Actioning TikTok Ads
Actioning turns insights into changes you can push straight to TikTok Ads — no copy‑pasting between Aliveo and TikTok Ads Manager. When you ask Aliveo to optimize budgets, bids, bid strategies, pacing, or statuses across campaigns, ad groups, and ads, it produces an action table: a clear, side‑by‑side preview of current vs proposed values. You review the rows, adjust anything you like, select what you want, and click Apply — Aliveo then sends those changes to TikTok on your behalf and reports back which ones succeeded.
This guide covers:
- How action tables work — reviewing and applying changes safely.
- What you can action — budgets, bids, bid strategies, pacing, and statuses across campaigns, ad groups, and ads.
- Creating actions on the fly with
/actioningin Analytics Chat. - Building repeatable Custom Actioning Workflows.
- Example prompts, from simple one‑liners to multi‑step optimization workflows.
Who can action. Actioning is available only for accounts Aliveo manages for you (not read-only connections), and only to users who have permission:
- Primary users can action by default.
- Secondary users can action only once a primary user grants them permission for that account or platform — see Actioning Permissions.
- Read-only users can never action.
Aliveo checks this up front. If you're not eligible for an account, it still analyzes and recommends — but the Apply controls won't appear.
1. The Action Table
Whenever a chat answer or an agent step proposes changes to your account, Aliveo renders them as an action table. This is the single place where you review and apply changes — it looks and behaves the same whether the table came from a chat, a /actioning request, or a scheduled workflow.
Every action table carries the same instruction at the top:
Select rows, adjust the recommended values if needed, and click Apply.
Each row pairs a proposed value with its current value, and you can adjust any proposed value inline before applying. Select the rows you want, and the Apply button reflects how many you've chosen.
Anatomy of the table
| Element | What it does |
|---|---|
| Row checkboxes | Select exactly which recommendations you want to apply. A header checkbox selects/deselects all eligible rows. |
| Proposed value (editable) | The recommended new value. You can edit it inline before applying — change a bid, round a budget, switch a status, etc. |
| Current value | Shown beneath the proposed value (e.g. Current: 12.00) so you always see what you're changing from. |
| Status badge | Pending until applied, then Applied once the change reaches TikTok successfully. |
| Search / filter / sort | Narrow large tables with the Filter rows… box, per‑column filters, and sortable headers. |
Proposed cells adapt to the field type: amounts like bids and budgets use a number input, while statuses, bid strategies, and pacing types use a dropdown of allowed values.
Reviewing → applying
- Review each row — compare the proposed value against the current one.
- Adjust any proposed value inline if you'd like something different from what was recommended.
- Select the rows you want with their checkboxes (or use the header checkbox to take everything).
- Click Apply (N) — the number reflects how many rows you've selected. The button stays disabled until at least one row is selected.
- Aliveo validates the changes, pushes them to TikTok, and shows the result:
- Actions applied — "Selected recommendations were sent for execution."
- Some actions could not be applied — a few rows failed validation; review them and retry.
- Failed to apply actions — try again, or Refresh the table to reload the latest recommendations.
Applied rows flip to an Applied badge and their checkboxes lock, so you can't double‑apply the same change.
Built‑in guardrails
Before anything reaches TikTok, Aliveo runs each row through safety checks so you don't get cryptic API errors:
- No‑op protection — rows where the proposed value equals the current value are skipped.
- Drift protection — if the account changed since the recommendation was generated (the "current" value no longer matches TikTok), the row is held back rather than overwriting newer data.
- TikTok rule enforcement — Aliveo pre‑checks TikTok's constraints (see Things to know) and rejects rows that would violate them, with a plain‑language reason on the row.
- Change log & restore — every applied change is recorded (what changed, from → to, who, and when) in the Action Log, where you can track its impact and restore most changes with one click.
2. What You Can Action
Campaigns, ad groups, and ads can all be updated. Campaigns and ad groups can also be created.
