Reporting & Analysis
Sep 27, 2022
TLDR
TikTok Ads are becoming increasingly attractive for e-commerce businesses due to their large and engaged user base, lower ad costs, and video-first platform. To make informed decisions, it's crucial to compare TikTok Ads' performance with other ad channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Google Sheets is an excellent tool for this purpose, offering accessibility, customizability, integrations, and cost-effectiveness. You can connect TikTok Ads to Google Sheets and use pre-designed analytics to review performance and to monitor metrics like clicks, e-commerce conversion rate, and ROAS. Schedule weekly reports to track each ad channel's performance conveniently.
TikTok Ads is fast becoming a great alternative to Facebook- and Instagram- Ads. TikTok Ads have the potential to reach over 885 million people worldwide! And the good news is that bigger brands haven’t yet driven up the cost of advertising on TikTok, so you should give it a shot even if your budgets don’t match those of Unilever.
That said, don’t take our word for it. To make an informed decision, you have to see how TikTok Ads work relative to all the other advertising channels.
The way most of us do this is simply download key metrics from all our ad channels—Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and TikTok Ads—into a spreadsheet or Google Sheet and compare them. This usually takes a bit more data wrangling than ideal, but today we will go through how to make that happen with minimal steps.
Why are TikTok Ads becoming more popular for e-commerce?
You've probably noticed an increasing number of ads on TikTok promoting direct to consumer brands. TikTok is becoming increasingly popular for brands and e-commerce merchants, and here's why:
Large and Active User Base
TikTok has a massive and highly engaged user base, with over a billion monthly active users worldwide. This makes it an attractive platform for businesses looking to reach a large audience and drive engagement.
Lower Ad Costs
TikTok ads are still relatively new, and as a result, the platform's advertising costs are generally lower compared to other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This makes it an attractive option for smaller businesses with limited budgets.
Video-First Platform
TikTok is a video-first platform, and its users are accustomed to watching short, attention-grabbing videos. This makes it an ideal platform for brands looking to showcase their products through video ads that capture the viewer's attention quickly.
User-Generated Content
TikTok is known for its user-generated content, and many direct-to-consumer brands and e-commerce merchants have found success in partnering with popular TikTok creators to promote their products. These collaborations can help businesses reach new audiences and build credibility with their target market.
Targeting Capabilities
TikTok offers advanced targeting capabilities that allow businesses to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. This helps ensure that their ads are shown to the most relevant audience, which can lead to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment.
Why is it important to review TikTok ads alongside other ad channel performance?
TikTok ads do not exist in a vacuum. If you're running ad campaigns on TikTok, it's important to review their performance alongside your other ad channels. Why is that so, and how can you do that best?
Get an Overview of your Ad Channel Performance
Getting a holistic view of your ad performance helps you to identify areas of strength and weakness and make informed decisions on where to invest your ad spend.
To view your TikTok ad performance against other marketing channels, you can download your reports into a spreadsheet for side by side comparison, or use our Ad Channel Performance Hop to view all your metrics in one click.
Get the Ad Channel Performance Hop now →
Compare Daily Sales Against Ad Spend
Identifying which channels are performing well and which ones need improvement allows you to optimize your ad spend and improve your overall ROI. Typically, performance marketers do this by creating a daily tracker of sales against ad spend per channel, so that they can observe any trends that may surface over time.
While most marketing teams spend up to 4 hours a week manually plugging in data into their trackers and creating reports, these reports can also be created automatically in Google Sheets using our Sales vs Marketing Spend over Time Hop.
Get the Sales vs Marketing Spend over Time Hop now →
Understand Conversions by Channel
If looking at conversions data is important to your business KPIs, reviewing TikTok ad performance alongside other ad channels can show you which channels are converting best for the given ad spend, allowing you to optimize your ROAS.
You can review this by creating a view in a spreadsheet of conversion data across ad channels, or use our Ad Channel Conversion Performance over Time Hop.
Get the Ad Channel Conversion Performance over Time Hop now →
Understand your Revenue Streams
Reviewing TikTok ad performance alongside other ad channels can help you identify which ad channel is bringing in the most revenue. By understanding which channels are performing best, you can allocate more budget to those channels, improving your ROAS.
A highly effective way of doing this is to compare sales by attributed channels across your various ad channels. By comparing attributed sales side by side in a spreadsheet, you can identify which channel is bringing in the most revenue, and make decisions based on this data. This can also be done in one click using our Sales by Channel - Reported Attribution over Time Hop.
Get the Sales by Channel - Reported Attribution over Time Hop now →
How can e-commerce merchants easily review ad performance across channels?
If all you want to do is look at your data, then simply logging in to the various ad platforms, or using some sort of BI software, would be enough for you.
However, if you need to go beyond simply looking at data, and want to do analysis on your results, share the results with collaborators, and connect to visualization platforms like Google Looker Studio, then the best way to review all your data is on Google Sheets.
Here are a few benefits of reviewing your data on Google Sheets:
Accessibility
Google Sheets is cloud-based, meaning you can access your data from anywhere with an internet connection. You don't need any special software and are not tied to a particular device.
This also makes it easy to collaborate with team members and review data together, even if you're working remotely.
Customizability
Google Sheets allows you to customize your data analysis in a way that makes sense for your business. You can create custom charts and graphs, pivot tables, and use formulas to calculate metrics and KPIs specific to your business needs.
Integrations
Google Sheets can easily integrate with other Google tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads, allowing you to import your data seamlessly and create custom reports.
Cost-Effective
Google Sheets is a free tool offered by Google, making it a cost-effective way for you to review your data analysis.
Connect TikTok Ads to Google Sheets
You can get your TikTok ads data to Google Sheets in a few easy steps.
Step 1: Log into your Airboxr account
If you don’t have an Airboxr account yet, check out these steps. Once you have your Airboxr account set up, proceed to the Integrations page. It looks something like this.
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Step 2: Connect your TikTok Ads account
Click on the TikTok Ads button on the page and you will be asked to log into your TikTok Ads account. Click the play button below for a step-by-step walkthrough. Good news: you won't need a Tiktok developer account to make this work.
Step 3: Run a predesigned analysis
Now that you’ve connected TikTok Ads, you can customize and run any predesigned analytics. Go to the Hops Marketplace and filter for TikTok to get started.
Simply click on any of the predesigned reports and add them to your collection: also called My Hops. This is your collection of analysis and reports you need to run from time to time.
Review your TikTok Ads data
I mentioned earlier in this article that you should measure your TikTok Ads performance relative to other channels. You could do this by downloading CSV files from all your ad channels, filtering for the same dates, cleaning the data to make sure that all the formats are correct, and then pasting the key metrics next to each other.
But that’s not why you’re reading this - you want to know how to do this conveniently. We'll show you.
To compare your TikTok Ads performance with Google Ads and Facebook Ads data, first go to the integrations page and connect to all your ad channels. We are doing this because we also need to import data from those channels in order to compare their performance.
Once you have connected your data sources, add the Ad Channel Performance Hop to your collection (you can click here to add it quickly).
When you run this Hop, you will receive a report showcasing how each ad channel performs across the same key metrics. Here’s a sample screenshot of the output:
In the above report, pay special attention to:
Clicks
The more (relevant) people click on your ads, the more you build your remarketing audience. This can help you remind those visitors to come back and make a purchase.
E-commerce Conversion Rate
The higher the conversion rate is, the more relevant visitors the ad channels are bringing to your website.
ROAS
Return on Ad Spend is a key, but often misattributed, metric. It shows how much revenue you generate for every dollar of marketing spend.
Keep an eye on this metric, but be cognizant of the fact that typically multiple ad and organic channels work in tandem to get you that sale. We suggest tracking MER (and not ROAS) to measure the performance of your marketing efforts.
Awesome! Now you have set up a report to measure all your ad channels (including TikTok Ads) in one place. We suggest scheduling this report to run once a week, so you can keep tracking how each ad channel is doing.
Here’s a quick video on how to schedule your reports:
Other TikTok reports you should try out:
TikTok Campaign Performance—use this report to deep dive on key campaign metrics such as clicks, conversions, conversion rates, and more.
TikTok Core Stats by Age—use this report to find out which demographics your ad content resonates the most with.
You can also check out the full list of automated analysis. If you run a Shopify store and don't have an Airboxr account yet, start your free trial below:
