Ad automation for TikTok can help to speed up the process of setting up complex campaigns. Leverage a set of advanced tools to save time and to minimize the risk of errors from repetitive tasks.

This article shows you how you can set up TikTok ad-level automation based on a feed. If you're not familiar yet with setting up campaigns with Smartly manually, check out Manage TikTok campaigns.

TikTok automation behavior

Before configuring your first automated ad with TikTok, it's important to understand how we handle special kinds of changes for TikTok. This might be somewhat different compared to other advertising platforms due to TikTok's limitations and the advancedness of our solution.

Action	TikTok automation behavior
Someone makes a change in TikTok's own ads manager to an ad that's automated via Smartly.	Smartly can either respect these changes or revert the value from the automation feed. You can configure this behavior with Advanced Publishing Rules.
An ad's property (like the copy or website URL) is updated in the automated feed.	Smartly can either automatically update the ad, or let you manually review all the changes coming from the automation feed. You can configure this behavior with Advanced Publishing Rules.
Adding or removing one of the automation feed rows	When you add a new row to an automation feed, and if the values in that row match any ad automation configuration, we'll create a new ad under the right ad set in TikTok. When you remove a row from an existing automation feed, Smartly will archive the ad automatically generated from that row on TikTok's side.
Changing the unique identifier or a row in an automation feed	The unique identifier is usually one of the first feed columns in an automation feed that helps Smartly identify separate entities. While other attributes of an ad (copy, creative, message...) can change, the unique identifier shouldn't. If Smartly detects that a unique identifier that was previously present does not exist anymore in a feed, then Smartly will archive the ad belonging to that. In reality, if someone changes the unique identifier, we will create a new ad entity.
Someone updates a Smartly Video Template for the ad automation but does not update any values in the automation feed	At the moment, we only make updates to the ads if we detect any changes in the automation feed at the next scheduled or manual refresh time. If you only update the Smartly video template but you don't update your automation feed, we won't be making any changes to your ads.

Step 1: Set up automation

To enable ad-level automation, use any Campaign Objective and then go to the ad settings:

Toggle Automation on at the top of the ad settings panel.
Select your Data source that contains the fields (creatives, ad copy, text) that you'd like to automate. If you haven't set up an automation feed yet, get started here.

The ad entity now acts as a "template" that the automation uses to create ads when you publish your changes. The notice that tells you how many matches you have in the selected feed indicates how many ads Smartly will try to create when you publish your ads.

Note: TikTok only allows 20 active or paused ads within one ad set. Please ensure that you don't exceed the limit with the combination of all manual and automated ads you create.

Step 2: Configure the automation feed

After selecting a feed for ad automation, you might have too many total items (rows) in that feed to just proceed with creating new ads. For that reason, Smartly gives you fine-tuned controls on which items you want to focus on.

Maybe it's only the products in stock, items on sale, a specific category, or something else.

You can filter down the initial list of items using filters, grouping, and sorting parameters.

Filtering the feed

Use filters to narrow the feed down to only a subset of items.

When you Add new condition, you need to select a feed column header, an operator (like "equals" or "contains") and provide a value to match.
- If you want to filter items that are on sale, you might have a feed column stating "yes" for "discount". In this case, you simply should configure "discount" as the column, "equals" as the operator, and "yes" as the value.
When you Add new group, you're specifying a group condition. Think about groups as brackets in a mathematical equation. Maybe you want to specify a set of conditions:
- IF ("discount" = "yes") OR ("must_promote" = "yes" AND "stock" = "in_stock")
- In the above equation, we defined two groups. So only those feed items should appear where we have a discount "yes", or they're "must promote" items AND in stock.

Inside the conditions, there is an ability to set Filter matching to "All" or "Any":

"All" acts as an "AND" relationship, so if two conditions are selected, those both should be met for the result to appear in the filtered feed.
"Any" acts as an "OR" relationship, so the result should appear in the filtered feed even if only one of the conditions is met.

