TikTok has launched GMV Max which is its next stage in-app shopping push in U.K. and it will be using AI for optimizing your product listings in the app. As per the company, GMV Max is now available for products and LIVE shopping sessions on TikTok Shop, GMV Max automates creation of campaign which includes audience targeting, bidding and creative selection for optimizing campaign performance by seamless identification and scaling of high performing assets for sellers on the platform.
The product advertising process will be handled by sourcing of assets, creation of ad campaigns and optimization for sales with incremental GMV that would not be otherwise attainable for keeping GMV to ad spend ration stable.
The ad creation system is end to end which aims at making it easier for brands for listing their products in the app and maximizing sales for TikTok users.
TikTok Shop has more than 200,000 active small businesses in UK with more than 6,000 LIVE shopping sessions each day. In the Chinese market, TikTok got great success with big monetization focus on in-stream shopping and it seems that GMV Max could be a hit among U.K. brands.
TikTok is the second largest online beauty and wellness retailer in U.K. and if we combine with popularity and broader online spending trends, it would be worth more businesses exploring the potential of TikTok promotions for their products.
The opportunity looks huge and TikTok will have to work towards adoption for boosting the momentum.Advertisers now using TikTok Shop for promoting their products will need to use its Ai driven GMV Max campaign tool. So from now on GMV Max would be the only way for running TikTok Shop ads and end options for manual targeting and campaign management.
GMV Max was introduced in October 2024 for UK merchants and it makes use of algorithm for automating ad delivery across TikTok. This tool decides ad placements, controls spending in real time and adjusts creative exposure. Now advertisers will only be able to set budgets and ROI goals and from there onwards the system would be automatically managing how the campaigns would be running.
As of now advertisers are able to manually select target audience by age, gender or location, apart from this they can even control bidding strategies and where the ads would appear but with GMV Max taking over, these controls would no longer be available. It is a buildup on TikTok earlier policy where GMV Max became the default option for campaigns by making use of Sales objective and the new requirement now covers all TikTok Shop advertising.
A number of ad buyers said that it would make it harder for tracking performance outside the closed ecosystem of TikTok. GMV Max right now credits purchases made during a campaign to the tool even if the user did not see an ad which raises serious questions regarding how the performance gets measured.
Without any kind of visibility in placements or audience data or influencer performance, advertisers would be struggling to connect outcomes of TikTok Shop with broader marketing strategies. The lack of transparency would limit the ability for integrating performance of TikTok with wider marketing plans.
Even though automation seems to be becoming the digital marketing norm, some of the advertisers are of the belief that move of TikTok is premature in this regards as GMV Max has not been able to prove itself effective for every advertiser.
On the other hand, small merchants on TikTok Shop welcomed GMV Max for its smart features like ROI Protection which provides credits in case returns fall below 90% of the campaign goals.
