How To Run TikTok SEARCH Ads in 2025 (Full Guide) transcript

Google's been doing this for years, but now Tik Tok just changed the game. You can finally run ads that show up when people search on Tik Tok, and the targeting is scary accurate. And we know for years that people have been migrating to Tik Tok for search because they look up routine videos, recommendations, how-tos. They look for Tik Tok to get advice because the videos are authentic and they trust them. And a lot of people have been using Google less and Tik Tok search more.

So, what a better way than to be able to run Tik Tok search ads to get in front of this traffic and showing your ads, products, service in front of those very people who are already qualified by asking the exact thing that your product or service offers or solves. So, in today's video, I'm breaking down exactly how Tik Tok search ads work so that way you can fully leverage them and maximize sales and leads from your Tik Tok search campaigns.

So, let's go ahead and get into the video. So, one of the first things you're going to do is go inside of your Tik Tok ads manager. And what we're going to do is we're going to hit create. And this campaign type for Tik Tok search is good for both service-based businesses and good for e-commerce based businesses that are either looking to send them directly to their site or a lead form. So, this method works for both, but we're going to go ahead and select sales and we're going to choose website.

And what you'll see is there is a new section where you can choose search campaign. Now, this feature has been around for a little bit within beta, but most ad accounts have access to this now. And you can create a campaign with keywords and serve ads in front of those people searching exactly for what you want your ad to show up for. So, we're going to go ahead and choose search campaign. We'll continue. And we're going to go ahead and name our ad group.

So, we're going to name this a broad audience. And we'll eventually change this to the keywords that we're going to be targeting. The first thing we'll do is we'll choose website. We're going to choose conversion. We're going to choose our pixel that we have connected to our website. And we want to make sure that our conversion objective is either purchases, leads, or scheduled calls, depending on what you're looking to get.

Once you do that, you're going to continue to scroll down here. There is a target CPA you can choose. We're going to avoid putting anything in this box for now. We're going to go down. And as you can see here, anything that people search on TikTok, so they could be searching what is the best way to gain weight while bulking on a workout plan. And you might be offering a workout plan that helps with people who are looking to bulk or people who are looking to lose weight.

Maybe you have a weight loss product or people who are looking to, you know, solve a specific problem in their house around, you know, hanging or patching up a wall. Maybe you offer that product or service. This is where you can get in front of them. Now, for the demographics, we're going to leave this pretty wide range open because if people are searching for it, we're going to use that as our qualification metric. So, we're going to leave that information wide open.

We're going to scroll down here and you have a few more detailed targeting options, but really what we want to get to is the keywords. And we're going to go ahead and select keywords. And now what we can do is search up specific keywords. Let's say that we're selling house plants or, you know, uh, anything with plants in a home. So, we can type in plants and we can see what some of these searches are that people have.

So, there's a keyword where plants has about 20,000 monthly search volume. Okay. And then we have plant. Then we have best plants for Zen garden, nightshade plants, triumph plants. So it gets a little bit more specific, but maybe we have, you know, plants for beginners. There's a few different plant options here that we can look at. And let's just go ahead and say that we're selling, you know, succulents or a house plant that we want to end up targeting.

So we can go ahead and build a keyword list and add plants to this. We can choose that keyword. So plants, and then we can go ahead and do plants for beginners. And we can even do house plants. And here's that keyword search. Indoor plants. House plant. Best indoor plants. So these are some good keywords. We could do succulents. And then there's succulents because that is what we're selling. Maybe we're selling a snake plant.

There it is. 8K monthly search volume. So we already have a pretty good keyword list here. Now the match type is what is important. So if you just have plants, that could mean quite literally any plant. So, if we're selling succulents and, you know, smaller plants that don't really need much watering, that is more for beginners and we might not want to go broad on just plants in general because it could be outdoor plants.

It could be even interpreted as garden. It could be a lot of different things. So, we want to make sure that we don't go broad on this specific keyword. We want to make sure that maybe we want to go exact on this. And then plants for beginners, we want to go exact as well. And then house plants. We want to make sure that that is phrase. And phrase is essentially as long as they include that keyword in their sentence.

So what are the best house plants? That would be phrase match. Exact would be they typed in this exact keyword. So they typed in plants for beginners. So we want to target that exactly. Now broad would be plants for beginners or it could be what are some ways that I can improve my home and make it feel more lively. So, it doesn't even include the word plants, but your ad could show up for that and it could be relevant in that sense, but it's not going to be the most high quality traffic.

What we want is people who are searching with high intent because we can do lower budgets and get a really good return on ad spend or very high quality leads just like on Google except for lower cost per click and drive, you know, the highest quality traffic. So, we want to be quite specific in this sense. Indoor plants, we're going to use phrase for that. Best indoor plants, we're going to use exact. Succulent, we can use, you know, phrase for that.

And then snake plant, you know, we can use phrase for that as well. So that way we kind of have a mixture of exact and phrase. Broad would be, you know, if something if if you offer hundreds of different plants and you're just going to indoor, outdoor, maybe that makes sense. So you could have that as a broad keyword. But essentially, we'll continue stacking up these. And you want to build up a good keyword list size.

