How to Duplicate a Campaign in TikTok Ads

Duplicating a campaign in TikTok Ads is one of the fastest ways to scale what's working, test new ideas, and save a ton of time. This guide will walk you through exactly how to do it, step-by-step, and share some best practices to help you get the most out of your campaigns. We'll cover duplicating at the campaign, ad group, and ad level so you can manage your ads with more confidence and precision.

Why Duplicate a TikTok Campaign in the First Place?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Copying a campaign isn't just about saving a few clicks. It's a strategic move used by media buyers to achieve specific goals. If you aren't already using this feature, you're likely working harder than you need to.

Three Main Reasons to Duplicate Campaigns:

• A/B Testing Variables: This is the most common reason. You have a campaign that's performing pretty well, but you wonder if it could do better. By duplicating it, you create an identical copy that you can then use to test a single variable. For example, you could test a new creative, a different audience, or alternate bidding strategies against your control. The key is to change one thing at a time so you can definitively say what caused the change in performance.
• Scaling What Works: When you find a winning combination of creative, targeting, and bidding, you'll want to scale it. Duplicating the original successful campaign and increasing the budget on the new one is a common scaling technique. This can sometimes help avoid disrupting the algorithm's learning on the original high-performing campaign while you try to reach a wider audience.
• Targeting New Demographics or Geographies: Let's say you have a campaign that crushed it with audiences in the United States. You can duplicate that entire campaign structure, then go into the new version and simply switch the target location to Canada or the United Kingdom. All your ad groups and ads are pre-built, saving you from having to reconstruct everything from scratch.

Understanding TikTok Ads Manager Structure

To use duplication effectively, it helps to understand how TikTok structures ad accounts. It's a simple three-level hierarchy, and you can duplicate assets at any of these levels.

1. Campaign: This is the highest level. Here you set your campaign objective (like Traffic, Conversions, or App Installs) and your overall budget (if you're using Campaign Budget Optimization).
2. Ad Group: The middle level, sitting inside a campaign. This is where the heavy lifting happens. You'll set your audience targeting, placements, budget and schedule (if using Ad Group level budgets), bidding strategy, and optimization goals. A single campaign can have multiple ad groups.
3. Ad: This is the lowest level, nested within an ad group. The ad level holds your creative - your videos, images, copy, and call-to-action. Each ad group can contain multiple ads.

Understanding this structure helps you be more precise. Do you want to try a new audience? Duplicate an ad group. Want to test a new video with an existing audience? Duplicate an ad. Need to launch your entire winning strategy in a new country? Duplicate the campaign.

How to Duplicate a TikTok Ad Campaign: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's start at the top. Here's how you can make an exact copy of an entire existing campaign in just a few clicks.

Step 1: Navigate to the Campaigns Tab

Log in to your TikTok Ads Manager account. By default, you'll usually land on the Dashboard. Click on the "Campaign" tab located at the top of the page. This will take you to your main campaign view, where you'll see a list of all your past and present campaigns.

Step 2: Find and Select the Campaign to Duplicate

Scroll through your list of campaigns or use the search bar to find the specific campaign you want to copy. Once you've located it, check the box to the left of the campaign's name. As soon as you select it, a menu of options will appear above your campaign list.

Step 3: Click the "Copy" Button

In the menu that appears, you'll find the "Copy" button. Click it. A new pop-up window will appear, giving you some options for how you want to create your duplicate.

Step 4: Configure the Duplication Settings

This pop-up is where you make some important choices:

• Number of copies: You can create up to 10 copies of the campaign at once. For most A/B tests, you'll probably just need one.
• Copy and Carry Forward Ad Group or Ad ID-related Data: This is an important setting. It lets you decide whether you want to carry over things like comments and likes from the original ads.
  • Keep it checked (default): Your new ads will show the same engagement (likes, comments, etc.) as the original. This is great for keeping social proof and can improve performance.
  • Uncheck it: Your new ads will start fresh with zero visible engagement. You'd typically only do this if you specifically want to test how an ad performs without any pre-existing social proof.

After you've configured these settings, click the blue "Copy" button at the bottom of the pop-up.

Step 5: Review and Publish Your New Campaign

After clicking "Copy," TikTok won't immediately launch the new campaign. Instead, it will create draft versions for you on the campaign creation page. The campaign name will be prepended with "Copy of - " to help you distinguish it from the original.

Now is your chance to make the changes you intended to test. Go into the new campaign's settings or its ad groups to update what you need to - whether it's the targeting, placement, or budget. Once everything looks good and your changes are in place, give it a final review and then click "Publish."