Grouping, sorting, and the maximum number of ads

By defining the optional Group by parameter, you can select how the automation groups specific items from the feed to create the ads. Here, you can select the feed fields that you want to group together. Please do not use any parameter for the Group by attribute that might change later. If this field changes for existing ads, Smartly will archive the current ads and re-create new ones instead.

If you want to Sort the results of the feed in a specific older, you can define a column and select whether you want Ascending or Descending sorting based on the values there.

In addition, you can Limit the maximum number of ads being created from the feed. This is useful if you have many matching items and want to ensure that only the first 10 or 15 items appear in an ad. If you're running a discount campaign, you might want to advertise the lowest-priced items still in stock.

Step 3: Use data from the feed

Use feed data to automate individual field inputs on the ad settings form, including ad status, ad name, creative, copy, or website URL. You can also freely combine static text with the data you've gotten from the feed.

In text inputs, you refer to a feed field using the double curly braces notation: {{feed.fieldname}}.

For example, {{feed.creative}} pulls the field column labeled as "creative" from the feed.

To use automation for one of the supported ad settings:

Click next to the field to enable using feed data.
After then, browse the list of available feed and macro values by pressing the icon.

For the TikTok ad-level automation fields, see Smartly automation fields and possible values (Google sheet).

To combine the feed values with static input, such as adding a URL parameter at the end of your static links, do it like this (supposing you have a "content" column in your feed):

https://smartly.io/?utm_content={{feed.content}}

Step 4: Define advanced publishing rules (optional)

Smartly supports different ad automation behaviors, and in this section, you can configure how you want us to handle updates to your automation feed and changes to your ads.

Keep values changed outside of feed

By default, we use the "Keep values changed outside the feed" behavior, which means that if you adjust any of the automated ads in the native TikTok ads manager, we'll be respecting those changes in our platform, and the automation won't further apply to that specific ad and specific field that you've adjusted. So, if you change the ad copy in TikTok's ads manager, we won't automatically revert it back to the value that's coming from the automation feed.

If you'd prefer us to always overwrite manually changed values from what's present in the automation feed, select "Override values changed outside the feed".

Republish ad automatically with every feed update

This second setting controls whether Smartly should update the ads automatically whenever there is a change in the connected automation feed. So, if you change the ad copy in the source of the automation feed (like a spreadsheet), we'll be changing the ad copy for the ad automatically.

If you'd prefer to have all these changes manually reviewed, you can select the "Always publish feed updated manually" option so you can review the changes each time in our campaign management interface.

Step 5: Review the automation setup

After configuring the campaign details and finalizing the fields you'd like to automate, go to the review phase by clicking on Add Changes to Review. If you missed a required setting, we'd indicate an error in the campaign management solution.

After you enter the review phase, you'll be able to see how many ads Smartly will create based on the defined ad automation template and how those ads will look based on the right-side preview. If you're unhappy with any of what you see, you can go back to change the automation configuration, or if there is a typo in the feed, even go back to the feed to adjust it.

The review phase is a good place to ensure that you're creating the right number of ads, with the right number of settings, under the right campaigns and ad sets.

If you're happy with what you see, press Publish All for us to publish the new/changed ads to TikTok.

ℹ️ Please remember: TikTok only allows 20 active or paused ads within one ad set. Please ensure that you don't exceed the limit with the combination of all manual and automated ads you create.

Tips for an even more advanced automation

Below, we share a few tips and tricks to create even more powerful automated ads with our platform.

If you're using Google Spreadsheets for your automation feed, leverage formulas.
With spreadsheet formulas that populate a field based on conditions, you can create feed values that are changing based on another column's value or based on external data. For example, you can automate the status of an ad based on a specific date. Using a condition that checks whether today is greater than a specific date defined in another column, you can govern the status of an automated ad.
Use one automation feed for multiple platforms
You can leverage one automated feed across multiple platforms if you want to create cross-platform ads with Smartly tools. When setting the feed up, please ensure that the columns contain the exact values each platform requires. For example, while the "Active" ad status might is "ACTIVE" for Snapchat, it's "ENABLE" for TikTok.