Campaigns
| Action | Values |
|---|---|
| Daily / lifetime budget | Set a new daily spend cap or a campaign lifetime (total) budget |
| Status | ENABLE / DISABLE |
Ad Groups
| Action | Values |
|---|---|
| Daily / lifetime budget | The ad group's budget, in whichever mode (daily or lifetime) it was created with |
| Bid strategy | Switch between automatic bidding (no bid cap — TikTok spends your budget at the best cost) and a manual bid cap you set |
| Bid | The bid, when the ad group uses a manual bid cap |
| Conversion bid | The target cost per result, for conversion‑optimized ad groups |
| Pacing | Standard (spend evenly across the day) / Accelerated (spend as fast as possible) |
| Status | ENABLE / DISABLE |
Ads
| Action | Values |
|---|---|
| Status | ENABLE / DISABLE — pause underperforming ads or re‑enable them |
Creating entities
| Create | What you provide |
|---|---|
| Campaign | An objective (e.g. Reach, Traffic, App Promotion, Conversions) — name and other fields arrive with sensible defaults you can edit in the table. |
| Ad group | The parent campaign, an optimization goal, a bid strategy, and a budget (daily or lifetime). |
New entities are created disabled by default, so nothing starts spending until you turn it on.
3. /actioning in Analytics Chat
The fastest way to make a one‑off change is right inside a chat. Type / in the chat input to open the mode menu, then pick actioning.
Selecting actioning tells Aliveo you want to change the account, not just analyze it. It then makes the actioning tools available so your request comes back as a ready‑to‑apply action table instead of a plain answer.
You don't always have to type /actioning — Aliveo also recognizes actioning intent from phrasing like "pause…", "reduce the daily budget…", or "lower the bid…". Using the slash command simply makes your intent explicit.
Things you can say in actioning mode:
- "Pause the 2 ad groups with the highest cost per conversion."
- "Reduce the daily budget by 20% on campaigns spending over $50 a day."
- "Lower the bid by 15% on the 4 ad groups with the highest cost per result."
- "Switch the ad groups with the worst cost per conversion to automatic bidding."
Aliveo finds the relevant entities, builds the action table, and hands it to you to review and apply.
The other chat modes, for reference: info (answer from context without running analysis), brainstorming (strategy and market exploration), web_search (pull in live external info), and create_agent (draft an automation agent). Only actioning produces apply‑ready action tables.
4. Custom Actioning Workflows
For optimizations you want to run repeatedly — or assemble as a multi‑step routine — use a Custom Actioning Workflow agent instead of a one‑off chat. This is a blank‑slate agent template pre‑wired for actioning: you describe the analysis and the change, and the workflow produces an action table each time it runs.
You'll find it in the agent creation flow under Step 2: Template Selection (look in the Optimization Agents group).
Custom Actioning Workflow
Blank‑slate actioning workflow for TikTok Ads at the campaign / ad group / ad level (budget, bid, bid strategy, pacing, status).
- Use it for: daily and lifetime budgets, ad‑group bids, bid strategy switches, pacing changes, and enabling/disabling campaigns, ad groups, and ads.
- Set up with: Ad Performance data.
How to build one
The template drops you into the workflow playground with the actioning tools already switched on, so you assemble the steps yourself:
- Shared Context — define anything common across steps (definitions, thresholds, the time window, e.g. "use the last 30 days").
- Analyze steps — do the data work: pull performance, compute metrics like cost per conversion or cost per result, rank entities, and produce the proposed changes as an action table.
- Summary step — (optional, always last) logically summarize the combined output of the analyze steps.
Because this is an actioning workflow, the analyze step that proposes changes renders an action table in the workflow output — you still review and Apply exactly as you would in chat. (Custom Actioning Workflows are set up as one‑off agents so you stay in control of when changes are proposed.)
For the general agent‑building mechanics — accounts, data context, grouping, steps, preview, and scheduling — see Creating an Agent.
