How to Structure Ad Groups in TikTok Ads Manager

Structuring your TikTok ad groups correctly is the difference between wasting your budget and profitably finding your ideal customer. It's the engine room of your ad account, where targeting decisions directly impact your cost per acquisition and your ability to scale. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up your ad groups for better performance, clearer data, and smarter testing.

First Things First: The TikTok Ads Campaign Structure Explained

Before you build, you need to understand the blueprint. The TikTok Ads Manager is organized into a simple three-level hierarchy. Getting this clear in your mind is the first step to mastering your ad group setup.

Think of it like a filing cabinet:

• The Campaign: This is the cabinet itself. Here, you choose your single, overarching advertising objective, like Conversions, Traffic, or App Installs. You'll also set your total campaign budget here if you're using Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO), but more on that later.
• The Ad Group: This is a drawer within the cabinet. Each drawer contains ads targeted at a specific audience. At the Ad Group level, you define who you want to reach, where you want your ads to appear, and how much you're willing to spend on that specific audience (if using Ad Group Budget Optimization, or ABO). This is where all your targeting, placement, and bidding strategy lives.
• The Ad: These are the individual files inside each drawer. An Ad is the actual creative - the video or image, the caption, and the call-to-action - that your target audience sees. You will have multiple Ads within each Ad Group.

To put it simply: Campaigns hold your goal, Ad Groups hold your audiences, and Ads hold your creatives. Getting this structure right is fundamental because it allows you to test and optimize systematically.

The Golden Rule of Ad Group Structure: Isolate One Variable

If you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this: the most effective ad group structures are built to test one variable at a time.

Imagine you create an ad group targeting men ages 25-34 in California who are interested in both "hiking" and "camping," and you run three ads on both TikTok and Pangle. If the ad group performs poorly, what was the problem? Was it the age group? The location? The interest in hiking? The camping interest? The placement on Pangle? You have no way of knowing because you changed too many things at once. You can't make an informed decision on what to do next.

A clean structure avoids this confusion. The Ad Group level is primarily designed to help you find your winning audiences. The Ad level is for finding your winning creatives. When you keep these separate, you get clear, actionable data that tells you exactly what’s working and what isn’t.

3 Smart Ways to Structure Your TikTok Ad Groups

There is no single "perfect" structure, the right approach depends on your goal, budget, and how much data you already have. Here are three proven models that work for advertisers of all levels, from beginners finding their footing to seasoned professionals looking to scale.

Method 1: The Audience Segmentation Structure

This is the most common and arguably the best starting point for most advertisers. The goal is to test fundamentally different types of audiences against each other to see which one performs best. By splitting these high-level audience types into their own ad groups, you can quickly see if you get better results from broad targeting, interest-based targeting, or custom audiences.

How to set it up:

Create a single campaign with your primary objective. Inside, create separate ad groups for each major audience type you want to test. Within each ad group, run the same 3 to 5 ad creatives.

Example Setup for an E-commerce Store Selling Coffee:

• Campaign: November Sale – Website Conversions
  • Ad Group 1: Broad Audience
    • Targeting: United States, Men & Women, Ages 25-54. No other targeting is applied. You're letting the TikTok algorithm do the heavy lifting.
    • Ads: Your 3-5 best video ads.
  • Ad Group 2: Interest Audience Stack
    • Targeting: United States, M/F, 25-54, plus interests like "Coffee," "Espresso," "Cooking & Recipes," and behaviors like interacting with food-related content.
    • Ads: The same 3-5 video ads from Ad Group 1.
  • Ad Group 3: Lookalike Audience
    • Targeting: A 1% Lookalike Audience based on your Pixel's "Purchase" event from the last 180 days.
    • Ads: The same 3-5 video ads.
  • Ad Group 4: Retargeting Audience
    • Targeting: A custom audience of users who Added to Cart but did not Purchase in the last 30 days.
    • Ads: Same 3-5 ads, maybe with one swapping in for a special discount or "don't forget this!" message.

Why it works: After running this for a few days, you'll get incredibly clear data. You might discover your Lookalike audience delivers leads for $5 while the Interest-stack audience costs $25. This tells you where to allocate more budget and where to scale back.

Method 2: The Tiered Interest & Behavior Structure

Once you've identified that interest-based targeting works well for you (using the method above), you can drill down even further. This structure helps you find the most profitable niche interests and behaviors within your broader audience. It's about getting more granular to uncover hidden pockets of high-intent customers.

How to set it up:

Here, you're breaking down related interests into separate ad groups. Instead of stacking a dozen interests into one group, you group 1-3 highly similar interests together per ad group. You're testing interest themes against one another.

