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Like most social media platforms, TikTok pays its bills by selling ads to brands that want to reach its hundreds of millions of users. The most popular type of ad on TikTok is the “In-Feed Ad,” which mirrors Snapchat ads or Instagram/Facebook story ads. These in-feed ads run in between organic content on the “For You” page, TikTok’s individualized home page.

For marketers embarking on their TikTok journey, in-feed ads are a great place to start since you can test and learn with a small budget. This type of ad is also TikTok’s main tool for performance marketers because it allows for direct click-outs to landing pages and the app store.

There are several ways to purchase in-feed ads, including TikTok’s self-service ad platform and through reservation with their sales team. Pricing on TikTok is generally much better than other platforms, but prices are rising steadily as brands flood to TikTok. It’s worth noting that while TikTok’s targeting capabilities lag behind other platforms, the company is building them out rapidly.

To get the best results from your in-feed ads on TikTok, consider these guidelines:

Don’t reuse ads from other platforms: This is a common mistake brands make: repurposing top-performing Instagram story or Snapchat ad creative as their TikTok ads. Those platforms have a totally different visual aesthetic and storytelling norms, so that content sticks out on TikTok. It feels out of place, or worse, screams “AD!” No surprise that repurposed ad creative tends to perform poorly. The best creative for a TikTok ad looks and feels like any native piece of TikTok content.

Keep creative in line with TikTok style: The polished and elegant creative that performs well on Instagram or YouTube will feel very out of place on TikTok. Instead, follow the same best practices for creating TikTok-native videos for Brand Channels. Great ads abide by popular TikTok storytelling styles, take advantage of popular trends and include relevant music and sounds. And, yes you do need to purchase a license to the music in your ad.

Consider influencers to develop your ads: Hiring popular TikTok influencers is one strategy marketers are utilizing to give ad content a more native feel. Successful TikTok influencers can help finesse your ad in a way that feels organic to the platform, and ultimately more engaging. Influencers can also add a helpful perspective on what TikTok-centric trends would integrate best with your campaign objective. TikTok’s ad platform is integrated with their Creator Marketplace, which can be a good start for identifying influencers to collaborate with.  

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Evan Horowitz is CEO and co-founder of Movers+Shakers. He founded the creative studio in order to spread joy. The firm is breaking engagement records with unexpected digital activations and creating deep emotional connections between brands and consumers. After setting the record for most viral TikTok campaign in history, Movers+Shakers became “the go-to agency for brands making moves on TikTok” (Refinery29). They’re creating fast-growing brand channels, influencer and ad campaigns, and of course more viral challenges. Evan is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs, and a holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS Engineering from Stanford.

Regardless of whether you’re aiming to foster more leads, email signups or purchases, there are few more effective ways to create more custom than through rigorous testing. 

Given the array of tools at the disposal of marketers, just 22% claim that they’re satisfied with the conversion rates that they amass. 

Fortunately, A/B testing and multivariate testing can seamlessly combine to fully optimize the process of turning your social media traffic into conversions. 

To understand the power of A/B and multivariate testing, it’s important to remember the array of variables that comprise your website. Text boxes, images, videos, call-to-actions and various multimedia plugins all combine to bring audiences an experience that aims to result in a conversion. Testing helps marketers to discover the exact combination of elements that are best placed to encourage visitors to act on the interest that encouraged them to navigate towards your site in the first place. The same practice can apply to just about any marketing approach. From social campaigns to PPC advertising. 

For example, have you arranged the images on your website in an effective manner? Or will visitors feel overwhelmed by the overflow of visuals? It’s virtually impossible to anticipate which layout will be the most effective in keeping visitors on your pages for longer – but actively testing different setups can offer up tangible insights into how prospective customers interact with the various elements that comprise your pages. 

It’s also possible that different layouts can lead to different effects. If your website’s tone is more informal, you might find that you’ll build more engagement with audiences, but could ultimately lack the sales you were aiming for. Whereas more formal imagery could create more purchasing intent but less of engaging customer experience. 

