TikTok users who search for specific videos on the app will start seeing sponsored content in their search results.
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The company announced today that advertisers will be able to place ads next to organic content that appears during search in the app. When a user clicks on an ad, they can continue scrolling down the screen to see search results in a feed. The ads are derived from other videos the company runs on the platform.
The ads will appear alongside organic content that appears when a user searches on TikTok, with a translucent “sponsored” tag on the video thumbnail. The ads already appear as videos among organic content in users’ “For you” feeds with the same “sponsored” tag. Search ads are set to “on” by default for advertisers.
TikTok’s decision to display ads in search results was inevitable. Earlier this year, Instagram did the same, placing sponsored content related to a user’s search. Instagram’s search ads appear when a user clicks on a post and starts scrolling away from other content.
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The ads that take up TikTok’s search pages may indicate that it’s a valuable niche for advertisers. Young people are increasingly using TikTok as a replacement for Google to search for product recommendations, restaurants , or shows to watch. (It’s working better than expected.)
However, TikTok search isn’t as advanced as Google, and keyword and hashtag are often pretty useless, at least in my experience. TikTok has also had trouble monitoring content that appears prominently in search results in the past — last year, the platform removed several videos that promoted the use of prescription drugs as weight-loss ads after researchers found that TikTok was showing them in search.
Source of information: theverge.com
