Thread by @richstemecom

Your TikTok ads aren’t spending, but you don’t know why?

You can fix those issues by following this 🧵:

Obviously, you want your ads to spend. If your ads don’t spend, nobody is seeing them. So, should you kill those ads? Or are there ways to save them?

Here are the biggest issues you might wanna check if you experience ad spend issues:

- Speculative (unclear) algorithm problems
- Bidding problems
- Targeting and audience problems
- Ad creative problems

Let’s see how you can test and eliminate them one by one until your ads start spending:

Solution #1: Duplicate the same campaign

Often, before you dig deep into your analytics and start examining your creatives, simply try to duplicate your ad campaign without changing anything.

I’ve noticed that TikTok sometimes has some unclear bugs and doesn’t process your ads without a viable reason.

So, the first thing I recommend is duplicating the campaign and turning off the old one.

By doing this, you enter the application or review process again, and more often than not - it will start spending!

If you already did this and your ad still doesn’t spend, let’s see the second solution.

Solution #2: Adjust bidding to lowest cost

When TikTok started out, the lowest cost automatic bid wasn’t an option. So, I had to use the manual bidding and set a cap.

So, if you’re doing manual bidding, this can be one reason why your ad doesn’t spend.

For instance, if you cap the bid at $15 but you’re in a competitive industry, or many advertisers are pushing the same (or similar) product in front of the same audience, then your bid might not be enough for the ad to run.

In a competitive ad space, manual bidding can be your enemy.

The problem here is that TikTok allows you to set the bid as high as your daily budget is. And, naturally, you don’t want to increase your budget too much that you work at a loss.

The easiest way to check if your bidding is an issue is to switch from manual to the lowest cost bid option.

Often, this will solve your problem. But if it still doesn’t, then your bidding is likely not an issue, and you can move on to my next solution.

Solution #3: Test different targeting

If your ad didn’t start spending when you duplicated it, and it didn’t spend when you adjusted your bidding to the lowest cost, then you might be choosing the wrong audience.

So, at this point, you can simply duplicate your ad sets and test different interests, categories, and audiences.

If you still don’t see a difference in your ad spend, simply launch the ad with “NO INTERESTS”.

Your ad spend still doesn’t move?

Let's move to the next one!

Solution #4: Test different creatives

If none of the above solutions worked, try to split test multiple creatives and compare their results.

Often, if the creative is the issue, your ad will still spend, only not enough.

If you have a daily budget of $20 and your ad spent only $1, that’s a big pointer that your ad works, but your creative isn’t good enough.

If playing with different creatives also gives no results, simply move on to a new product, or try a couple of other things that could work.

Solution #5: Configure a new pixel

Sometimes, the problem could be TikTok’s algorithms in terms of your pixel setup.

If you want to ensure that the pixel code isn’t an issue, you could try creating and using a new pixel and then relaunching the ad to see if that fixes the problem.

Solution #6: A different conversion event

Changing the conversion event can also help you shake up your ads a bit.

Instead of setting an event for your pixel to track purchases, you could set it to measure website visits or add-to-cart actions.

You might not see a drastic change in your ad spend by doing this, but hopefully, you’ll get more traffic to your website that you can use later to retarget.

What if you did all the above steps and did everything right, but your ad still doesn’t spend?

Solution #7: Keep testing or move on

At this point, if nothing worked, you might as well just move on to test a new product entirely.

However, if you’re a branded one-product store and can’t afford to test another product, then all I can recommend is to keep making changes one by one and testing until your ads start bringing you the results you need.

I hope you found value in this thread. I'd love to hear any problems/solutions you've experienced with TikTok's ad spend!

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