Authenticate with an access token that has Campaign Management permissions; ensure your ad account has TikTok's automated targeting features enabled.
Create a campaign via POST /open_api/v1.3/campaign/create/ with an appropriate objective_type (e.g., CONVERSIONS, APP_INSTALL); set the campaign-level budget and budget_mode.
Create an ad group under the campaign; to enable broad/auto targeting, set audience_type to REACH_AND_FREQUENCY or leave targeting fields empty to let TikTok's system determine the best audience automatically.
Alternatively, set targeting_expansion.enable to true in the ad group payload; this allows TikTok to expand beyond your explicit targeting criteria when it finds better-performing audiences.
Supply at least one creative (ad) in the ad group with a video asset, ad text, and landing page URL; TikTok's broad targeting requires the system to have creative data to determine relevance signals.
Monitor the ad group's audience reach and CPM via the reporting API; compare performance against a parallel ad group with manual targeting to evaluate whether auto-targeting improves CPA.
Known gotchas
TikTok custom events (non-standard event types) cannot be used as optimization goals even in broad/auto targeting mode; only standard events are eligible for campaign optimization objectives.
Enabling targeting expansion does not guarantee the system will expand; if the initial audience is large enough to deliver the budget, expansion may never activate — test with smaller seed audiences to observe expansion behavior.
Broad targeting works best with conversion-objective campaigns that have sufficient historical event data; new ad accounts with no pixel history will see poor performance from auto targeting until the learning phase completes.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp