is Conversions, our Optimization Goal will automatically be set to Conversion. For the Bid Strategy, the simplest and most common choice is Lowest Cost. This tells TikTok's algorithm to get you the most conversions possible for your budget without you needing to set a specific bid amount.

The Secret Sauce: Creating Ads That Feel Native to TikTok

Your technical setup could be perfect, but if your creative is mediocre, your campaign will flop. On TikTok, the best ads don't look like ads at all.

Don't Make Ads, Make TikToks

This is the golden rule. Users scroll through their For You Page to be entertained and discover new things, not to be sold to. Your creative needs to blend in seamlessly with native, organic content. If it feels like a traditional commercial, users will swipe away in a heartbeat.

Follow these essential creative guidelines:

• Shoot in 9:16: Always use a vertical video format.
• Grab Attention Fast: The first three seconds are everything. Open with a strong hook, a surprising visual, or a question.
• Use Sound: Unlike other platforms where many users watch with the sound off, TikTok is a sound-on environment. Use trending audio, compelling voiceovers, and sound effects to make your ad more engaging. You can find commercially licensed music in TikTok's Commercial Music Library.
• Leverage Text Overlays and Captions: Use on-screen text to highlight key benefits or call out important information.

Tips for High-Performing Creative

• Embrace Authentic, Lo-Fi Content: Slick, professionally produced commercials often underperform on TikTok. User-generated content (UGC) is king. Ads that look like they were filmed on a smartphone by a real person tend to feel more trustworthy and relatable.
• Educate or Entertain First: Provide value before you ask for the sale. Show a problem and how your product solves it, create a quick "how-to" tutorial, or lean into a funny trend. Value first, sale second.
• Have a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): What do you want the viewer to do next? Say it clearly in a voiceover or with text on screen ("Click the link to shop now!"). Supplement this with TikTok's customizable CTA button ("Shop Now," "Learn More," "Sign Up").

What Happens After You Click 'Publish'?

Your work isn't done once the ad goes live. The "set it and forget it" approach rarely works.

Monitoring Your Campaign's Performance

Check your Ads Manager dashboard daily to track performance. Initially, focus on a few key metrics:

• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who click your ad after seeing it. A low CTR could indicate your creative isn't compelling enough.
• CPA (Cost Per Action): How much it's costing you to get one conversion (e.g., a sale). This is likely your most important metric.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): For every dollar you put into ads, how much revenue are you getting back? A ROAS of 3x means you made $3 for every $1 spent.

Testing and Optimizing

Your first campaign is a starting point for learning. Don't be discouraged if it isn't an overnight success. Let your ads run for at least 3-4 days before making any big decisions, as the algorithm needs time to learn and find your audience. From there, you can start testing.

Duplicate your best-performing ad groups and test one variable at a time: a new audience, a different video creative, or a new caption. Over time, you'll learn what resonates with your target customer and be able to scale your campaigns profitably.

Final Thoughts

Creating TikTok ads is a powerful fusion of art and science. By mastering the platform's targeting tools and pairing them with creative that feels genuine and entertaining, you can get your brand in front of a massive and highly engaged audience. The most important thing is to start, learn from the data, and keep testing.

Once your ads start building a community, managing all the extra social engagement becomes a new challenge. We’ve been there, trying to keep track of every comment and DM while also trying to plan our own content calendars across multiple platforms - and the chaos was real. That’s why we built Postbase, to give creators and marketers a simple, reliable hub to schedule all their content (especially video) and manage a flood of new comments from one clean inbox.