TikTok Ad Secrets: 📉 ADC vs. 🎨 Smart Creative

Morning! I have 2 cool cases that I’ve recently saw in 𝐓𝐢𝐤𝐓𝐨𝐤 𝐀𝐝𝐬 with iOS campaigns 😎🧪

1st Case
We have tested campaigns with and without Advanced Dedicated Campaign (aka the AEM tech from TikTok😅) and after 2 weeks, we have seen a 20% lower CPA (we’re targeting upper funnel events in both campaigns) in the campaigns that are using ADC.

I checked the modelled conversions and… there was not modelling at all haha so for some reason, the algorithm performs better when it has ADC enabled although it still relies on SKAN signals to optimize.

2nd Case
We have tested Smart Creative feature with 2 different campaigns with the same optimization goal: Purchases.

The test was quite simple: We used Smart Ads in one campaign while the other only had manual ads.

After 3 weeks of continuous optimizations in the manual ad groups (adding the winning creatives from each testing ad group to the BAU ad group), we could never achieve the performance of the campaign with Smart Ads, which has been 19% lower week over week.

Recommendations from my side:

1. Go with ADC, you won’t see crazy modelling like Google Ads or AEM and algorithm seems to learn better (at least for now).
2. If you have a few UGC videos and your resources to produce content are a bit limited, go with Smart Ads. You will get more variations thanks to the different copies and algorithm also seems to optimize better

Have a nice week!🧪

Smart Creative