TikTok unveils new automation tools to boost advertising performance

At Advertising Week, TikTok introduced a suite of ad tools designed to automate advertising, enhance measurement capabilities, and strengthen privacy technologies.

TikTok’s new Smart+ performance automation solution simplifies the advertising process, allowing brands to reach the right audience with the right creative content at the optimal time. This tool automates targeting, bidding, and creative selection to deliver personalized ads that maximize business outcomes. Brands can input their advertising goals, and Smart+ will automatically generate or choose the most effective creative assets, placing them in front of the right users.

TikTok says Advertisers have already seen strong results using Smart+, with a reported 52% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) when optimizing campaigns. The solution includes several campaign options tailored for specific outcomes, such as driving traffic to websites, boosting sales through catalog ads, promoting app installs, and generating leads.

Roberta Atzori, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at EssilorLuxottica, shared the positive impact of Smart+ on her brand’s performance: “Adopting a fully automated solution that optimizes targeting, creative, and campaign performance has led to significant improvements, including a 50% reduction in cost per acquisition and a 42% increase in ROAS for Ray-Ban.”

TikTok also announced its new GMV Max solution, which automates TikTok Shop campaign creation and optimizes audience targeting, bidding, and creative selection. By integrating organic content, paid ads, and affiliate posts, GMV Max enables merchants to maximize their gross merchandise value (GMV) and increase their return on investment. Early testing has shown that merchants using GMV Max saw an average GMV uplift of 30%.

Nish Samantray, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Arrae, praised GMV Max for simplifying campaign management: “It allows us to focus on more important parts of the funnel, like creative optimization, while automating the ad buying process.”

Further extending its reach, TikTok introduced Out of Phone: Retail, a new in-store digital advertising solution that displays TikTok content within physical retail locations. This feature bridges the gap between online engagement and in-store purchasing, providing retailers with a fresh way to integrate digital campaigns into the real world.

TikTok also announced Conversion Lift Studies (CLS), a tool that measures the true impact of ads beyond simple clicks. TikTok’s research has shown that 79% of purchases driven by TikTok are not captured by traditional measurement methods. CLS offers brands insights into how their ads influence consumer behavior and incremental sales, revealing a 25% average lift in conversions for advertisers using this solution.

To enhance privacy while delivering accurate measurement, TikTok is rolling out new Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs). These tools, developed in partnership with trusted execution environments and clean room providers, allow brands to securely analyze first-party data while maintaining privacy standards. PETs offer a new way for advertisers to measure performance with advanced privacy protections, ensuring that data-driven insights remain secure.