TikTok is launching more sophisticated search ads so brands can target campaigns based on keywords, and avoid keywords, the company announced on Tuesday. Since last year, TikTok has run ads in search results, but the campaigns were automated, leaving it to TikTok to choose what queries prompted what ads to appear. Now, TikTok is handing search ad controls over to the marketers.

The biggest change in search ads is the keyword targeting, an activity that is familiar to search marketers on Google and Amazon, where ads get placed according to a user’s query. If a consumer were searching for a specific brand, that brand, or rivals, could bid to serve an ad at that moment. TikTok’s search ads will have similar mechanics to traditional search environs, forcing TikTok marketers to become more knowledgeable about search trends on the app. Marketers will need to understand the keywords consumers are using to discover videos relevant to their brands and try to manage campaigns to show up on the appropriate searches. TikTok also has made it so search advertisers control more of their bids—what they are willing to pay for certain keywords.

The new product “is really our first foray into keyword-based search,” said David Kaufman, TikTok’s global head of monetization product solutions and operations. 

An advertiser will be able to “select a portfolio of keywords that they’d like to target their advertising campaigns against and give those ads an opportunity to meet users exactly at that moment of discovery around that high-intent search behavior,” Kaufman said. “We think it’s a transition for us from being a search placement extension into a full-fledged search product with that keyword-based bidding and targeting.”

On TikTok, 57% of people use search, and 23% of those users head to the search bar within the first 30 seconds of opening the app, Kaufman said.

Since last year, TikTok has been running ads within search results pages, though marketers had no levers to control where and when those ads appeared. Advertisers simply turned on a “search” toggle within TikTok’s ad platform that extended campaigns they were already running to appear in the search results. Search is becoming a more core part of social media, as the platform’s become more fueled by commerce, and as consumers turn to video apps to research products. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and other video-focused apps are seeing the potential for social media to become primary places where consumers search, compared to the older web that relied on Google and text-based searches.

YouTube is owned by Google, and advertisers run campaigns that incorporate the whole platform, buying everything from search to video ads. Instagram, owned by Meta, has been experimenting with more options for brands to run ads in search. TikTok especially though has seen how new social media habits are leading to new advertising products, including its new search ad platform.

TikTok has received credit for its role in viral commerce, where products featured in videos on the app become hot sellers. The closer TikTok is to the commerce, the more compelling its search function is to marketers. But search advertising requires different strategies than the typical social media ad campaign. Social media can be good for broad reach, brand awareness goals, but search is a more performance-driven campaign setting. Social media marketers are used to targeting people’s interest and demographics, while search marketers target consumers’ intent as expressed in their search queries.

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“We see about one in three of our users are actually searching on TikTok after discovering [a product or service] on other platforms,” Kaufman said. “It’s a really interesting combination of having that upper-funnel discovery on TikTok feed, and lower-funnel, intent based traffic that's generated by TikTok itself, as well as users trying to go deeper on products that they may have heard about in other parts of the internet.”

When TikTok was developing its search advertising formats it internally debated whether to keep the process fully automated or to develop the full ad suite familiar to search marketers, including keyword control. TikTok has AI-powered ad campaigns that introduce more automation into the targeting and bidding mechanics, like how Google developed Performance Max campaigns and Meta built Advantage+. TikTok is trying to calibrate its search campaigns to provide some easy modes for the marketers to set up campaigns, but still give them the power to hone the campaigns, Kaufman said.

“We think it’s very critical to get that balance correct,” Kaufman said. “But we also want the solutions to become simpler over time, while driving that performance threshold up.”

TikTok has offered search advertisers insights into keywords before, giving those brands feedback about what search queries triggered their ad campaigns to appear. But advertisers were not able to adjust campaigns based on that feedback. “You could select up to 10,000 keywords for your campaign,” Kaufman said, “which is quite a diversity of interest and intents that are available.”