CHANNEL · TIKTOK
TikTok, run with voice.
TikTok creative is its own dialect. We do not cross-post from Meta and we do not measure with last-click. Both are mistakes most teams make.
TikTok rewards two things and punishes a third. It rewards creative that sounds like the platform — handheld, first-person, immediate. It rewards an honest test budget, run for at least 14 days, before any budget conclusion. It punishes attribution measured purely on last-click; the channel's contribution is meaningfully upper-funnel and arrives at the warehouse via search and direct two to four weeks later.
How we run it
- 01
Creator-style creative as a default, not as an experiment. Studio-style ads with a brand voice-over read as foreign and underperform on every test we have run.
- 02
Spark ads from real creators in the roster. We do not buy generic UGC; we work with the same creators we run for influencer programs, with usage rights agreed up front.
- 03
Holdout-based incrementality on a quarterly cadence. The 'is TikTok working?' question cannot be answered with last-click; we install a test arm and read the answer at week 8.
- 04
Weekly creative review by hook (first 1.5s), retention curve at 3s and at 10s, and CTR — in that order, not the other way around.
Where it works
TikTok is the channel where craft of the ad matters more than the structure of the account. Get the creative practice right and the rest follows.
Where it breaks
Where TikTok breaks: programs running Meta variants on TikTok with a 7-day click attribution window. They look unprofitable, get downsized, and the team concludes 'TikTok did not work for us.' The conclusion is wrong; the test design was.
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