Different businesses will require different levels of website performance, and rigorous multivariate testing helps marketers to see what online features offer varied results for users. 

Adopting A/B and multivariate testing tools can help you to generate more leads, a higher volume of subscriptions, and ultimately attract more sales. But let’s take a closer look at how both A/B and multivariate testing can directly boost your social media conversions:

Learning your A/Bs

A/B testing often referred to as split testing, actively compares two versions of a web page, email or other facets of a business in a way that can actively measure their respective performance. 

This can be done by rendering one version to be observed by one group and another to a different cross-section of users. 

To help illustrate the key concept behind A/B testing, think of yourself as a website owner, and imagine that you have two landing page layouts that you can’t decide on. 

Through tools like Unbounce and Optimizely, A/B testing allows you to test one page by showcasing it to one group while sending another to a different group and studying the results. It’s possible to study the performance of each landing page by consulting metrics pertaining to traffic, conversions or purchase intent. 

Generally, these metrics will show one landing page to perform better than its competitor and you’ll gain a clear idea of which layout would be most effective online. 

Tapping into multivariate testing

Source: Leadpages

While multivariate testing can certainly complement A/B testing, these two practices are not fundamentally the same. 

Where A/B testing helps both website owners and marketers to see which design is more popular within different control groups, multivariate testing allows users to test various campaign elements all at the same time. 

This means that various different combinations of images, multimedia, text, call-to-actions can all be displayed for different users. While some may be greeted with a large image and a sign-up prompt, others may see an introductory video when they arrive on the same website, for instance. 

Given the wide range of element-based combinations that your campaign could feature, multivariate testing is regarded as one of the most efficient ways to gain insights into the impact that your marketing campaign could have once it’s correctly optimized. 

Finteza can be a handy tool when it comes to analyzing the performance of A/B tests, enabling you to see which page performs better from a sales funnel point of view.  

Advances in marketing technology have catapulted the capabilities of multivariate testing tools into the limelight. With the right software, it’s possible to conduct tests in real-time with the same audience – providing a true sample to draw results from. This means that various combinations of elements can be sent to audiences at different times, with analytical software on hand to interpret the results and figure out which blend of elements operate most efficiently.

The value of A/B testing on social media 

Source: MeetEdgar

One of the most effective uses of A/B testing can be found on social media. Campaigns can be optimized for various audiences by sending different messages to different control groups. Where 50% of the control group is shown message A, the other 50% is shown message B. The winning version is determined by which received the highest volume of clicks or impressions. The most effective option is then broadcast to all audiences from there on in. 

Social A/B testing helps to enlighten marketers as to which message is most engaging to audiences, and what type of content creates more meaningful engagements. This form of testing can also help to provide insights into what time of day a message will be most likely to hit home and which call-to-actions are best positioned to generate conversions. 

A/B testing is best summarized by WIRED writer Brian Christian, who explains that A/B helps to generate high-quality focus-groups that can test new ideas in real-time, without any prior conditioning. “Without being told, a fraction of users are diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior compared against the mass of users on the standard site. If the new version proves superior—gaining more clicks, longer visits, more purchases—it will displace the original,” Christian surmised. 

The marketing landscape is ever-changing, and very few marketers can seriously claim to have the vision and anticipation required to stay ahead of trends. With this in mind, A/B testing in real-time is essential to gain insights into your target audiences.  

While it can seem like a complex approach to conversion optimization, there are plenty of advanced tools that can aid A/B testing methods. Notably tools like Evergage can help to optimize headlines for linked articles on different social media platforms. Content is an essential part of the process of generating new leads, but A/B testing helps marketers to figure out how best to deliver content on different platforms – leading to greater levels of traffic and subsequent conversions.

Multivariate optimization

While A/B testing can work wonders in helping marketers to decide between two different campaign ideas using quantifiable metrics, multivariate testing can deliver more comprehensive and exponential insights. 

Of course, social media is a rigid place for the testing of different messages and campaigns, but multivariate testing tools have the power to deliver fully customized website experiences for traffic arriving from various social sources. This can be a particularly effective way of catering to the different demographics of social networks – from the relative maturity of the microblogging platform, Twitter, to the more vivacious and vibrant youthfulness of Snapchat and TikTok. 

