TikTok Search Ads: A Gen Z Marketer Makes Recommendations

If search engagement on TikTok doesn’t have your attention, it should; Google CEO Sundar Pichai knew back in 2022 that TikTok was making serious search inroads with younger users.

That could have real implications for advertisers, especially as Gen Z (my cohort) climbs the professional ranks and puts ourselves in position to make or influence purchases, whether personal or professional.

That said, I’m a marketer in an agency that prides itself on rigor and using every lever at our disposal to find ways to improve efficiency for our clients. And TikTok search is, to be polite, not flush with those options.

In this post, I’ll look at TikTok search from two perspectives: the user perspective, since I use it for search all the time, and the advertising perspective, in which I make a few recommendations for TikTok to be a better option for efficiently converting users like me into purchasers.

TikTok search from the user perspective

There are plenty of reasons my generation uses TikTok for search.

As a user, I can consume a tremendous amount of insightful, educational content in bite-sized clips. It’s easy to scroll through multiple videos in very little time, which can be addicting. There’s also an element of adventure – you never know what you’ll see next. At the same time, what you see is very likely going to align with your interests – TikTok knows the topics you like (e.g. exercise, marketing tips, self-care, tech, news, etc.) and can engage you with several of them in a few short minutes.

TikTok ads done well – with a catchy hook in the first three seconds, captions to convey messaging to people who have the audio off, and an organic feel – can be as engaging as organic posts. Search ads, which have the benefit of intent, have huge potential to lock in users and deliver value for advertisers.

I use TikTok’s search frequently when I’m looking to purchase a product or service. I’m looking for posts that show me user testimonials and, for products, how they actually look (in a way the images on the brand’s website don’t capture). I also use it a ton when I travel: for ideas for activities and restaurants, to check out local weather and wardrobes, etc.

TikTok search recommendations from an advertiser’s perspective

As an advertiser, I’ve seen that TikTok search can drive tons of traffic and awareness for B2B and DTC accounts – and for DTC, it can work lower in the funnel to drive conversions and purchases.

And yet.

The truth of the matter is that TikTok’s advertising functionality isn’t nearly as sophisticated as Google or Facebook’s. There’s plenty the platform can develop to be a more viable contender for advertising budgets, especially for brands looking to target younger audiences. Here are what I see as some of the most impactful upgrades the platform should invest in to draw more advertisers:

More controls

TikTok search does have match types similar to Google’s – exact, phrase, broad – and, like Google, you can use negative keywords. And the similarities don’t go much further. We can’t exactly bid on certain keywords – they’re automatically created, matched, and connected with the ads depending on the query. 

In short, right now, there’s no keyword-specific control available, and you can’t see what ad was shown for each query  Couple that with in-feed and search ad types being housed in the same campaign, and you can understand that advertisers who crave control aren’t all that eager to spend money on the platform. 

Ideally, TikTok would give marketers the ability to create separate campaigns and optimize performance according to each ad type. At the moment, though, control specific to search ads is just an on/off toggle: 

Note that you can target interests, purchase intent, and certain behaviors you think your highest-value audience will take. But so far, our TikTok campaigns have seen the best results with automatic targeting, which allows TikTok to find the best audiences for you.

More data and visibility

TikTok’s automatic placements might produce decent results from time to time, but the data you get from the platform leaves a lot to be desired. If you select automatic placements, where you give TikTok your budget and your preferred audiences and let the platform go from there, you get very limited insight into spend distribution – in other words, how much spend goes to TikTok, Pangle, or other third-party apps in the ad network (think: Search Partners for Google).

We are able to see the ad type performance (ie search vs in-feed) performance, but we can’t see ad type and placement performance together; you’re limited to this view:

You can create a custom report to view “ad type” performance at the campaign level, but there’s not a ton of nuance into the performance of different ads themselves.

Moreover – and this might be the most frustrating data gap right now – advertisers can view search terms at the campaign/ad set level but not at the ad level, so we can’t see what video ad was shown for each query. Insight into ad-query mapping would help advertisers iterate and optimize creative to dial up performance. For instance, if we knew a specific video was showing up for a theme of queries, we could measure the relevancy of that video on our end and possibly look to create new assets that matched the query more to improve our chances of showing up for those searches and leading users to convert.

Easier creative editing

For a platform that’s changed the game for short-form video, TikTok’s platform editor is surprisingly cumbersome. Adding captions to videos in TikTok, for instance, is very manual and tedious, and the same goes for updating things like colors and fonts to stay on brand.

With all the AI functionality emerging, it’s a bit baffling to think that TikTok doesn’t (yet) make it easier for advertisers to edit the content lifeblood of the platform.

Those are fairly meaty update requests, but TikTok has already done the hardest work: building a huge base of users for advertisers to engage. The next generation of purchasers is here, and as TikTok rolls out tools to help advertisers reach them, we’ll be eager to test them – and report our findings. Stay tuned to the Blackbird blog!