Example Setup for a Mobile Gaming App:

• Campaign: App Pre-Launch – App Installs
  • Ad Group 1: "Strategy Gamers" Interests
    • Targeting: Males 18-34, Interests in "Strategy Games," "Action Games."
    • Ads: Your set of 3 creatives focused on gameplay strategy.
  • Ad Group 2: "Famous Gamers" Creators
    • Targeting: M 18-34, who follow or interact with well-known gaming creator accounts.
    • Ads: The same set of 3 creatives.
  • Ad Group 3: "Competitor" Behaviors
    • Targeting: M 18-34, with video interactions related to other popular mobile games in your genre.
    • Ads: The same set of 3 creatives.

Why it works: This approach moves past broad assumptions and gives you laser-focused data. You might learn that people who follow famous creators are twice as likely to install your app as people who follow competitor games. That’s a powerful insight that lets you refine your ad creative and future targeting strategies. It stops you from blending profitable and unprofitable interests in the same ad group.

Method 3: The Creative-First Broad Targeting Structure

This strategy can feel counterintuitive, but it's incredibly powerful on TikTok, whose algorithm is exceptionally good at finding the right user for the right piece of content. Here, you put almost all your faith in your ad creatives. Instead of telling TikTok who to target with narrow filters, you go very broad and let the creatives self-select their audience.

This works best when you have a library of diverse, user-generated-style (UGC) ads showing different angles, pain points, or benefits of your product.

How to set it up:

Here, you will use Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO). You'll typically have only one ad group targeted very broadly. You'll then "stuff" this ad group with lots of different ads.

Example Setup for UGC-Focused Clothing Brand:

• Campaign: Winter Collection Sales – Conversions – CBO Enabled ($200/day budget)
  • Ad Group 1: Broad US Women 18-40
    • Targeting: United States, Female, 18-40. No interest or behavior targeting.
    • Ads: 7-10 different video creatives inside.
      • Ad 1: A "Get Ready With Me" video featuring the new sweater.
      • Ad 2: An unboxing video.
      • Ad 3: A "3 Ways to Style This Dress" video.
      • Ad 4: a haul video featuring several items.
      • And so on…

Why it works: The CBO setting at the campaign level will automatically analyze the early performance of all 10 ads. It will see that Ad 3, the styling video, is resonating with a certain type of user and begin to heavily shift the campaign's budget toward that specific ad. In essence, the creative is doing the targeting. The algorithm finds the audience for each ad, which is often far more efficient than manual interest selection.

Best Practices for Managing Your Ad Groups

Whichever structure you choose, following these best practices will help you keep your account organized and your campaigns running smoothly.

• Use a Clear Naming Convention: This is a non-negotiable for running multiple campaigns. A clear naming system saves you from clicking into every ad group to remember what it is. A simple format works best: Date_CampaignObjective_AudienceDescriptor. For example: 10-25_Conversions_LAL1-Purchasers_US.
• Start with ABO, Graduate to CBO: For testing, Ad Group Budget Optimization (ABO) gives you full control. You can set a budget for each ad group to ensure each audience gets a fair test. Once you have identified winning audiences and creatives, you can move them into a new Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) "scaling" campaign, where you let TikTok automate budget allocation for maximum performance.
• Avoid Significant Audience Overlap: Be careful not to create ad groups that target almost the same people. For example, an ad group for "skincare" interests and another for "beauty" interests will likely have massive overlap. This forces you to bid against yourself, driving up costs. Use TikTok’s audience exclusion features to keep your targeting clean.
• Stick with 3-5 Ads Per Ad Group: In a testing environment (ABO), running 3-5 unique creatives per ad group is the sweet spot. It gives the algorithm enough options without spreading your test budget too thin. Too few ads limit your ability to find a winner, too many prevent any single ad from getting enough spend to exit the learning phase.
• Let Your Ads Run: Don’t be too eager to shut off ad groups. It takes time for the algorithm to learn. You should aim to get at least 50 of your desired conversion events per ad group before making a firm decision on its performance. Turning off an ad group after just a handful of results often means you’re cutting it off before it had a chance to optimize.

Final Thoughts

Properly structuring your TikTok ad groups isn’t about some hidden hack, it's about setting up a framework for methodical testing. By isolating variables - whether it's your audience categories, specific interests, or creative appeals - you empower yourself with the clean data needed to make smart decisions, optimize your budget, and scale your campaigns effectively.

While a killer ad strategy gets your content in front of new faces, building a lasting brand happens when that content is consistently engaging. To keep our own organic social media organized amidst all the ad testing and campaign launches, we rely on Postbase. Its visual calendar helps us plan our entire organic content strategy so our feed always tells a cohesive story, and the unified inbox makes sure we never miss the comments and DMs driven by our campaigns, turning that hard-won paid reach into a genuine community.