15 eCommerce TikTok Ads Strategies, Tactics & Ideas (2025)

💬 Like any paid ads performance channel, TikTok certainly has it's nuances, as well as other placements/types that aren't found on the other social ads channels (although, there is some overlap here and there).

The good news is that there are some favourable placements and ad features that accomodate to eCommerce brands (incl. the likes of TikTok Shop and integrations with Shopify, which I share more in a couple of checklist points below).

I share some of the top ad placements, types and examples for any eComm brand (regardless of their growth stage) to get inspired and get new ideas to apply to their TikTok paid performance strategy.

Examples and experiments/ideas for TikTok ads that early-stage or fast-growth eCommerce brands can test (with examples and case studies)

💬 With some of the checklist points, I incl. some key brands you should check out in your own time to review their ads, but also totally worth analysing/reviewing their organic content strategy too (some are really amazing).

One of my favourite tools (which is totally free to access) to get inspiration for what’s performing/trending at the present time, is the TikTok Ads Library - a.k.a. Creative Centre.

There’s a lot of value going through exploring various ads, and it’s easy to use too. 

To explore top ads that are performing, this is what you need to do:

• Head to the Creative Centre
• Then, use the various filters available to you - including the likes of choosing:some text
  • Countries
  • Industry
  • Date range
  • And language

Although, the real power of the filtering to understand what is relevant and working for various goals you are interested in, are the drop downs for:

• Objective - incl. Lead gen, product sales, video views, etc
• Ad format - Spark/non-spark
• And even the ability to choose “likes”, segmented by percentile ranges - e.g. “Top 1% - 20%, 61% - 80%” etc. 

Underneath the main filters, you can also use ‘sorting’, where you can choose the likes of:

• 2s view rates
• 6s view rates
• CVR (conversion rate based on all impressions on ads)
• And likes!

The real power feature

Whilst I mentioned the filtering features are powerful, it gets even better when you view the “analytics” of each video.

After you press “see analytics”, you land on this page experience, where you can get a breakdown of the ad itself. 

You can see things such as:

• The landing page
• Regions the ad is served in
• Ad caption
• Even the landing page… (amazing for performance marketers)
• Ad performance
• Video analysis 

And what’s even more awesome is the “interactive time analysis” section, where you can breakdown via CTR, CVR, clicks, conversions and remain (which means the time in seconds of watchers staying on the video).

Plus, there’s even a section for “recommended”, which is based on your search, which means more analysis and inspiration opportunities.

Most of us know about Instagram shopping, and it’s a similar experience if you want to sell on items TikTok (simply answer is - you should). 

Massive audience potential, and the slickness of the checkout experience is great for customer UX (which means can lead to more sales).

If you’re on Shopify (which most of you reading this would be), there’s an awesome integration available which takes minutes to set up. 

Head to the Shopify app page to follow the installation process.

The app is great because it can help you with:

• List management (so syncing of the product feeds, sync, automation, information updates on products, etc)
• Performance analytics of ads
• Campaign management (pixels, analytics, etc)
• As well as targeting capabilities (incl. the likes demographic, website behaviour, events, product categories, etc).

An amazing feature for eCommerce brands on TikTok is the shop functionality, where you can set up a ‘storefront’ for your brand, to get access to features such as:

• Product showcase (where people can see product items on your profile)
• Shop tab (users can scroll through a shoppable format, seeing all campaigns/promotions and items in one place)
• Live shopping (where viewers can explore pinned products that are mentioned in the live video stream)
• And of course shoppable videos (which means viewers can see which product(s) are featured, where they can see more info and add to cart/buy)

These native shopping experiences have helped brand provide a frictionless experience for their customers/followers, which has lead to awesome sales results.

Learn more about how TikTok shop works via the newsroom.

TikTok live is a big opportunity for eComm brands to take advantage of, and there’s been some big wins from brands who’ve done well using this format. 

Many of the social platforms naturally like to push ‘live’ as a feature and increase the chances of visibility - this is because it’s a format that holds engagement of viewers/users, which is a goal of the platform (they want users to spend more time engaging and sticking around).

Many brands are still not adopting it, so there’s an opportunity here to stand out against competitors/others in the industry and take advantage for getting attention/cut-through on the platform. 

Naturally, live-based interactions get a lot of engagement, and you can easily build up momentum of views as more viewers join and interact, where they can add comments, ask questions, etc. - and most importantly, this is where you can showcase/highlight in real-time your top products items. 