5. Examples — From Simple to Complex
Every example below is a single natural‑language request. Aliveo handles the analysis (finding the entities, computing the metric, ranking) and produces the action table — you review and apply.
Simple, single‑step actions
- Budget — "Set the daily budget to $100 on my top 2 campaigns by conversions."
- Status (campaign) — "Pause the 2 campaigns with the highest spend and fewest conversions."
- Status (ad) — "Pause the ads with zero conversions and more than $50 spend in the last 30 days."
- Bid — "Lower the bid by 15% on the ad groups with the highest cost per conversion."
- Pacing — "Switch my top‑spending ad group to accelerated pacing."
Metric‑driven optimizations
These combine an analysis with a change — Aliveo computes the metric, ranks, filters, then proposes the action:
- CPA guardrail — "Reduce the daily budget by 20% on ad groups with a cost per conversion above $15."
- Wasted‑spend cleanup — "Find ads with over $25 spend and zero conversions in the last 30 days and pause them."
- Efficiency scale‑up — "Raise the budget by 10% on the 3 ad groups with the lowest cost per conversion."
Bidding automation
- Hand control to TikTok — "Move the ad groups with erratic cost per conversion to automatic bidding."
- Take control back — "Switch my highest‑spending ad groups to a manual bid cap of $8."
Multi‑step workflows you can assemble
In a Custom Actioning Workflow, you can chain several of the above into one routine:
- Weekly efficiency pass — (1) Analyze: rank ad groups by cost per conversion, trim budgets on the worst. (2) Analyze: rank by conversion volume at target CPA, raise budgets on the best. (3) Analyze: pause ads with sustained spend and no conversions. (4) Summarize what changed.
- Delivery tune‑up — (1) Analyze: find ad groups under‑delivering against budget and move them to accelerated pacing. (2) Analyze: find ad groups overspending on weak audiences and lower their bids. (3) Summarize.
Each analyze step produces its own action table, so you can review and apply each set of changes independently.
Advanced, tailored workflows
Beyond the self‑serve patterns above, we build custom actioning workflows tuned to your account's strategy and scale. If any of these sound like what you need, talk to us and we'll set them up for you:
- Sophisticated bid & budget management — goal‑seeking bid/budget logic that reacts to CPA, conversion‑rate, and delivery trends rather than simple top‑N rules.
- Pacing — keep daily spend on track to budget targets across the flight, with proposed adjustments when an account is over‑ or under‑pacing.
These run as the same review‑and‑apply action tables, so even sophisticated logic stays fully under your control — nothing changes until you click Apply.
6. Things to Know — TikTok's Rules
Aliveo enforces TikTok's own constraints up front, so invalid rows are caught before they're sent. If you see a row rejected with a reason, it's usually one of these:
Statuses
- Only
ENABLE/DISABLEcan be set. Everyday phrasing like "pause", "turn off", or "activate" is normalized to the right value automatically.
Budgets
- An entity's budget mode (daily vs lifetime) is fixed when it's created. Aliveo only proposes the mode a given campaign or ad group actually uses; you can't switch an existing entity from one to the other.
- Amounts are in the account's currency and must respect TikTok's minimums.
Bidding
- A bid and automatic bidding are mutually exclusive. You can't set a bid while the ad group bids automatically; switching to a manual bid cap requires a bid in the same change.
- Leave the bid blank on an automatically‑bidding ad group — an empty bid cell is treated as "no bid", not a bid of zero.
Set once, at creation
- A campaign's objective and an ad group's optimization goal are fixed when the entity is created and can't be changed afterwards. To use a different objective or goal, create a new entity.
These guardrails mean you can safely propose broad changes; Aliveo simply skips the rows TikTok wouldn't accept and tells you why.
That's actioning — analyze, review, and apply TikTok Ads changes without leaving Aliveo. Start with a quick /actioning request in chat, and graduate to a Custom Actioning Workflow once you find an optimization worth repeating.
