Solved: From TikTok to Meta Ads – A Beginner's Guide

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you've made a decent start with organic TikTok, which is more than a lot of people manage, so fair play to you. Moving into paid ads on Meta is a logical next step, but it's easy to get bogged down in all the noise and myths out there.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a roadmap. Honestly, the key isn't about following some secret step-by-step formula you read on a blog. It's about getting the foundations right, understanding a few core principles, and avoiding the common mistakes that'll see you burn through cash with nothing to show for it. We'll get to the 'how-to' part, but first we need to tackle some of the stuff you mentioned, because it's a perfect example of people focusing on the wrong things.

Let's talk about that 'warming up' myth...

Alright, first things first, let's clear this up. The whole idea of "warming up" an ad account with organic posts, comments, and activity is, for the most part, a myth. It's one of those things that gets repeated in forums so often that people just assume it's true. Tbh, it's a massive distraction from what actually matters.

Meta's automated systems are looking for genuinly suspicious behaviour, not a lack of cat photos on your new business page. They want to see a legitimate business, with a real website, clear contact details, and a valid payment method. They care about you following their ad policies—not promoting dodgy products, making wild claims, or using misleading images. They don't care if you've posted organically for six days or six months.

Now, is it true that a brand new, empty account that suddenly tries to spend £5,000 a day might get flagged for a review? Yes, absolutely. But that's not because it wasn't "warmed up" with posts. It's because that behaviour looks like a stolen credit card. The real "warm up" is starting with a sensible, modest budget (say, £20-£50 a day), proving you're a legitimate advertiser who pays their bills, and then scaling up gradually once you have ads that are actually working. That's it.

So, the takeaway here is simple: stop worrying about this. It's not the thing that will make or break your success. Spending weeks trying to "warm up" an account is just weeks you're not selling product. Let's focus on the stuff that will actually move the needle.

First, we'll need to get the boring (but necessary) bits sorted

Before you can run any ads, you do need the basic plumbing in place. This part isn't exciting, but if you get it wrong, it'll cause headaches later. Don't overthink it, just get it done.

1. Create Your Business Assets: You'll need a Facebook Business Page and an Instagram Business Profile for your store. This is non-negotiable. Don't try and run ads from your personal profile. For the setup, keep it simple: upload your logo as the profile picture, write a short, clear bio about what you sell, and make sure the link in your bio goes directly to your store's homepage. That's enough to get started.

2. Set Up Meta Business Suite (or Business Manager): This is basically the central hub where all your business assets live. Go to business.facebook.com and create one. The main reason for this is to keep your personal Facebook life completely seperate from your business advertising. It's also where you'll manage your ad account, your Pixel, your product catalogues, and where you'd give access to an agency or a freelancer in the future without having to hand over your personal login details.

3. Create Your Ad Account: Inside your new Business Manager, you'll create an ad account. This is where your campaigns will live and where you'll add your payment information. Make sure all your details (business name, address, etc.) are correct and match the details on your payment card. Discrepencies here are a common reason for accounts getting flagged.

4. Install the Meta Pixel: This is probably the single most important technical step. The Pixel is a small piece of code that you install on your website. It's your inteligence agent. It watches what visitors do on your site—which pages they view, which products they look at, what they add to their cart, and, most importantly, what they buy. This data is absolute gold. It allows Meta's algorithm to understand who your customers are, find more people like them, and show your ads to the people most likely to convert. It also lets you do retargeting (showing ads to people who've already visited your site), which is where a lot of the profit is made. If you're on a platform like Shopify, installing it is usually just a case of copying and pasting an ID number into a box. It's not as scary as it sounds, and there are a million guides on YouTube if you get stuck.

Don't even think about running ads for an e-commerce store without a properly installed and firing Pixel. You'd essentially be flying blind and telling the algorithm to just guess who to show your ads to.

I'd say you need to fix your offer *before* you spend a penny

You said you're getting good results with organic TikToks but conversions are low. This is a massive clue. It tells me you probably don't have a traffic problem; you have a conversion problem. People are interested enough to watch and engage, but when they get to your store, something is stopping them from buying.

This is the number one mistake I see people make. They think ads are a magic bullet that will fix a leaky bucket. They won't. If your website and offer can't convert the warm, engaged traffic from your own TikToks, it stands no chance of converting the cold, skeptical traffic you're going to get from paid ads. All you'll do is pay to send more people into that same leaky bucket, and your money will pour straight out the bottom.

Before you even dream of opening Ads Manager, you need to be brutally honest with yourself about your store. Think about the customer journey from the moment they click your ad to the moment they should be hitting 'Confirm Purchase'.

-> High Click-Through Rate (CTR) but low Add to Carts? This suggests your ad is compelling, but the product page is letting you down. Are your product photos high quality? Do they show the product in use, from multiple angles? Is your product description just a list of features, or does it sell the benefit? Does it answer obvious questions? Is the price clear? Is it competitive?

-> Lots of Add to Carts but few checkouts? This often points to a problem in the cart or checkout process. Are you surprising them with a massive shipping fee at the very end? Is your checkout process long and complicated? Do you require them to create an account? Your store needs to look trustworthy. Do you have reviews or testimonials? Clear shipping and returns policies? A professional design?

The core issue often boils down to the offer itself. You aren't just selling a product; you're selling a solution to a problem or the fulfillment of a desire. Your ad and your website need to communicate this instantly. Forget thinking about your customer as a demographic ("women, 25-34, interested in fashion"). Think about their pain, their 'nightmare'. For an e-commerce store, the 'nightmare' might be the frustration of finding a unique gift, the disappointment of fast-fashion falling apart, or the desire to own something that makes them feel confident. Your entire message should be built around solving that problem. This is how you go from getting views to getting sales.

You probably should understand your numbers first...

This is the part where most people's eyes glaze over, but it's the difference between running a proper business and just gambling. The question isn't "how cheap can I get a click?" it's "how much can I afford to pay to acquire a customer and still make a healthy profit?". If you don't know the answer, you have no business running ads.

The key metric here is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This tells you what a customer is worth to you over their entire relationship with your store, not just on their first purchase. Someone who buys once and never returns is worth a lot less than someone who comes back every few months.

Let's break down how to calculate it. You'll need a few numbers from your business:

1. Average Order Value (AOV): Total Revenue / Number of Orders. What's the average basket size?
2. Purchase Frequency (PF): Total Number of Orders / Number of Unique Customers. How many times does the average customer buy from you in a year?
3. Gross Margin %: The percentage of revenue you keep after the cost of the goods sold. If you sell a t-shirt for £30 and it costs you £10 to make and ship, your gross margin is (£20 / £30) = 66.7%.
4. Customer Lifetime (in years): This can be tricky for a new store. A simple way is to estimate. How long do you realistically expect a customer to keep buying from you? Let's start with 1 or 2 years.

Once you have those, you can get a rough idea of your LTV. A simple version is:
LTV = (AOV * PF * Gross Margin %) * Customer Lifetime

This number is your North Star. It tells you the absolute maximum you could ever spend to acquire a customer. In reality, you want your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to be significantly lower. A healthy business model often aims for an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. This means for every £1 you spend acquiring a customer, you get £3 back in lifetime gross margin.

To make this easier, I've built a simple calculator for you. Play around with the sliders to see how improving things like your average order value or getting customers to buy more often can dramatically change what you can afford to spend on ads.

Once you know your target CAC, your job as an advertiser becomes much clearer. You're not just trying to get cheap clicks; you're trying to acquire customers for less than your target CAC. This single number will guide all your decisions about which ads to scale and which to kill.

You'll need a simple campaign structure to start with...

Okay, with the foundational strategy sorted, let's get into the practical side of setting up your first campaigns. People love to overcomplicate this with dozens of campaigns and ad sets. You don't need that. For a new store, simplicity is your friend. I'd recomend a simple, two-campaign structure that covers the entire funnel.

Campaign 1: Prospecting (Finding New Customers)

This campaign's only job is to reach people who have never heard of you before and turn them into customers.

• Objective: ALWAYS choose 'Sales' as your campaign objective. You're an e-commerce store, you want sales. Don't choose 'Traffic' or 'Engagement'. You're telling Meta what you want, and if you ask for cheap clicks, it will find you people who love to click but never buy. You are paying Meta to find buyers, so tell it to find buyers. This debunks another myth: you do not need to run awareness campaigns first. Awareness is a *byproduct* of making sales, not a prerequisite for a small business.
• Budget: I'd start with about 80% of your total daily budget here. If you're starting with £30/day, put £24 into this campaign.
• Audiences (Ad Sets): This is where you test who you're showing ads to. Inside this one campaign, you'll create a few different 'ad sets', each one targeting a different group of people. For a new account with no data, you'll start with 'Detailed Targeting'. This means targeting people based on their interests, behaviours, and demographics.
  • -> Think about your ideal customer. What magazines do they read (e.g., Vogue, Cosmopolitan)? Which brands do they follow (e.g., competitors, complementary brands)? What are their hobbies? Be specific. Targeting "Fashion" is too broad. Targeting "ASOS", "Zara", and followers of a specific fashion blogger is much better.
  • -> Create 3-5 ad sets to begin with, each focused on a different 'theme' of interests. For example: Ad Set 1 could target competitor brands. Ad Set 2 could target fashion magazines and influencers. Ad Set 3 could target interests related to the *reason* someone buys your product (e.g., "sustainable fashion", "ethical shopping").
  • -> Let these run for a few days. The data will quickly tell you which group of people is responding best. You'll then turn off the losers and put more money behind the winners.

Campaign 2: Retargeting (Bringing People Back)

This campaign targets people who have already shown interest by visiting your website but didn't buy. This is often your most profitable campaign.

• Objective: Again, 'Sales'.
• Budget: The remaining 20% of your daily budget. So, £6/day in our example.
• Audience (Ad Set): Here, you'll use a 'Custom Audience' created from your Pixel data. To keep it simple at the start, you can group a few audiences together. Create one ad set that targets:
  • -> All website visitors in the last 30 days.
  • -> People who have viewed a product in the last 30 days.
  • -> People who have added a product to their cart in the last 14 days.
• Crucial step: You must EXCLUDE people who have already purchased from you in the last 30-60 days. There's no point paying to show ads to people who just bought something.

This simple structure gives you full coverage. The prospecting campaign constantly finds new potential customers, and the retargeting campaign works to convert the ones that got away. Below is a flowchart that visualises how you should think about prioritising audiences as your account gathers more data.

And now for the ads themselves... the creative part

You have an advantage here because you've been creating TikToks. You already have a feel for what kind of content resonates with your audience. Don't throw that away! The best ads on Meta often don't look like ads at all. They look like native content, just like a good TikTok or Instagram Reel.

1. Repurpose Your Winners: Look at your TikTok analytics. Which videos got the most views, comments, and shares? Take your top 3-5 videos, remove any TikTok watermarks, and use them as your first video ads. This is the fastest way to get started with proven creative.

2. Copywriting - The Before-After-Bridge: Good ad copy isn't about listing features. It's about telling a mini-story that your customer can see themselves in. A powerful framework for this is the Before-After-Bridge.

• Before: Describe their current world. What's the frustration or problem they're facing? Paint a picture of their pain point.
• After: Describe the world where their problem is solved, thanks to your product. What does it feel like? What's the ideal outcome?
• Bridge: Position your product as the bridge that gets them from the 'Before' state to the 'After' state.

Here’s a quick example for a hypothetical store selling high-quality, comfortable work-from-home loungewear:

3. Test Different Creative Formats: Don't just rely on video. Test different formats against each other within each ad set. Meta's algorithm is smart; it will start to show the best-performing format to more people.

• Single Image: A stunning, high-quality photo of your product. Often works best for visually appealing items.
• Carousel: Lets you showcase multiple products, different features of one product, or tell a story across several cards. Great for showing variety.
• Video: As discussed, user-generated content (UGC) style often works best. Short, snappy, and mobile-first.

I remember one e-commerce campaign we managed for a women's apparel client, where we discovered that a specific style of image ad just clicked with their audience, ultimately leading to a 691% return on their ad spend. We've seen similar successes with other clients, for instance in the cleaning products niche. You won't know what works for you until you test.

So, the ads are running. Now what?

Launching the ads is only the start. Now you become a detective. Your job is to look at the data in Ads Manager and understand what it's telling you, then make decisions based on that evidence. Don't make emotional decisions or change things every five minutes. Let the data guide you.

Here are the main metrics you should care about for e-commerce:

• ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): This is the king of all metrics. For every £1 you put in, how many pounds in revenue came out? If you spend £100 and get £400 in sales, your ROAS is 4x. You need to know your 'breakeven' ROAS (which depends on your profit margins) and aim to be well above it.
• Cost Per Purchase (CPA): How much did it cost you to get one sale? This should be compared to the target CAC you worked out earlier.
• CTR (Link Click-Through Rate): Of all the people who saw your ad, what percentage clicked the link? A low CTR (under 1%) usually means your ad creative or copy isn't grabbing attention.
• Cost Per Click (CPC): How much are you paying for each click? A high CPC can eat into your profits, even with a good conversion rate.

You need to look at these metrics together to diagnose problems. It's the same funnel analysis we talked about for your website, but now applied to your ads:

-> Low CTR and High CPC? Your ad is the problem. It's not resonating with the audience. The image/video isn't stopping the scroll, or the headline isn't compelling. Test new creative.

-> High CTR and Low CPC, but low ROAS and high CPA? Your ad is doing its job of getting people to the site, but your website or offer is failing to convert them. Go back and work on your product page, pricing, or checkout process. This is a classic 'leaky bucket' scenario.

A simple rule for making decisions: let an ad set run until it has spent at least 1-2 times your target CPA. If an ad set has spent £60 without a single sale, and your target CPA is £30, it's very unlikely to suddenly become profitable. It's time to turn it off and test something new.

When you do find a winning ad set and creative that's getting you profitable sales, don't make drastic changes. The way to scale is to increase its budget slowly, by about 20% every 2-3 days. This gives the algorithm time to adjust without resetting its learning phase.

Putting it all together for you

That was a lot of information, I know. It's a far cry from just "boost post". But this is the difference between treating paid ads as a serious business growth channel and just setting fire to your money. The good news is that the principles are simple, even if the execution takes practice.

The entire process is a feedback loop: you start with a hypothesis about your customer and your offer, you test it with a simple campaign structure, you analyse the data to see what worked, and then you refine your hypothesis and test again. That's the whole game.

To make it more concrete, I've detailed my main recomendations for you in a table below. Think of this as your starting checklist.

As you can probably tell, this can quickly become a full-time job. While getting started on your own is absolutely possible, the real challenge comes with managing, optimising, and scaling your campaigns profitably over the long term. It requires constant testing, analysis, and staying on top of a platform that changes all the time.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference, not just in saving you time, but in getting you to profitability much faster by avoiding costly mistakes. If you get to a point where you'd like a professional eye on your specific situation, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session where we can take a look at your store and your goals and give you a tailored plan of action.

Either way, I hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful and gives you a much clearer path forward than the myths you were worried about.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh