On most paid social platforms, we tend to target broadly and allow our creative to be the primary driver for performance gains. Every new TikTok ad group will come with a prompt suggesting interest and behavior categories. Those interest categories could include Car News, Singing & Music Competitions, and Shampoos etc. We wanted to test these recommendations and see how they performed relative to broad targeting.
Looking at overall performance, using TikTok’s recommendations for targeting lead to CPAs that were 14.5% higher than targeting a broad audience. This translated to higher lower funnel metrics across the board. Broad targeting was slightly less expensive CPM wise and CPC wise and slightly outperformed on each of the lower funnel metrics as a result.
The ad group using the recommended targeting ultimately wasn’t able to win out on any KPI we looked at. Though it was a short test, we drove a number of conversions in both ad groups and both Ad Groups were able to meet TikTok’s 50 conversion requirement to exit the learning phase within the first 24 hours.
At Thesis we maintain that targeting as broad as possible is the most effective way to increase both scale and performance of your campaigns. Focusing on optimizing your creative rather than targeting will likely lead to more significant gains in performance. That said, you might as well try testing Interest targeting if you have the time and budget!
