Set a GMV Max target ROI that makes money, and feed it enough videos to spend it

Here's what changed. Brands Meet Creators says that from July, every TikTok Shop campaign has to run through GMV Max, and live, product and video shopping ads can't be created or edited anymore. ▶ 0:46 Jordan West puts the date most brands had to switch by at July 15, 2025. ▶ 0:55

You give it a product, a daily budget and a target ROI, and it handles the creative, the audience and the bidding. ▶ Jon Reiter 1:36 You don't even pick an audience: you tell it the return you want on your investment, and that is your target ROI. ▶ Jon Reiter 1:41 TikTok looks through every video it can find, from your own handle, your official accounts and your affiliates, and picks the ones it thinks will do best. ▶ The Media Elephant 0:14 Any video that tags your TikTok Shop product can get picked. ▶ ZoCo Marketing 5:45

Every video goes down the same road. In queue means it's waiting to be tested, learning means it's being tested, and delivering means it's promoted regularly. ▶ Fernando Campos 6:46 In learning, Jon Reiter says each video gets a little budget, typically a cent or two, just to see. ▶ 3:34 TikTok now calls that learning phase exploring. ▶ ZoCo Marketing 14:06

It moves fast. Jordan Kilgour says the system re-scores creative and audiences about every 15 minutes, slowing the losers and scaling the winners. ▶ 6:48 Duff says you're going to see one or two videos take up about 90% of the budget. ▶ 3:57 And you can't look under the hood much: Jordan West says per ad numbers are now hidden inside GMV Max. ▶ 1:35

Know this before you trust any number it shows you: while the campaign runs, every paid and organic order for its products is credited to it, even if the buyer never saw an ad. ▶ Jordan Kilgour 13:15 The Media Elephant gives the formula: paid sales plus organic sales, divided by ad spend. ▶ 2:41 In their example, take out the organic sales and $4,500 of paid sales on $2,000 of spend comes to 2.25x. ▶ 3:46 Put your own numbers in below to see what your ads earned on their own.

There are two ways it can spend. Jose Torres says that in his example target ROI won't spend anything if it can't get a 3x ROAS, while max delivery will spend the $3K at a 1x. ▶ 5:46 Either way, Social Commerce Club calls GMV Max a signal amplifier, only as good as what you feed it. ▶ 32:12

Before it can pick a single video, it has to be switched on, so how do you set it up?

Three accounts have to be connected before you can make a campaign. ZoCo Marketing says your Business Center has to be linked to both your Ads Manager and your TikTok Seller account. ▶ 1:26 Then, in Business Center, make sure Ad promotion is checked so you can run ads for that shop, and hit save. ▶ 3:35 When you make the Business Center, Le Duy Hiep says to pick I am an advertiser so you can get the $6,000 incentive he talks about. ▶ 3:16

You'll know it worked when Create campaign shows your shop as available. ▶ ZoCo Marketing 2:37 Pick Continue with a TikTok Shop there; ZoCo Marketing says a business shouldn't continue as a creator. ▶ 3:08 At this point, Le Duy Hiep shows, you still can't create a GMV Max ad and the button is not active. ▶ 7:26

There's one more gate, and it catches new shops. Social Commerce Club says you can't run any GMV Max campaign without a shop performance score. ▶ 16:34 Social Commerce Club says to get 30 orders organically, which TikTok Shop demands before it gives you a score, and you want that score at 3.5 or above to have enough to get going, such as ads and affiliate outreach. ▶ 13:01 ▶ 12:35

Once that's in place, building the campaign is a few clicks. From Seller Center, Jon Reiter goes to the Marketing tab on the left and picks Shop Ads. ▶ 5:38 At the top is Create GMV Max ads, with two kinds of campaign: promote products or promote a live stream. ▶ 5:58 The five screens below show each one.

1. 

   STEP 1

   Link three accounts

   In Business Center, your Ads Manager and your TikTok Shop seller account have to be linked to each other.

2. 

   STEP 2

   Continue with a TikTok Shop

   In Ads Manager, start a GMV Max campaign and pick Continue with a TikTok Shop, not as a creator. If your shop is listed, everything is connected.

3. 

   STEP 3

   Seller Center, Marketing, Shop Ads

   Or start from Seller Center: Marketing on the left, Shop Ads, then Create GMV Max ads at the top right.

4. 

   STEP 4

   Promote products, then pick them

   Choose Promote products. Jon Reiter puts one or two proven winners and a couple of newer products from the same niche in one campaign, five at most.

5. 

   STEP 5

   Target ROI and daily budget, then Publish

   Set the target ROI from tool 1 and the daily budget from tool 4, then publish and leave it alone for 7 to 10 days.

Which products go in is where the tutorials split. Jon Reiter puts one or two proven winners with a couple of newer products, all in the exact same niche, up to five a campaign. ▶ 6:33 Fernando Campos gives each product its own campaign, so you can see which ones earn the highest ROI, and Jose Torres says the same: one product, one campaign. ▶ 2:42 ▶ 11:07 Jordan West went the other way: he says one campaign holding all your products seems to be the winning formula for brands in 2025. ▶ 7:48

Whatever mix you pick, Jordan West toggles on affiliate, organic and brand page content as sources. ▶ 2:09 Jordan Kilgour leaves creative on auto select and only cuts videos that don't match the product he's promoting. ▶ 4:28 Le Duy Hiep says ads start running about 30 minutes to 3 hours after you publish. ▶ 12:22 Then The Media Elephant says don't touch the target ROAS or the daily spend for at least 7 days, and 10 is better. ▶ 9:59

One box on that last screen asks for a single number, your target ROI, so what should you put in it?

Target ROI is the return you ask GMV Max for. ZoCo Marketing puts it simply: set a target of 4 and TikTok tries to bring back $4 in revenue for every $1 you spend. ▶ 4:49 That number is revenue. It says nothing about profit, so you need your cost of goods and your margins before you set it. ▶ 5:15

Jon Reiter works out his break-even ROI before he sets any target. ▶ 3:50 Then he usually sets the target at about 1.5 times that break-even. ▶ 7:40 Your break-even is in the calculator at the top of the page. Put a target in below and see where it sits against it.

Where to start is where the tutorials split the most. ZoCo Marketing sets it from your last 30 days of blended ROAS, and if you have no idea, starts with the number TikTok recommends. ▶ 5:34 ▶ 5:46 Le Duy Hiep follows TikTok's number at first, 5.4 in his example, and adjusts it afterward. ▶ 11:04 The Media Elephant strongly discourages using any of the automations TikTok suggests for your brand. ▶ 5:57

The Media Elephant recommends setting a target somewhere between 2 and 3. ▶ 8:01 Fernando Campos says a cold start might need to start around 2, and Duff recommends something lower like 2, or even 1.5. ▶ 3:05 ▶ 1:50 Jordan West and Jordan Kilgour go lower still: start at about 1, and Jordan Kilgour's team has gone as low as 0.7, 0.4 and 0.1. ▶ 4:47 ▶ 43:15

Why so low? Jordan West says the higher your target, the harder it is for GMV Max to find the confidence to spend. ▶ 12:36 Jordan Kilgour warns not to set the target at 3: you won't get 3, and your campaign will spend about 20 to 80 cents a day. ▶ 2:47 And Jordan West says to expect to lose money at first, and not to chase a high ROAS on day one while the system learns. ▶ 8:46

When the ROI does look good, read it with care. Jordan Kilgour says ROI gets boosted because it counts both ads and organic, so a high ROI alone doesn't mean GMV Max is working. ▶ 26:14 The Media Elephant puts the bar high: a brand not near 7x on GMV Max is probably losing money, depending on its margins. ▶ 8:16 TikTok's ROI protection gives ad credits if ROI falls below 90% of target with 20 plus daily orders, but Jordan Kilgour calls it hit or miss and his team tends not to use it. ▶ 44:47 ▶ 45:04

A low target gives it room to spend, but how much should it have to spend each day while it learns?