Other reasons/benefits of TikTok live include:

• Interactive shopping experience - you can showcase products, and get people to check out in real-time
• Opportunity to create FOMO/urgency - share special offers on the livestream itself, where you encourage people to take advantage of a deal
• You’re building authenticity and brand - and it’s and great way to establish trust and authority (as you can’t fake livestreams)
• Plus, it’s a great opportunity to get real-time data and feedback - pay attention to comments and questions

Check out this case study on live shopping on the app with Maybelline, which achieved a great ROAS and purchase numbers.

Key recommendation: if you’re a brand starting out with this format, work with creators/influencers who have done this format before, and are confident on camera. 

They can bring more credibility to your brand, as well as audience numbers.

Plus with their audience, they can get a ‘boost’ of viewers to tune in when they’re live (where they can share, etc).

Learn more about how TikTok live works, alongside how it operates with Ads manager via TikTok’s guide.

I like the video ads format a lot as it does a fairly good job of blending in with organic content (although, this does of course come down to the nature of the video ad shared - it does need to feel like other organic videos). 

As spoken about already, biggest drawcard is the UX for users/viewers to check out ‘tagged’/attached products that are highlighted, without necessarily leaving the app.

You can check out the video example in this Adore Beauty case study (some pretty awesome results too).

This ad format is focused on showcasing products straight from your feed (product catalog) - and you don’t need the likes of video assets for this specific format. 

It’s a great one to test as it usually it helps increase your reach, being served to audiences more prominent to buy/take interest. 

Plus, it’s also dynamic based on what the TikTok algorithm is optimising for - it will do it’s best to find ‘pockets’ within audiences you setup to serve ads in front of those “more likely” to take interest/action. 

There's a good video on catalog ads in this guide.

This is more relevant for brand’s with a larger budget, looking to scale up their awareness efforts for specific branded campaigns. 

For me personally, this is not an ad format I would normally do (as normally like to focused on conversion-objective campaigns), but it’s a format that’s proven to help numerous brands with awareness goals. 

A great campaign objective where Top View Ads can play a big role in helping get more awareness, is if it aligns to some sort of challenge, competition, or a particular ‘branded hashtag’ based campaign.

For instance, MilkLab (an Aussie Oat Milk brand) had epic results using Top View as a placement (as well as using in-feed) for their MilkLab Barista hashtag challenge, where they managed to reach 4.9 million Australians.

To see an example of what Top View placements looks like (and learn more about capabilities and specs), check out this resource.

Spark ads are growing in popularity, with the primary reason is that it’s a native ad format that serves up in an ‘organic’ fashion - as in, they appear more natural as a placements like the rest of your organic content.

It’s one of the best formats to promote your best organic posts, and/or boost posts that are featured by creators that are talking/featuring your product (but you need to get their permission/approval first as it’s ‘sponsored content’ - that’s the label that viewers will see, which you would have seen numerous times before. They will get notified about this). 

It’s a good format to test, especially as many of the organic posts whether on your feed or another creator’s feed, are UGC-style (which typically works effectively as a creative style on TikTok for ads).

There are other cool features available to try out too with Spark ads, including the likes of ‘duets’ and ‘stitches’, and even being able to add stickers.

Read about the specs/capabilities with Spark Ads.

• Tribe, a top influencer/creator platform for brands, shares two great examples from top brands.

Plus, you can find many other top Spark Ads examples via the Creative Centre.

• Another great case study I came across is fo Moodi, which used Spark Ads to achieve 7mil+ impressions (read case study here).

Many of us already know about the carousel ads placement and style that we know on the Meta network (Facebook and Instagram), and it’s similar in terms of setup and how it serves on the TikTok app.

You can set carousel placements for conversion objectives, as well as any targeting combination you’re looking for - I typically recommend MOF campaigns (for remarketing). However, totally worth testing TOF depending on campaign and promotion you’re pushing. 

You can 2-10 images with dedicated URLs for each.

Check out the link for the case study, as well as see a carousel ad example in action.

For carousels, I recommend utilising them for:

• Showcasing new collections, whether variants of one product, or a category 
• Product recommendations (great for upselling and cross-selling opportunities for existing customer segments)
• Seasonal period campaigns 
• Showcasing various offers for a time-sensitive campaign (weekend sales, Christmas sale, etc)
• Announcements for competitions/giveaways

The reality is to execute branded effect campaigns well, they are more suited for larger brands with budgets - however, depending on the campaign you want to run and you have a solid distribution/GTM plan in place (i.e. for example, working with various creators/influencers to amplify reach), then it’s worth considering.

