How I Spent My First $1 Million on TikTok Ads

It's no secret that the most important thing in User Acquisition is good creatives. You can test different setups, narrow or expand the audience, do whatever you like, but if you don't have good creatives, you won't be able to spend a lot on UA with a high ROAS. The more creatives you have for testing, the better your chances of beating the odds and finding top performers. The TikTok Creative Challenge (TTCC) offers this opportunity, and I took full advantage of it.

A year ago, when I joined Zing to grow UA spends, we had very small volumes, less than $10k in daily total spend. I had to build the traffic acquisition and all UA processes from scratch, as they simply did not exist before. My main goal at that time was to grow Facebook and TikTok.

With Facebook, everything was quite straightforward and clear: how to increase spend and set up the creative testing process. I had a lot of experience with Facebook and followed a well-trodden path, as I had many cases with different projects and verticals. Although I had worked with TikTok, it wasn't as extensive, and at that time, I couldn't boast of any outstanding TikTok cases. I also significantly underestimated this platform, thinking that it was impossible to scale high volumes with good ROAS on TikTok.

Around the same time, TikTok introduced its main killer feature - TTCC (TikTok Creative Challenge), a platform where you can submit a brief and get free, user-generated video ads created by TikTok creators. I thought this was a super cool thing that hit the market at just the right time. Live, native, beautiful (and not so beautiful) UGC creatives were trending, with higher LTV and retention rate, such creatives couldn't be copied by competitors, they lasted longer than other "creative layers," and we could draw inspiration from these creatives for our internal production. Overall, there were only positives! And it is free! ??

I just needed to come up with a process for testing and scaling TTCC creatives and spend a lot with a good ROAS. Sounds very easy, right? (Of course not)

Through trial and error, sweat and blood, I gradually created the process and increased the spend, finding top performers that allowed us to scale our spend based on the principle: the more spend and/or ROAS on top performers, the more creative tests we run. These tests, in turn, transform into top performers, which we then scale. The more we spend on TTCC, the more briefs and creatives we get to test. The cycle closed, and we could scale and earn! And that’s exactly what we did.

I managed to devise the right process around TTCC creatives and use it to grow our spend from zero to more than a million $ in monthly spend on TikTok. Here are the conclusions I’d like to share:

We live in a new reality where everything is super dynamic and unpredictable. Never underestimate any sources, just as I once underestimated TikTok. TTCC is essentially a game-changer in the world of traffic, a genius tool where everyone is satisfied: the platform, the advertiser, and the creative creator. It's a maximal win-win scenario, and you don't often see SUCH solutions from market giants. I believe that at this rate, TikTok can challenge Facebook's top position as the number one source.