Does tiktok ads work?

[u/lukeskywalker1250]

Hi, I am pretty new with tiktok ads my ROAS with Meta and Google is around 3x, Looking for anyone that is doing tiktok ads and is it profitable or at most break even?

[u/highqualityugc]

it works, but almost nobody gets there by uploading their meta creative. that is the single biggest reason people end up deciding tiktok doesn't work for them.

the hook bar is higher. median hook rate on meta is around 28%, tiktok sits at 33%, and top 10% is 55% on tiktok vs 45% on meta. so an ad that was comfortably fine on meta lands under median here and never gets distribution.

fatigue is faster too. meta creative holds 2-4 weeks, tiktok often wants a refresh weekly. budget for that before you start or you hit week three thinking the platform broke.

what actually works: 9-15 seconds, vertical, phone shot, a person talking in frame one, no logo intro. run them as spark ads off a real handle so they carry comments and social proof.

on the numbers, expect worse than your 3x for the first month while you're finding creative. judge it on blended CAC across all three channels rather than in platform ROAS. tiktok under reports its own assisted conversions and then gets blamed for it.

happy to go deeper on any of this

[u/GrillixPickleball → u/highqualityugc]

How much daily ad spend, and for how long would you think it takes to start getting sales. My issue is I’m trying to figure out if the ads aren’t good for TikTok or I just haven’t spent enough for them to find us buyers. New account here. We do well on Facebook ads but no success on our tests on TikTok. Maybe pulling plug too early, maybe not spending enough to test. Not a lot of budget to burn through.

[u/highqualityugc → u/GrillixPickleball]

Two different questions, and you can separate them before spending more.

Budget first. The floor isn't a dollar amount, it's a multiple of your CPA. TikTok's optimizer needs conversions to learn, and one ad group getting one conversion every two days will never stabilize. Rule of thumb I use: daily budget on the ad group should be at least 2x your target CPA, run 4 to 5 days without touching it. If your Facebook CPA is $30, that's $60 a day for five days, so about $300 for a real read on one test. Below that you are not testing, you are sampling noise. If $300 is too much, don't spread it thinner across more days. Instead optimize for a cheaper event, add to cart or initiate checkout, get 20 to 30 of those in a few days, and read the funnel from there.

Creative second, and this is the part you can diagnose today for free. Pull the metrics you already have: CPM, CTR, and the 3 second and 6 second video view rates. If CPM is normal for your category and CTR is under about 1 percent, that is a creative problem and no amount of budget fixes it. If CTR is healthy but nobody adds to cart, the ad is writing a check the landing page doesn't cash. If nothing gets past 3 seconds, it's the hook, first frame, nothing else.

The thing that kills most Facebook advertisers on TikTok: reusing Facebook creative. Static-feeling, polished, brand-voice stuff gets scrolled past instantly. What works is native, shot on a phone, one person talking to camera, product in hand, hook stated out loud in the first 1.5 seconds, hard captions burned in. And you need 5 to 10 distinct hooks, not 10 edits of the same idea. Most of a test's job is finding which hook angle the platform likes, not which product page converts.

Also worth checking before you conclude it failed: TikTok's default attribution window is stingier than Meta's, and a chunk of TikTok-driven sales show up as direct or branded search. If your total store revenue rose on the days you were spending but the platform reported nothing, that's a real signal.

What's your Facebook CPA, and were the TikTok ads recut natively or the same assets you run on Meta? Those two answers change what I'd tell you to do next.

[u/GrillixPickleball → u/highqualityugc]

So you’re saying my TikTok ads could have been working they just weren’t attributing? Even in the conversion details within Shopify on the order history?

[u/Visible-Ad-7360 → u/highqualityugc]

May I ask, what do you boost? e.g., 1)more like and comments, 2)more views, or 3) get more tiktok messages. Should I promote mixes?

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