So, what are branded effect ads exactly? It’s a format where brands can create their own “custom” experience, using native features such as the likes of creating their own:

• Filters, 
• Stickers
• and even the likes of AR effects. 

And you can do a mix between 2D and 3D based effects.

Key action: make sure to read the guide from TikTok about specs for Branded effects - it’s really good (58 pages long). It has all the specs and design examples of the various types available - really detailed and worth the time to digest.

This is a great guide (with video) to see how they work.

And to show the potential of where branded effects and hashtags can go, these are some pretty amazing results from Mucinex. 

Yes sure, big brand - but there are some great takeaways to think about and consider.

Again, similar to the previous checklist point with branded effects campaigns, branded hashtag challenges has huge viral potential, but it does take resources tom execute this well, and have a level of distribution as a baseline to help get the campaign momentum going. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t be a smaller brand that can’t execute this and be very successful with a campaign like this, but you have to be prepared - for example, have a lot of creators/influencers ready to go when you launch. 

As you can see below, when done right, it can have big upticks (read more here).

TikTok has some great videos prepared which summarises key takeaways for best practices that’s worth the time to watch (view them here).

For more inspo on branded hashtag challenges, this is a good read.

Whilst sales is one of the key objectives for any eComm brand, there’s potential to focus on awareness/views campaigns to communicate/kickstart a key message that your brand aligns with. 

For example, supporting a cause related to positive change, aligned with the likes of non-profit/charities. 

I’m a big fan of UGC contests and the likes of viral competitions, and TikTok is a great channel to achieve awesome results to gain entries and a level of referring and engagement (which can hopefully lead to viral potential).

1. First, it’s reading and learning about the TikTok community guidelines, as there are a few things to consider. 

2. Second, it’s then about strategising and researching which types of contests (especially if a UGC contest campaign) work best on the platform. 

TikTok is a “different beast” compared to other social platforms, so it’s well worth doing the research. 

I recommend going through the “discover” feed and explore various hashtags and brands doing competitions. Even just a simple search for “contests” can lead to viewing various ones running across a variety of brands and creator profiles.

As you may be able to tell or know about the platform already, there’s a big emphasis on challenges and trends. 

So naturally, you will need to come up with ideas like this - some examples include:

• UGC contests/challenges of how followers/viewers can use your product in some sort of activity (which is the challenge)
• Creative use of product in action (challenge)
• Duet challenges
• Dance-offs 

Then you’ve got branded hashtags too - there’s lots of potential possibilities. 

Key tip: reach out to a complementary brand or creator who has done contests and/or challenges on TikTok - get their feedback and learnings from campaigns. 

Totally worth the investment to pay for avoiding potential costly mistakes.

A good case study reference about a successful challenge is from Cetaphil, who managed to achieve millions in views and a good number of creators engaged and number submissions, for a beauty challenge.

For viral comps, I mentioned a bit more on this with my TikTok organic checklist (access below) - you can do contests/challenges on the platform, but you can also run comps driving audiences to a landing page.

For instance, you can run a giveaway, where you give entrants the ability to gain extra bonus entries when they do certain social actions on the app.

There are some great viral comp tools to check out.

A software platform that can help you achieve this is called SweepWidget - see guide on how it works.

Recommended resource: To learn about other strategies related to growing followers/views on TikTok organically (and other tactics like viral comps), check out the checklist.

This is very much a strategic checklist point as a key consideration to think about - having a streamlined workflow in place is key for getting "more bang for your buck" (Aussie slang for better ROI), especially as creators/influencers are becoming more expensive to engage with - the goal here is that you want to repurpose variants/styles of videos to create new videos for various campaigns/objectives.

That incl's having standardised templates, variants for hooks (and using winners), presets for transitions/animations, tools for ensuring you're onto the latest sounds, stickers, etc.

I will also in the future share a process that has worked well for me when it comes to testing different variants for scaling video production.

Within the platform itself, there are some great tools/features to find 'trending' items, like sounds, music, styles, etc.

As mentioned at the start of this checklist, with the Creative Centre, you can find all the latest trending videos which can help with seeing the different variants that go into performing videos.

At at the top of the Creative Centre in the menu, you can hover of 'trends' to find other areas, such as seeing the latest songs, hashtags, and more.

Here's an example preview of 'trending songs'.