Source: Online Sales Guide Tips

Given the vast array of elements that can be altered during multivariate testing, it’s important to turn to a tool that can make the whole process of tweaking landing pages and content as simple as possible. 

VWO is an effective platform in undertaking not only multivariate tests but also A/B and split URL testing. With the help of visual editors, marketers and website owners alike can change elements on the pages they wish to test and deploy different landing pages for visitors arriving from different places across the web. Furthermore, the tool helps users to study metrics based on how long a visitor spends on pages, how far they scroll, their exit intent and a host of other custom triggers. 

The marketing landscape is ever-developing due to the arrival of more intricate and engaging technology. While A/B testing has existed in the world of marketing for some time, multivariate approaches can bring unprecedented levels of optimization and insight into the performance of different ideas and concepts. 

For better or worse, the world is in love with social media. But different platforms have evolved to be favored by different user bases. Advanced tools and testing methods can now provide brands with the agility to take on competitors on different social fronts by crafting heavily tested, personalized experiences depending on where their traffic is coming from. The World Wide Web is developing into an increasingly competitive place – advanced testing helps to give conscientious marketers a fighting chance.

Peter Jobes is the Content Marketing Manager at Solvid, a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO, paid advertising, and website designing.

This week, Jess Budde, Greg Finn, and Christine “Shep” Zirnheld cover all the digital marketing headlines before you log off for the holiday weekend.

Facebook will prioritize original reporting 

Facebook announced that they are updating their algorithm for news articles to prioritize original reporting.

If many articles related to a certain topic link back to one article as a source, Facebook would identify that article as the original report.

The social media giant also announced that, in an effort to promote transparent authorship, they will prioritize articles that list a reporter in the byline over articles that do not.

Organic Google Shopping listings can now appear in main search results

Google began showing organic shopping listings in the shopping tab of Google.com earlier this year and is now featuring organic listings in its main search results as well.

These free listings will appear in the knowledge panel, which will be powered by product feeds in Google’s merchant center, not structured data from sites.

This change sets the product listings in the knowledge panel apart from other product information found in the SERPs. This new feature will be fully rolled out by the end of the year.

Bing gives details on how they rank content

Bing released new webmaster guidelines that outline the parameters they use to rank content in the search results in order of importance.

The third item on the list, after relevance and quality and credibility, is user engagement.

This parameter looks at clickthrough rates, bounce rates, and how the user interacted with the web page after they clicked through from the search results.

Google changes desktop ad labeling for shopping ads

Instead of a “Sponsored” ad label, users will soon see the “Ads” label that is already used to specify which shopping results are ads on mobile.

More brands sign on to boycott Facebook Ads

Prominent brands like Coca-Cola, Ford, and Levi’s are joining the July boycott of Facebook Ads as part of the “Stop hate for profit” campaign.

Keith Aldrich delivers a spicy take of the week regarding Google Ads’ bid estimates.  Somehow, getting 4 more top impressions for an additional $800 CPC just doesn’t seem to add up.

I’m just going to leave this here…. #ppcchat pic.twitter.com/64jlqAR4nh

— Keith Aldrich (@keithaldrich) July 1, 2020

ICYMI, the CCPA is now officially in full effect.

If you need a refresher on how this will affect your ads, David Hermann has a helpful Twitter thread to break it down.

As a reminder, CCPA goes into effect TOMORROW. If you’re running FB ads, you’re going to start noticing CA targeting’s performance drop.

Why? FB is limiting the data you get from, well, me and other Californians like me.

— David Herrmann (@herrmanndigital) June 30, 2020

Then, we answer your burning digital marketing questions during our lightning round:

• Who is running ads on local business profiles?
• What is the difference between “Google Search Keywords” and “In-Market Keywords” in Google’s custom intent audiences?
• When did voice search start to decline?
• Where can job hunters look for support on social media?
• Why retailers may see an abandoned cart influx from shoppers named John Smith.
• How you can see Google Analytics data in Search Console reporting.

