I’ve sent you the good ones.
$1.1m from ads. 10.6x ROI. 55 videos that made 45% of the money.
All true. All our clients.
Here’s the bit I left out of……
Every case study starts at month five
Month 2 is a spreadsheet starting with zero in it…..
Nobody shows you the full story……
So I pulled my own client list this morning:
Brand A did $466,213 in creator sales in 90 days.
Brand E did $78.
Brand A started last year. Brand D started in June.
Same team, same playbook, same people running it.
The cold start is three to four months
Nobody says that out loud
Brand D had 4,600 creators sat frozen because of one TikTok profile setting nobody could unblock for weeks.
And when sales do start, they’re horribly concentrated.
Brand B has done $11,812 since May. $10,055 of it came from one creator. 85% of the business is one bloke who could stop tomorrow.
💡 In months one to three you’re not building sales. You’re buying data.
144,000 creators. $346.
That is not a typo
Brand C ran six outreach campaigns since June. Roughly 144,000 creators reached. 969 samples shipped. $346 in sales.
That’s 969 units of your own stock, packed and posted, gone.
One campaign on its own: 33,088 creators reached, 98 sample requests, one video posted, zero dollars.
Amazon Halo Effect
It’s real
Most of what TikTok Shop does for you never shows up as a TikTok Shop sale.
There are three places someone can buy from you.
TikTok Shop is easiest, they’re already scrolling.
Amazon is next, they trust it and their card is saved.
Your own site is the holy grail and the hardest, because nobody hands a random website their card details when Amazon already has them.
So the videos run, and people may not buy on TikTok Shop. But they type your brand name into Amazon instead, because that’s where they buy everything.
Branded search climbs. Organic rank climbs. Sales you never paid for.
That’s the halo, and it’s the only part of month two that pays you back later.
You can’t track it with the pixel
The TikTok pixel can’t see Amazon. Amazon won’t let a third party pixel near a listing and they’re not about to start sharing…. but you track sales on your website
Amazon Attribution is meant to fill that gap….. sadly not (don’t trust Amazon Attribution when TikTok is involved…… it’s a long story).
A customer sees the video, does nothing, but then searches your brand on Amazon three days later and buys.
So you measure the shadow instead…..
Back in 2023 I ran ads for a grooming brand. Attribution reported nothing, so I opened Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance and tracked the brand term week by week. It climbed while the views climbed. No tracking link involved, just two lines going the same way.
⚠️ One gate. You can only judge a halo once you’ve got serious view volume. Brand A has 7.2 million views in 30 days. Brand C has 12,144. Don’t go hunting a halo you haven’t earned.
The tools finally caught up
How to track the Amazon Halo effect…. the average TikTok Shop outreach tool already tracks it:
Reacher correlates your daily branded search against your TikTok views, with a lag setting so a video today matches an Amazon order three days later. It’s the only one of the three that touches branded search.
EUKA now puts Amazon sales, TikTok views and TikTok Shop sales on one timeline, plus your top Amazon search terms (my fav…. has MCP access).
Cruva links TikTok products to specific ASINs, so you can ask whether this product moved when videos about this product landed.
Parallel lines, not proof. Still the first time anyone put those lines on one chart.
💡 Go and connect Amazon to your TikTok tool. Today. Before you need the proof, not after.
‘Cos everyone knows someone that has gone viral on TikTok……. don’t let that confuse you….. going viral is so rare, I believe it’s a myth.
For those brands that understand the costs…. TikTok Shop is the best platform for eCommerce.
- Paul 👊
PS. 17 September, 6pm BST. I’m breaking down all five levels of TikTok Shop AI live, what each costs and which one you should aim at. Free, capped, recording for everyone who registers.
Simply vote here, to be included: