Advertising features on TikTok are evolving, and with almost two billion users worldwide, it’s one of the best apps for marketers. Here, we’ll go over the major TikTok Ad specs for 2025.
TikTok Ads in 3 Steps
There are 3 parts involved in creating a TikTok Ad in the TikTok Ads Manager:
- Campaigns
- Ad Groups
- Ads
We’ll go over each step here before getting onto the specs for your TikTok Ads.
TikTok Campaigns
Once you have setup your TikTok Ads Manager account, the next step is to set up a campaign for your TikTok Ad. This is where you will select the objective, budget, and create an Ad Group.
TikTok divides Ad campaign objectives into 3 groups. Each reflect the Marketing Funnel: awareness, consideration and conversion.
Awareness focuses on the top-funnel marketing stage. TikTok specifies the goal of this campaign as ‘Reach’ (aka, great for brand awareness).
Consideration focuses more on the mid-funnel stage. TikTok lists ‘Traffic, App Installs and Video views’ as the main goals of this campaign.
Conversion focuses on the bottom-funnel stage. TikTok encourages users to take valuable action on your site. This includes downloads, signs ups, subscribes, and of course purchases.
After you’ve decided on your objective, you will be able to add multiple Ad Groups to your campaign.
TikTok Ad Groups
In Ad Groups you can manage all things related to the ad itself. This includes: layout, assets (image, text and video), placement, targeting, budget, bidding methods and optimization.
TikTok offers the Automated Creative Optimization option. Upload multiple assets and TikTok automatically generates the best performing combinations of those assets.
TikTok’s impressive targeting features allow you to narrow your audience based on demographics, interests, behaviours, and device type! Pinpoint your audience by iOS or Android device. You can even be as specific as setting the price of the device (i.e. only target users with a device that costs $1,000 or more).
In Budget & Scheduling, choose from either Daily Budget or Lifetime Budget to ensure your ad spend never exceeds this limit (USD $20 minimum spend). Depending on which you choose, you can set a budget either for the total duration of your campaign or a daily limit.
Bidding & optimization lets you customize your optimization goals and bidding strategy. You can choose from 3 goals: ‘Conversion’, ‘Click’ and ‘Reach’. Input third-party tracking links to monitor your Ad’s overall performance.
Note: Once you’ve created your Ad Group, you cannot change the Start Date, Optimization Goal, or Conversion Event.
Create a TikTok Ad
After setting up your Campaign and Ad Group(s), you can create your Ad. TikTok Ads Manager currently supports only two Ad formats: image and video.
TikTok allows up to 999 campaigns per ad account, with up to 999 ad groups per campaign You can have up to 20 ads per Ad Group, and formats and specs vary depending on placement.
The main placements available for your Ad through the TikTok Ads Manager are:- TikTok In-Feed on the ‘For You’ page
- NewsFeed Apps Series: TopBuzz, BuzzVideo, Babe and News Republic (includes newsfeed ads and detail page ads)
- Pangle
Here are the TikTok Ad specs for 2024:
The following Image Ad specs are for News Feed App series placements.
News Feed App series placements appear in other news aggregation apps owned by TikTok’s creator ByteDance including: BuzzVideo, TopBuzz, NewsRepublic, and Babe.
Apart from appearing in TikTok In-Feed, News Feed app placements can also appear post-video and on the details page. ‘Post-video’ means your Ads will play at the end of a video. The ‘details page’ is underneath the content on a video or article page within any of the News Apps listed above.
TikTok Ad Specs for Image Ads:
- App Name or Brand Name: 1 – 40 half-width characters including punctuation and spaces (0.5 – 20 full-width characters). 4-40 Latin alphabet letters and 2-20 Asian characters.
- Description:: 1-100 half-width characters and 1-50 full-width characters. 12 – 100 Latin characters, 6 – 50 Asian characters. Emojis and the characters “{ }” and “#” cannot appear in the description.
- File type and size: JPG or PNG and no size restriction (less than or equal to 500KB recommended)
- Resolution: TikTok lists no restriction but recommends ≥ 1200 x 628 px
TikTok Ad Specs for Video Ads:
- App Name or Brand Name: 1 – 40 half-width characters including punctuation and spaces (0.5 – 20 full-width characters)
- Description: 1 – 100 latin characters, 1 – 50 asian characters. Emojis and the characters “{ }” and “#” cannot appear in the description.
- TikTok Video Ad Placements
- Aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9
- Resolution: ≥540 x 960px, ≥640 x 640px, or ≥960 x 540px.
- File type and size: .mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .3gp, or .avi and less than 500MB
- Video duration: 5 – 60 seconds (9 – 15 sec recommended) Bitrate: ≥516 kbps
- News Feed App Series Video Ad Placements
- Aspect ratio: 16:9 or 1:1
- Resolution: no restrictions but TikTok suggests ≥720 x 1280px, ≥640 x 640px, or ≥1280 x 720px
- File type and size: .mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .3gp, or .gif less than 500MB
- Video duration: No limit but TikTok suggests short videos of between 5 – 60 seconds
- Bitrate: ≥516 kbps
- Aspect ratio: 1:1
- File type and size: JPG, JPEG or PNG and < 50KB
Other TikTok Ad Formats
TikTok offers 3 other ad formats: Spark Ads, Playable Ads, Carousel Ads, and Collection Ads.
Spark Ads allow advertisers to leverage organic TikTok posts and user-generated content (UGC).
TikTok Carousel Ads allow you to feature multiple images in a slideshow type format, linking each image to either the same or a unique URL.
If you’re looking to drive installs for an app or game, we recommend TikTok’s Playable Ads. Playable Ads are interactive ads that invite users to take part in a full-screen playable experience, like a preview.
Note: It is recommended that Playable Ads are compatible with Pangle (TikTok Audience Network).
Here we will go over Carousel, Collection, and Spark Ads
TikTok Ad Specs for Carousel Ads
TikTok Carousel ads are supported on the Newsfeed App series as in-feed ads and detail page ads in TopBuzz and Buzz Video.
Use Carousel ads to tell your brand’s story or as a virtual catalog for a product or service. You have the option to link each frame of the carousel to a unique landing page.
TikTok Carousel Ads support up to 10 images in one ad in a left to right sequence.
Text character lengths
- Ad Title: between 12 – 40 characters (20 Japanese characters)
- Ad Caption: only one line with a maximum of 20 characters
- Character specifics:
- half-width characters are counted as 1 character
- full-width characters are counted as 2 characters
- punctuation and spaces within the text are counted as characters
- spaces at the beginning and end of the text will not be counted as a character
- Emojis not supported
Carousel Images
- Number: between 2 – 10 images
- File type and size: JPG or PNG, ≤500 KB is suggested
- File resolution: no requirement listed but depending on whether a user chooses the square or the horizontal format, the system will tailor the image in the center to be:
- Square: 640 x 640 px
- Horizontal: 1200 x 628 px
TikTok Ad Specs for Collection Ads
- Aspect Ratio: 9:16, 1:1 or 16:9.
- Resolution: 720 x 1280 px, 640 x 640 px, and 1280 x 720 px.
- Duration: 5 seconds minimum, 16 seconds maximum.
- File Type and Size: MP4, MPEG, MOV or AVI, 500 MB minimum.
The new alternative to Collection Ads is Video Shopping Ads. In 2023, TikTok launched TikTok Shop, which is currently available in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.
When users click product links, a product page will appear over your video where they can learn more and make a purchase – leading to higher click-through rates and conversions!
TikTok Ad Specs for Spark Ads
- No restriction on video ratio, resolution, file type, file size, duration, and bitrate
- Ad caption can be blank for Reach, Video View and Reach and Frequency (Beta) objectives. It cannot be blank for Engagement (Beta), Traffic and App Install objectives
- Emojis and account mentions are allowed in captions
- The display name and text in the Spark Ad reflects the organic post and cannot be edited through the Ad Manager
Why TikTok Ads?
If you’re looking to reach a young, diverse and highly-engaged audience for your next paid social strategy, TikTok should be a priority.
TikTok is the highest-grossing app of the year, with almost a billion downloads in 2024 alone.
62% of TikTok users are under 30 -year-olds in 20+ regions worldwide who spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the app.
TikTok is indispensable to your digital marketing strategy if you’re looking to reach Gen Z, making up over 60% of users. After viewing a Dynamic Showcase Ad on TikTok, 74% of Gen Z TikTok users would seek more information on the product, and 46% of Gen Z TikTok users have bought a product from TikTok in the last year.
TikTok prides itself on the slogan ‘Don’t make Ads, make TikToks!’
This gives us good insight into how to influence TikTokers and track the result of your digital ad investment.
