TikTok kicked off Advertising Week in New York with a flurry of announcements covering artificial intelligence-powered automated performance tools, enhanced measurement capabilities, and new privacy technologies for advertisers.
“TikTok is building for the future,” global head of monetization product solutions and operations David Kaufman said in a statement. “We have been listening, learning, and innovating with our advertiser partners to continuously develop solutions that deliver performance. Our goal with these new solutions is to empower brands to engage their communities on TikTok and achieve business results.”
The platform’s new Smart+ suite of tools uses the TikTok Symphony AI capabilities the company introduced at its fourth annual TikTok World event in May to automate the performance bidding process across targeting, bidding, and creative.
Advertisers input their assets, budget, and targeting goals, and Smart+ uses TikTok Symphony to create or choose the best asset, selects the best audience, and serves the ads to the users most likely to convert.
Smart+ is launching with four available objectives: Smart+ Web Campaigns to drive traffic and lower-funnel actions, including sales, on advertisers’ websites; Smart+ Catalog Ads, delivering relevant product recommendations to users based on their interests, intent, and actions, also driving lower-funnel outcomes; Smart+ App Campaigns, geared toward application installs and conversions; and Smart+ Lead Generation Campaigns, designed to convert people who have expressed interest into high-value customers.
TikTok said its internal data showed advertisers using Smart+ Web Campaigns to optimize for value seeing improvements of up to 52% in return on ad spend.
“Adopting a fully automated solution that optimizes targeting, creative, and campaign performance has led to a 50% reduction in cost per acquisition, a 47% increase in conversion rates, and a 42% improvement in ROAS [for RayBan],” Roberta Atzori, performance marketing manager at EssilorLuxottica, said in a statement.
Merchants on TikTok Shop can tap the platform’s new GMV Max solutions to automate campaign creation including audience targeting, bidding, and creative selection.
GMV Max works by optimizing traffic across merchants’ organic content, paid ads, and affiliate posts to boost their return on investment, and TikTok said it slashes the time required to set up campaigns in half and gives sellers access to shoppable placements across the platform’s For You feed, search, and Shop tab within a single campaign.
The company said brands in initial testing of GMV Max saw an average gross merchandise value gain of 30%, and Arrae co-founder and co-CEO Nish Samantray added in a statement, “GMV Max allows us to focus on other parts of the funnel that are more important, like creative optimization. We all know that creative is the most important part of ad buying, so GMV Max allows our team to focus on just that.”
On the measurement front, TikTok is now offering its Conversion Lift Studies to brands of all sizes.
Conversion Lift Studies calculate the impact of TikTok campaigns beyond the last click by drilling into the relationship between ad exposure and consumer behavior to measure sales that would not have taken place without the customer having seen a TikTok ad.
The company’s internal research found that 79% of purchases driven by TikTok are not attributed to the platform, and measuring simple click-and-buy undervalues TikTok conversions by 73%, adding that its advertisers are seeing average conversion rates at least 25% above those for people not exposed to the TikTok ad.
Finally, TikTok announced integrations with third-party and open-source privacy-enhancing technology providers including Anonym Trusted Execution Environments, Amazon Web Services Clean Rooms, LiveRamp Clean Rooms powered by Habu, and Secure Multi-Party Computation.
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