We’ve been experimenting a lot more with TikTok ad capabilities recently with some of our own campaigns and some for our clients too. It’s always so exciting trying to crack the code for new platforms, but it almost always comes at the cost of wasting some budget on ideas and tests that simply don’t work. However, we’ve come across something that has been working really well so far so we wanted to share it…
Hashtag Interactions
Something we naturally tried first when we started with TikTok ads was to use the interest targeting options because we’re so used to using it on Facebook. But while we’ve been testing and experimenting recently, we’ve tried out the Hashtag Interactions option and the results have been surprising! Hashtag targeting is something we really wish Facebook ads manager would provide an option for with Instagram ads. The best way to organically grow a TikTok account in the early days was to be ranked highest on any niche related hashtags so people searching would find you first. It seems to us that if you’re targeting people who watch videos with certain hashtags, your videos will appear in both their searches and feeds, so if you get the right hashtags you’ll hit your perfect audience.
So far we’ve been adding as many relevant hashtags as we can think of into 1 ad group and it’s been working well. This is mainly due to limited budgets for testing before we go all in. It will be really interesting to see how a larger budget works on just one hashtag.
The downside
One problem with using hashtags for targeting is that not everyone uses them properly. If you’ve ever done any research into hashtags related to your brand on Instagram, you’ll know what we mean. People might post a photo of their dog to Instagram but use the hashtag #holiday because they happen to be on holiday. Not great for pet brands looking to target dog owners. So you have to be mindful of which hashtags you’re using, and do a few searches on TikTok to make sure the general content is in line with what the hashtag represents.
The other downside is that you may need to get in touch with TikTok ads support to request the Hashtag Interaction feature if you don’t already have it.