You are maxed out at a thousand. You don't necessarily need a thousand, but there's tons of different ways to end up doing keyword targeting. But in this case, we're going to revolve this category of keywords around plants specifically. And then what we can do is make a separate audience, which is, you know, potentially about how to improve my living space or how to bring make it more lively. That is where it's, you know, we're kind of recommending the product based off of like what they're interested in or home decor or home improvement, you know, helping with happiness.

We know plants help with that. So, that's where you would get into separate audiences, but you don't want to mix that in with this. You want this one to be very specific. So, we're going to go ahead and hit confirm. And we're going to see that we have about, you know, 712,000 monthly search volume. Tik Tok says that's low, but, you know, that's really not a big deal. We can end up increasing this by adding a few more keywords, but we're going to go ahead and name this phrase slashexact for plants slash succulents slash snake plant.

And this is like kind of our keyword audience. And then what we're going to do is we're going to scroll down here and we can add a few more, but we're going to start our daily budget a little bit lower here at $30. So that way we can do some testing. Now coming back to the target CPA, which we mentioned earlier, we do have to input a number here. And this is going to be what your target cost per purchases in this case or your target cost per lead or target cost per call.

This is what you want to pay on average. So, if you're fine with, let's say, our succulents or our, you know, snake plants are selling for $40 and we know that we have to maintain a certain margin and we don't want to spend any more than, you know, $15 cost per purchase. Well, that's what we would input. So, you'd input the number that you're comfortable with spending and whatever that number is, you usually want to go up$1 or $2 off of that.

So, that way there's some flexible range there. So, if you want to stay around $15, just go ahead and bump it up a couple of bucks. So, that way you can ensure that you're getting delivery on your actual ads set. Otherwise, it won't spend and it won't actually get out there. Now, from here, what we're going to do is we're going to scroll down and go ahead and hit continue. And this is the part where we want to build out our ads.

And this is very important. You want to include all of your best performing ads. So, if you have video ads that have historically worked for you, you want to put those here. And the different types of creatives that you want to leverage in this are going to be based off of what they're searching. So if they're searching succulents, you want to show succulent ads. If they're searching house plants for beginners, you need to have a video that's house plants for beginners.

And here's plant number one, plant number two, plant number three in that video. And the best ways to improve your home space with plants or here's a review around the best types of plants to have in your home if you're just getting started with gardening or indoor plants. So you want to make it relevant in that sense because it's going to drive up better results. Let's say you're doing this for roofing, right? So if somebody's searching, you know, best roofing providers in XYZ location, you want to have your service listed around what you do in that area and what you fix.

So it needs to be highly relevant. You want to have around anywhere between five to 20 different ad types. You don't need that many, but ideally the more the better because Tik Tok can then show the best ad based off of the relevant search term and you can get the best combination of ads showing whenever somebody's actually looking that up in the Tik Tok search bar. So whenever somebody searches, your video is going to show up right here as sponsored.

And you want that headline to show in the first 3 seconds of the video. That way it's relevant. Pretty much what they're searching, you kind of want that video to be showing that. So from there, we can go ahead and adjust our call to actions. This is pretty straightforward. what you're offering is if you're selling plants, you're going to do shop now, and you may do learn more. You may do check it out, order now, interested.

You want to choose things that make the most sense for what they're clicking on. And then from here, you're going to add your five to seven videos and make sure that you send them directly to your product page or your collection page. Now, your headline is equally important when you do this. So, whenever you add your video, you're going to have the option to input your headline. So, you want that to be very short, just a few words calling out exactly what it is.

So, house plans for beginners or the best plant that you need. Here's 20% off your first order. You want to have some form of a special offer or a very straightforward headline. And then you just simply direct them to that collection or product page. And you'll build out those 5 to 7, 5 to 20 different ad formats here. And that is your first audience, right? Your next audience. Once you have all those ads, you can duplicate this.

And all you're going to do is simply make a larger audience that is going to be a little bit different and you're going to have different creatives in here as well. This is how you do testing. So you want to be able to then edit these keywords. How to improve home space. Home decor hacks might be one. Small room setup ideas. And that's where you could say, "Hey, you have a small room. Here's the different types of plants that fit best in a space like this." So you can get more creative with your search terms here and come up with different ways to do this.

And that is where you'll build out this. You want to make sure that you end up building about three audiences. And you're going to think of different avenues. One is going to be very specific. One is going to be thinking outside of the box which is related to the space at which those plants are going to be in. And then you're going to do another one which is just going to be much more broad and allow the algorithm to do the work for you.

Once you do that, you can publish your campaign and allow this to go into testing and you're going to give it 5 to seven days. If you don't see any results, you're going to turn it off. If you don't see it start spending, you're going to up your budget. If it still doesn't spin, you just need to add more keywords to get enough search volume in here. Once you do that and you start seeing results, you can start throttling up your budget and go from there.

And if you want to learn the full strategy on how to maximize not only search ads but Tik Tok shop, how to do lead genen, how to be able to optimize your Shopify store, Facebook ads, and so much more, then I highly recommend checking out this video here because it breaks down the entire method of how you can optimize all these channels to the max efficiency and be able to scale up your brand. And once again, it's your favorite digital marketer here, Chase Chapel.

Cheers and bile.