TikTok Search Ads Just Released

Hey 👋

TikTok’s been on a roll lately with new features every month — but this addition actually changes everything for DTC brands 👀

Instead of popping up on someone’s feed and hoping they care about your product, you can now reach users based on their searches 😮 

That’s Search Ads, and in this post, we’ll show you exactly how to use them 🔥 

1. Just What are “Search Ads”? 🎯 

It’s a feature that lets you show ads to users who are searching for specific terms only.

This let’s you do a few things:

1️⃣ Convert At The Peak of Curiosity — you get the right eyes on your ads at the right time.

2️⃣ Capture User Intent Across Keywords — meaning you can capture demand across a huge variety of interests with keyword targeting.

3️⃣ +20% In Conversions —  based on TikTok’s testing, advertisers who run Search Ads with In-Feed ads see an increase in conversion rates of 20%.

Also based on their testing, 18% of users who saw an in-feed ad but didn’t convert, actually converted when they saw a search ad for the same product.

For the consumer, your ads shows during search like this:

Now, we’ll show you how to set them up & two very telling case studies 🔥

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2. Search Ad Campaign Setup & Case Studies 🔩 

Search Ads are now available right in your TikTok Ads Manager — when choosing either web conversion or traffic campaign as your objective, you can select “Search Campaign”.

Here’s a handy visual tutorial:

Once keywords, bids, and budgets are set, you can add a mix of video and carousel assets, with TikTok auto-selecting the best creative match for each search.

You can even update keywords and assets mid-campaign to adapt to any ongoing trends!

Let’s have a look at how these search ads perform in different niches:

1️⃣ Clinique

Using Search Ads resulted in Clinique getting 74K+ incremental search impressions, and an insane 441% conversion rate increase 🔥

2️⃣ DIBS Beauty

CPA lowered by 22%, +8% in CR, and their conversion rate during Black Friday was increased by 6x with Search Ads compared to in-feed ads 👀

P.S — BFCM is right around the corner, and if you want to be best prepared for it, check out our BFCM Campaign Checklist.

Now, we’ll show you a goldmine of consumer behavior data for market research, right within TikTok’s app.

3. Market Research Right Inside of TikTok? 📊 

TikTok Creator Insights — this is the goldmine of market research. You can type "Creator Search Insights" in the search bar or find it directly from Creator Tools in settings.

Here’s a visual showing where you can find it and how it looks:

Creator Search Insights shows popular search topics, that you can filter by categories like tourism or sports, or by relevance to the creator’s content.

It also highlights "content gap" topics — subjects that are frequently searched but have few related videos available, a.k.a big problems people are having that don’t have solutions.

In short, TikTok Creator Insights:

1️⃣ Shows What People Desperately Need

2️⃣ Highlights Topics with High Demand but Low Supply

3️⃣ Reveals Trending Questions in Every Industry

4️⃣ Tracks Search Growth over 14-day periods

The coolest thing about Creator Insights is that it’s real-time market research, showing real-time actual user intent, it’s free and nobody is actually using it 👀

And that’s that! We’ve gone over what TikTok Search Ads are, how to set them up, a few sick case studies & a free hidden gem for market research 🔥

BTW — If you want to learn about TikTok growth methods that you can implement alongside your Search Ads Campaign, check out our post on TikTok Growth Hacks!

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Daniil from ECORN