Head over to the Marketing O’Clock site to subscribe and find links to all of this weeks’ articles.

Thank you to our sponsors!

• Ahrefs – An all-in-one SEO toolset that gives you the tools you need to rank your website in Google and get tons of search traffic.
• Opteo – Helps Google Ads managers automate time-consuming manual tasks so they can spend more time on high-level strategy and creative work.

Featured Image Credit: Cypress North

CHEQ, a cybersecurity firm focused on ad fraud prevention, is expanding its ad verification solutions beyond impression-based programmatic advertising. It has launched a solution designed for paid search and paid search advertising channels called CHEQ PPC.

With the majority of digital ad spend going to paid search and social platforms, CHEQ says it has seen significant growth in click fraud with nearly one in five clicks proving non-human and/or fraudulent, according to a recent study commissioned by the firm.

CHEQ CEO Guy Tytunovich, a cyber-security veteran who started the company with a team of former defense intelligence engineering colleagues roughly four years ago, says Google, Facebook and other PPC platforms do a good job in fighting fraud, “and yet, there’s still an issue there … because there’s an inherent problem with solving [it] when you’re the biggest sitting duck on the internet.”

Citing the cyber-security truism of attacker advantage, he said, “There’s still X% of fraud that they could never eradicate.”

How it works. CHEQ PPC is designed to add a preemptive layer of protection against invalid clicks and fraudulent traffic on Google Ads, Facebook Ads and other cost-per-click-oriented platforms.

CHEQ PPC monitors the traffic that comes into advertisers’ sites or apps from their PPC campaigns and uses “thousands and thousands of honey pots” behind the scenes to identify anomalies in behavior. It is designed to block benign and malicious scrapers and web-crawlers, botnets, click farms, out-of geo clicks as well as suspicious human-driven behavior like competitor clicks and affiliate fraud.

It can connect to just about any network — Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Quora, etc.

The primary focus is on pre-emptive prevention, said Tytunovich, “where Google or Facebook or any other platform doesn’t even need to reimburse the advertiser because we’re basically excluding those fraudulent users from every being targeted.” Reimbursements, therefore, are “typically minuscule because the vast majority [of invalid traffic] is blocked preemptively,” he said.

There are two pricing models. One for small businesses, priced on click volume, and another for mid-market and enterprise companies based on levels of media spend.

Monitoring and analytics. To understand what the level and impact of bots and invalid traffic is CHEQ allows a small, but statistically viable amount of bot traffic through for monitoring purposes. On the CHEQ PPC dashboard (see above), advertisers can see that activity on a campaign level, and even keyword level for search campaigns, in various levels of granularity. There are also heat maps to show how the bots with mouse or scrolling capabilities behaved on the page or in the app. “Essentially what we’re showing is the volume of invalid users that would have come to the page without blocking,” Tytunovich explained.

Why we care. Ad fraud is not going away. CHEQ joins a number of other companies such as ClickCease, Clixtell, ClickGuard, TrafficGuard and PPC Protect in this arena. The company says it sees room in the PPC market for its cybersecurity-rooted, proactive approach to blocking fraudulent activity in the first place.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

Spam reports play a significant role: they help us understand where our automated spam detection systems may be missing coverage. Most of the time, it’s much more impactful for us to fix an underlying issue with our automated detection systems than it is to take manual action on a single URL or site.

In theory, if our automated systems were perfect, we would catch all spam and not need reporting systems at all. The reality is that while our spam detection systems work well, there’s always room for improvement, and spam reporting is a crucial resource to help us with that. Spam reports in aggregate form help us analyze trends and patterns in spammy content to improve our algorithms.

Overall, one of the best approaches to keeping spam out of Search is to rely on high quality content created by the web community and our ability to surface it through ranking. You can learn more about our approach to improving Search and generating great results at our How Search Works site. Content owners and creators can also learn how to create high-quality content to be successful in Search through our Google Webmasters resources. Our spam detection systems work with our regular ranking systems, and spam reports help us continue to improve both so we very much appreciate them.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know on Twitter.

Posted by Gary