#marketing-paid

@Mike K

Hey Mike! Good question, so the way GMV Max works is there are multiple ways to run it. First is the method you are talking about called "Target ROI" but there's also another way called "Max Delivery."

These are campaign objectives, just like you would running a Meta campaign and be able to select "Awareness" or "Traffic" or "Sales," GMV Max has 2 different campaign objectives, Target ROI and Max Delivery.

The way that both work are different.

In addition, within GMV Max, ad creatives are assigned a role. Think about Meta Ads "Learning" and "Delivering" phases and how you can see what stage the ad is in, the same is shown on TikTok with a little bit more detail.

Hold that thought, we'll come back to this.

With Target ROI is more of a bid / cost cap type of campaign. It will only spend if TikTok thinks the Target ROI you set (For example 2.0) can be hit, if it isn't confident, it won't spend.

This is due to a few different reasons. One is that your GMV Max campaigns do not have enough conversion data or sales to confidently spend or Two, you don't have enough quality creatives that are in "delivering."

As mentioned above, there are "ad phases" and just like Meta, TikTok Shop has them too. They are "In Queue," "Learning," "Delivering," and "Not Delivering." There are a couple of additional ad phases, but these 4 are the most important.

In Queue is video ad creatives (either from your brand page or your creators who have ad authorization turned on for those videos) that are awaiting the learning phase to be tested with ad spend.

Learning is when ads are actively being spent on to see if they are a successful ad that TikTok can then spend more money on and confidently get the return you are looking for set by your Target ROI.

Once ads have gone through a learning phase, they will go to 1 of 2 categories, "Delivering" or "Not Delivering." This will be determined by the performance of said ad creative, with the ad creatives that have gotten conversions or good data will be moved to "Delivering."

By having ad creatives go to "Delivering" phase, this will give TikTok and GMV Max more confidence to spend more and therefore getting your campaign out of the 'not spending' phase.

Typically the reason why GMV Max doesn't spend it a lack of creatives or not having enough running.

Now, let's shift our mind over to a campaign objective called "Max Delivery."

Max Delivery is simply that, it will "force" ad spend to that campaign no matter the confidence level.

It's a fancy way of saying, Max Delivery is just like running a regular ad campaign where it will spend the budget that you've set regardless of the ROI it will achieve on that day.

Typically when you start GMV Max, setting your campaign to "Max Delivery" helps 'force' sales to the campaign (even though they will be more likely unprofitable), just to get the sales data so that the GMV Max can have more confidence in spending to achieve the Target ROI.

Once you have some momentum with Max Delivery, you can switch it back to Target ROI to test and see if the daily spend is close to what the daily budget is.

This would suggest that you could increase the budget, showing it has the confidence level to actually spend your full daily budget, if it doesn't you'll need to move back to Max Delivery and test more ads.

A lot of the times it always comes down to low quality creatives.

So solving this spend issue, is always about testing more marketing angles, more approaches and higher volume to find those winners, then rinse and repeat.

Pro Tip: There's a feature called "Creative Boost" that you can access once you click through to the creatives in your GMV Max campaign, this "Creative Boost" feature allows you to manually set an ad spend to that SPECIFIC CREATIVE to test if you have confidence that it can generate sales.

So "Creative Boost" is basically like running an ad set with 1 ad in it that you get to set the budget for if it isn't getting enough spend to really test it. Sometimes we pull "Not Delivering" ads that only got a few cents of testing into learning again because we feel the creative will work, and sometimes it does and gets put into Delivering.

The end game goal is to get as many creatives into Delivering as possible, that way you can scale easier. They key will be maintaining content velocity each week with fresh new creatives to keep the cogs turning. This way you have an endless campaign that refreshes itself.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions I can help with :)

Wow, thank you so much for that reply. Going through all this now!

@Mike K I will add, one other reason that GMV Max won't spend is also you've set the Target ROI too high. What we've done to combat this is every 2-4 days drop the ROI down 0.2 each time going from 2.0 to 1.8 to 1.6 etc. all the way down to even 0.6, just so we can get it to spend. We need conversion data points, not profitability in the beginning.

You can then slowly increase Target ROI the same way up as you did down!

That was the first thing I tried and they still wouldn't serve, even after ads had gotten sales on very little spend. I am going to test boosting creatives now and see if that helps jump start them