• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 24, 2024

TikTok has come for Google's advertising business by allowing advertisers to target those using its search results to discover products and services.

The announcement of TikTok Search Ads Campaign -- a keyword-based search tool that enables brands to appear in query results -- came Tuesday during Google's most vulnerable time as the company continues to battle several antitrust cases, from search to advertising in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

Search Ads Campaign gives brands more control of how their content appears on the TikTok search-results page, ensuring that the correct creative is served to the right users.

Currently, Search Ads Campaign supports both Traffic and Web Conversion objectives for advertisers. This enables advertisers to optimize their campaigns for scale and performance, the company explained in a post.

A marketer presenting at the MediaPost Data & Programmatic Insider Summit recently told the audience that she can spend hours on the platform just looking around.

“TikTok’s search advertising capabilities were likely to evolve in similar ways regardless of the external factors surrounding Google and its own legal status,” said Gartner Vice President, Distinguished Analyst Andrew Frank. “While the volatility of these proceedings adds drama to the situation, the offering seems to stand on its own merits to consumers and marketers.”

Demonstrating the importance of search, TikTok's owner ByteDance last month announced the launch of a stand-alone app in China to search for short video content published on Douyin, a video-sharing app in China. The search tool brought it closer to competing with China's internet search giant Baidu, according to one report.

Internal research from TikTok shows an increasing number of people in the U.S. use its app as a search engine. The company estimates that 57% use its search function, and 23% search for something within 30 seconds of opening the app. 

In early testing, TikTok found that advertisers running Search Ads in addition to In-Feed Ads see a 20% increase in conversions on average. 

The company also found that Search Ads have more opportunities to convert those searching compared with In-Feed Ads. Some 18% of users who see In-Feed Ads but don’t interact with them do so after seeing the corresponding Search Ad. 

The typical search journey begins with a user clicking the search button at the top of the "For You" page, then typing in a search query, which yields a series of search results.

The ads appear among these search results and can be viewed within the in-feed experience. Once a user clicks on a Search Ad, they can continue scrolling through the search results in the order they appear on the page.

The ads today support traffic and web conversion objectives. Advertisers can use them for video and image carousel assets and include a mixture of these formats within one ad group.

The automated system selects the creative best matched for a specific user searching for terms within the targeted keyword list. Artificial intelligence is not mentioned, but considering the industry knows so much of how Google's and Microsoft's ad business works, its easy to identify that this is how it is done.

Once keywords are selected, advertisers can set target bids and budgets. Advertisers can activate, deactivate, and edit keywords and creative assets during the campaign creation flow as they run.

It is best to optimize campaigns as they run to gain the strongest performance. Through this process, advertisers can ensure their ads serve up for users searching content related to their brands, while also ensuring a positive user experience by serving optimal creative.

Keywords are the backbone of Search Ads Campaign, TikTok wrote in a post, which suggests making ad groups with at least 20 keywords and bundled thematically to fit with the ad creative that will serve in search results. The company also provides media-buying tips.