TikTok Smart Performance Campaigns (SPC).... What Amazon sellers need to know

TL;DR

• SPC campaigns are a time saver…..can be setup in 2 minutes

• SPC is meant for DTC sellers that use the TikTok pixel

• Amazon sellers can use SPC, but will be more expensive and unoptimised

TikTok Ads released a new feature: Smart Performance Campaigns.

It’s where TikTok will create the ad campaign for you….. it’s kinda like Chat GPT, but for TikTok Ads.

Normally, I ignore these types of updates as they are not useful for Amazon sellers….

However, everyone is reporting impressive results:

So I decided to test it out…..

How to create Smart Performance Campaigns in 2 steps:

Step 1: Select the Smart Performance Campaigns in TikTok Ad account

• You can only select this if you are running Website Conversion objective (this is where Amazon sellers will struggle…. more on this setup specific objective later)

Step 2: Set targeting, URL’s, budget and creatives

There are 4 elements that need to be completed (shouldn’t take you longer than 2 minutes).

Why would you want to use Smart Performance Campaigns?

• It’s easy and quick….. a manually created campaign takes around 20 min to setup whereas SPC campaigns take 2 min

• Trust AI…. TikTok is using AI to create these campaigns as the AI picks the best performing ads and audience. In all cases, AI is smarter than we are 😉

This image describes the details between manual and SPC campaigns:

Warning ⚠️… Amazon sellers are at a disadvantage

The problem with SPC campaigns is that they are based on the TikTok Pixel.

On a normal website, you can use the TikTok pixel to record your sales and traffic and then create TikTok based on those metrics.

Amazon does not allow us to use the TikTok pixel on our Amazon listings/storefront.

So TikTok does not know what our product is, our sales or audience.

Which means…..

SPC campaigns are guessing as is does not have enough information.

My results?

I ran 3 tests…. I created a SPC campaign for each:

• 2 Amazon products

  • Sending the ads directly to the Amazon listing

• 1 DTC product

  • An SPC campaign pointing to a website that had the TikTok Pixel installed

I compare the SPC campaigns according to the manual campaigns I had set up.

Conclusion:

Smart Performance Campaigns are not meant for Amazon products.

When creating campaigns, manually created campaigns will always win as you know what the product and audience is…. TikTok has no idea who to target when running SPC campaigns for Amazon listings and hence, will always be more expensive.

Don’t get me wrong, SPC campaigns still work for Amazon listings, but they will cost more, but the deciding factor for me is……

How valuable is your time?

Creating a campaign in 2 minutes is impressive and that’s more than enough to get you started.

Which leaves me with this: