‍TikTok Ads Vs Facebook Ads: Which is the Best for Your eCommerce Brand?

‍Deciding Between Using TikTok Ads Vs Facebook Ads

If you want to rapidly increase brand awareness and revenue, then engaging in paid advertising is the best way to get that done. Facebook and TikTok are the two most popular social media platforms for paid advertising although there are plenty of other platforms you can include into your social media strategy later as your business expands. For now, we focus on Facebook and TikTok and what decision you must make in using one or the other (or both) platforms as part of paid advertising for brand recognition, brand engagement, and advertising your products or services. 

Building Your eCommerce Social Media Brand Strategy

In designing your social media paid advertising strategy, you first must calculate how much funding you have set aside to spend for paid advertising. You have decided to work with both the Facebook and TikTok platforms, but you need to figure out how to use and fully optimize each platform’s capabilities when opening an account and placing your ads. Before opening any accounts, pull together the following components as you begin planning your strategy.

• Outline your goals (get more followers, more sales, etc.),
• Determine your market (a buyer profile, consider replicating a buyer profile list you may already have),
• Do preliminary research on other similar ecommerce companies already advertising on both platforms and check number of followers as well as engagement comments, plus type of ad),
• Write copy for a landing page and determine where to put it (i.e., Shopify store, ecommerce website),
•  Design your advertisement, including creating videos and scripts (create both a short (15-30 secs, and a 60-sec video),
• Create an exciting or compelling offer and call-to-action (CTA), and
• Follow the numbers (analytics) so you can see what works well and what may need extra work.

Conducting Valuable Research Early Before Creating and Spending 

When you first begin planning your strategy, looking at the advertisements of similar ecommerce companies engaging and selling on both the Facebook and TikTok platforms can give you lots of basic information. View their videos, listen to the scripts, look at follower comments, and view company pages on the platform for follower population and other relevant information you can add into a spreadsheet. 

But there is another way to add to this information and that is to find out how your business might stack up against your competitors. For example, you found a competitor who did a great Facebook ad, and you want to create something similar (but not exactly alike), then take that competitor’s ad and see how it stacks with other similar competitors. 

Varos.com is a company that can provide you with this information as a basic overview of the marketplace for your brand and product/service. Once you get your own advertisement posted on Facebook as a strategic starting point, then your key performance indicators (KPIs) (after a certain amount of run time) will give you your own starting benchmark KPIs in the competitor universe. The Filter Function image below show how you can look at different competitor marketplace KPIs within the same industry, based on yours.

You also get insight reports, like the one below, that show you where you are doing well and where more work is needed to pull up your KPIs to sufficient levels, based on benchmarks.

Aside from the Varos.com KPIs report, check your Facebook account regularly (every day is best) so you can see what your platform analytics can tell you. Recognize that there are KPIs that show trend disturbances because of seasonal adjustments and other marketplace variables which you have no control over. If you need help with understanding both your Facebook analytics and your Varos.com  benchmark report, get help here so you can find out how to put it all together for the best insight view of your brand on social media.

The next section shows the important information you need to help you decide on which platform to use first, or whether to use both at the same time. 

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What to Know About Facebook Ads

If you are ready to create a Facebook Ad, go to your account where your profile picture is at the top, go to the left of Messenger to Menu, which looks like 12 dots in a square. Open it up and scroll down to Professional. Click inside the section on Ads Manager. The Ads Manager layout shows up where you can create your ads and post them. Follow any messages you receive when first getting there (Term Agreement, Payment Information, etc.) to begin using the platform. 

• Placement: Once you have an ad prepared and placed on Facebook, you can share it on Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp, all owned by Metaverse. You can have several ads going at the same time but watch your budget very carefully each day, as clicks on your ads can suddenly get very expensive. 
• Types of Ads: Facebook allows you to build ads in different formats, such as a carousel format, a single image, one video, slideshow, and canvas (mixture of images and videos). You can also create a collection of product images that work well in the mobile view.  
• Pricing: Pricing can change at a moment’s notice these days, but as of July 2022, cost per mille (CPM) is $12.57 for every 1,000 impressions (an ad is seen across placements). While expensive, CPM is a valuable option that assists with building brand awareness and new follower engagement. 
• Market Targeting: Facebook leads in the targeting department when it comes to ads and selecting the variables of follower/buyer personas and profiles. As Facebook Ads has been doing this for over a decade, the targeting option is very evolved. However, some targeting, as regards mobile phone users, are not always as useful as on the desktop view, due to recent mobile phone providers’ cracking down on security protocols to avoid hacking issues.
• Benefits of Facebook Ads: When making your decision on which platform to use, Facebook Ads is better for scaling your brand awareness and sales over a longer period of time and with a larger targeted audience. It also works very well if you are covering specific types of customers, such as business-to-business (B2B) and/or business-to-consumer (B2C). 

Monitor your Facebook analytics every day inside the Facebook Ads manager and look for these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) outcomes from your Facebook campaigns:

• Conversion rate for Facebook Ads: going from an interested lead to a buyer,
• Average CPC on Facebook: What is your average cost-per-click per day, week, month of interested readers clicking on the ad and billed to the advertiser,
• Average ROAS for Facebook Ads: Return on ad spend versus new leads becoming customers. This is part of determining the success of your campaign and also tells you where to adjust.

The image below shows the Varos Complete Summary for the month, based on competitor analytics versus your company’s analytics.

Across the top of the Facebook Performance Summary by Varos.com. the most important overall analytics are shown for your advertisement versus the marketplace. The three results show lower performers, median, and top performers in your ad category.

CCP = Cost per Point - measure of cost efficiency which is the cost of your ad against the marketplace cost of those ads. The calculation is Media Cost divided by Gross Rating Points (GRPs)

ROAS = Return on ad spend versus new leads becoming customers

CPM = cost per thousand impressions (those who saw the ad without clicking on it

CTR = Click-through rate (those who clicked on the ad and went to the landing page

CPC = Cost per Click (Facebook charges you a fee for every click on the ad)

Conversion Rate = Potential customer goes from interested to purchaser

Spend = How much you spent on the ad versus gain of follower or purchaser

View-Through = The View-Through Conversion Rate shows how many saw an ad but did not click on it. They later went to the landing page from another point and either made a purchase or not.

Each of these sections open up after the summary and show the numbers by dates over a month (filtered), such as the Facebook Advertising Spend analytics. On the right is your comparison with the marketplace in percentages.

What to Know about TikTok Ads

Since 2016 when the TikTok platform roared into the social media universe as a flash-in-the-pan, video-based upstart, the platform has grown to 78.7 million users as of 2021. The largest group of users in 2021 10 to 19 years old, at 25 percent of the TikTok universe. The next largest group, 20 to 29 years old, make up 22.4 percent in 2021, and the third group, 30-39 years old (the millennial group), cover 21.7 percent, according to Media Boom and Statista. That still leaves about 30 percent of user on the table, likely (an assumption only) made up of 40 years of age and older. What is interesting about TikTok is that almost any ecommerce brand, including the luxury industry, have found ways that work well to engage the user community and increase brand recognition, resulting in more followers and influencer-based online purchasing.

• Placement: TikTok has a more basic approach in placing your ads which appear on the “For You Page” and on the “Discover” tab of the platform. TikTok works very well on mobile phones and adding videos and pictures is easier using the phone than trying to do it on a desktop application. TikTok ads can be places on Facebook better than the other way around. The reason is that TikTok videos should be 15-30 seconds long, with a maximum at 60 seconds. That is why when creating videos for your upcoming ads that you should make two, one for the TikTok crowd and a longer one (three minutes at most) for Facebook. 
• Types of Ads: TikTok ads are classified as In-Feed Ads (appearing in your For You feed between user posts), Brand Takeover (ads shows on first screen), TopView (ad appears in-feed after three seconds of entering feed), Branded Hashtag Challenge (these are used often by luxury brands as engagement strategies), and Branded Effects (uses AR filters, lenses, and shareable stickers). 
• Pricing: Cost per mille (CPM) is $6.06 compared to Facebook’s, $12.57; Sparks Ads requires payment of $1.00 per click, $6.06 per CPM, minimum budget of $50 daily for campaign, and $20 per day at Ad level, 
• Target Marketing: Can target segments of users, based on age, screentime usage, and engagement actions, better known as user interests and behaviors.
• Benefits of TikTok Ads: Best for short videos, reach a wider group of people (less targeting), generally younger audiences, gives you options for a lower budget, and is better for the B2C market, such as luxury brand selling, cosmetics, fashion, lifestyle, and entertainment. 

In the images below, we show the same Summary and Spend views as previously presented from the Facebook view. In the Summary view provided by varos.com, note the differences of which analytics are presented, due to what the Tik Tok platform has set up to provide to TikTok business account Ad creators. 

The most important analytics across the top are also represented in the Facebook Summary but there are fewer of them, as mentioned above. In this summary, the compilation is by week.

As with the Facebook Spend Graph, you can see the analytics pinpointed for every week in a month. On the right, Spend Overall shows your account spend versus the marketplace.

Facebook Analytics vs TikTok Analytics

Facebook analytics are found on Facebook business pages inside the business account. If you are running Facebook Ads, you can view your analytics within the Ads platform to find out the information you need. In TikTok, you can find your TikTok Ads Manager which provides the analytics you need to review. However, the TikTok platform is not as developed as is the Facebook Ads platform in giving you lots of information. 

Use Varos.com to get a better view of both your TikTok and Facebook campaign analytics so you have, first, the initial benchmark in place, and then begin comparing your benchmarks with competitor benchmarks. Here are the TikTok Ad benchmark analytics you would want to follow for maximum oversight:

• TikTok CPMs: The alternative to CPC, the cost-per-mille (1,000 viewers) is charged after the 1,000 mark is reached, whether clicked on or not,
• TikTok KPIs: Cost per Result, Follower Growth Rate, Comment per Post/Ad, Value per Post/Ad, and Engagement rates,
• TikTok Ad conversion rate: This depends on your goal of gaining followers or reaching a sales goal amount.

Consider utilizing platforms like Uplifted.ai, which enables you to create high-performing UGC video ads featuring your customers.

Now that you have a good idea of what you will face when creating Facebook or TikTok Ads (or both), it is time to get started. Varos.com can help with setting you up with the market research analytics you need to be successful with your Ads campaigns. Need help? Send us a note.

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About the Author

Yarden Shaked

Co-founder & CEO at Varos

LinkedIn