How to Duplicate Ad Groups and Ads

Sometimes you don't need to copy the entire campaign. You might just want to test a new audience within an existing campaign or a new creative variation within a specific ad group. The process is almost identical.

Duplicating an Ad Group

1. Go to the Campaigns tab and click on the name of the campaign that contains the ad group you want to copy.
2. This will take you to the Ad Groups tab for that campaign.
3. Find the ad group you want to copy, check the box next to its name, and click the "Copy" button that appears.
4. Just like with campaigns, a pop-up menu will appear asking you how many copies you'd like to make.
5. Configure your settings, click "Copy," and then you'll be taken to a new draft ad group where you can adjust the audience, budget, or other settings before publishing.

Example Use Case: You have a campaign selling hats. One ad group targeting interests in "streetwear" is doing well. You want to see if an audience interested in "skateboarding" would also work. You'd duplicate the "streetwear" ad group and simply swap the targeting interest to "skateboarding," keeping all the winning ads the same.

Duplicating an Ad

1. Navigate to a specific Ad Group by clicking through your Campaign list.
2. This will take you to the Ads tab.
3. Find the ad you want to copy, select it with the checkbox, and click "Copy."
4. Once again, you'll be asked to configure the settings. Here, you'll be taken to the ad creation screen for your new duplicated ad.
5. This is where you can upload a new video, test different headline text, or change the URL, then publish your new ad variation.

Example Use Case: You have a great hook in one of your videos that is getting high engagement. You want to test if a slightly different Call-To-Action in the text overlay will get more clicks. You can duplicate the ad and just change that one piece of text, leaving everything else identical.

Best Practices for Duplicating on TikTok

Following a few best practices will help you get cleaner data and better results from your duplicated campaigns and assets.

• Change Only One Variable at a Time. The golden rule of testing. If you duplicate an ad group and change both the target audience and the bidding strategy, you'll have no idea which change was responsible for the performance shift. Keep your tests clean. Test audience or bidding or creative - never all at once.
• Establish a Clear Naming Convention. Your ad account can get messy fast. Before you start duplicating, come up with a naming system. For example: "[Campaign Name] - [Targeting Type] - [Date] - [Test Variable]". A campaign named "Sneaker_Sale_US_Lookalike_VideoTest" is much easier to understand at a glance than "Copy of sneaker campaign 3."
• Only Scale Your Winners. It sounds obvious, but don't waste time and money duplicating and testing campaigns that are already underperforming. Focus your energy on your top 10-20% and figure out how to squeeze more performance out of them.
• Be Mindful of Audience Overlap. If you duplicate several ad groups and run them all with very similar audiences, they might start competing against each other in the ad auction. This can drive up your costs. Try to make your test audiences distinct enough to avoid significant overlap.
• Give New Campaigns Time to Learn. Every new campaign, even a duplicated one, goes through TikTok's "learning phase." During this period, performance can be erratic as the algorithm figures out who best to show your ads to. Don't be too quick to turn off a duplicated campaign if it doesn't perform amazingly in the first 24 hours. Let it gather enough data (typically around 50 conversions) before making a judgment.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Finally, here are a few common tripwires that can sabotage your duplication strategy:

• Forgetting to Change Anything: This happens more often than you might think. You duplicate a campaign with the intention of testing something new, get distracted, and hit publish without making any changes. You now have two identical campaigns competing against each other for no good reason. Always double-check your edits before you launch.
• Ignoring Your Budget Strategy: If your original campaign uses Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO), your duplicated campaign will too. Make sure your new campaign has an appropriate budget set so you don't accidentally over- or under-spend.
• Copying a Fatigued Creative: Even the best video ad gets old. Duplication is for testing and scaling, but it's not a magical fix for a creative your audience has seen a hundred times. If an ad's performance has been declining for a while, it might be time to introduce a completely new creative rather than just a variation of the old one.

Final Thoughts

Duplicating campaigns, ad groups, and ads on TikTok is a fundamental skill that shifts you from simply running ads to strategically managing them. It empowers you to test methodically, scale intelligently, and operate with much greater efficiency. Mastering this simple workflow frees up valuable time and helps inform your creative and targeting decisions with real data.

At the end of the day, running smart paid campaigns is only one part of a good social strategy. For our team, keeping the paid efforts in sync with the organic content calendar is just as important. We use Postbase to plan and schedule all our organic TikTok video content in one visual calendar. This way, we always have a clear view of our entire content engine - both paid and organic - making sure our messaging stays consistent and the whole system runs smoothly without unnecessary back-and-forth.