TikTok lets you set a daily budget as low as $10. ▶ ZoCo Marketing 8:01 But Jon Reiter points out that how much of the budget it spends, $400 in his example, is based on your target ROI. ▶ 2:21 The bigger question is how much it takes to get out of learning.

Jordan Kilgour gives the goal in plain numbers: 50 sales within 7 days gets your account out of learning. ▶ 31:42 And those sales have to be recent, because 50 sales from a year ago are outdated data. ▶ 32:26

So how much a day buys 50 sales in a week? Jordan Kilgour says at least 10 times your average order value, so a $20 product means at least $200 a day. ▶ 33:11 ▶ 33:39 In another video he puts it at 2 times the product price, $100 a day for a $50 item. ▶ 3:41 Put your price in below to see the budget that gets you out of learning.

He's also seen brands get out of cold start without a 10x budget, so he calls it no hard rule. ▶ Jordan Kilgour 34:20 Jon Reiter starts at $200 a day, and his team usually tests products at $300 a day with a target ROI of 4. ▶ 7:13 ▶ 7:45 Jordan West holds the budget flat while it learns, starting anywhere from $1 to $300 a day by the size of the brand. ▶ 3:42 On a small budget, Jordan Kilgour would start at a 0.5 target ROI and about $20 to $40 a day. ▶ 32:13

ZoCo Marketing sets the daily budget near TikTok's own recommendation, within about 20% either way. ▶ 7:38 Jordan Kilgour says to ignore GMV Max's budget recommendations; one of them suggested $10,000 a day. ▶ 16:48 Social Commerce Club says you can start lower, but the platform still needs data. ▶ 44:52 When a brand told Jordan West it planned about $5K a month, he said his team was not the one to go with and it was not going to be a channel. ▶ 14:17

Two settings can spend far past what you set. The Media Elephant turns off auto budget increase, because you may spend 10 times what you expected in a day. ▶ 8:37 ZoCo Marketing says to double-check promotion days, because they are one of the fastest ways to burn through your budget if you don't realize they are on ▶ 8:52, and Jordan Kilgour saw a campaign spend all of its budget between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. ▶ 5:13 Jon Reiter typically turns them on. ▶ 8:00

That budget has to land on something, and GMV Max spends it on videos, so how many videos does it need?

It spends on videos, and only on the videos it can find. GMV Max takes every video that promotes your product and picks the ones most likely to convert for the best return on your ad spend. ▶ Sebastian Betancur 3:58 Any video that tags your TikTok Shop product can be shown in the campaign. ▶ ZoCo Marketing 5:45 Duff says a $200 daily budget will not spend with only about 10 videos posted. ▶ 4:23

How many is enough is where the tutorials split the most. ZoCo Marketing wants at least three to five videos per product before a campaign starts ▶ 3:59, and says GMV Max is probably best for companies making at least 10 videos a week. ▶ 8:26 Jon Reiter waits for 25 videos in the past week, plus a video or two with a couple thousand views. ▶ 3:11 The Media Elephant says brands should have a minimum of 50 videos before they start GMV Max, and its agency waits until there are 250. ▶ 1:16

Why so many? The Media Elephant finds about one video in five ends up good quality, sometimes fewer. ▶ 1:38 Jon Reiter posted 40 videos before he got a single sale. ▶ 2:51 Jordan Kilgour recommends a target of seven videos a day ▶ 10:25, which he says gets you to 50 videos a week, and at one sale a video, 50 sales. ▶ 24:38 Put your numbers in below to see where your shop sits.

Your niche moves the bar too. Jordan Kilgour says quieter niches can start with 15 to 20 videos, and competitive ones want closer to 50 or 100. ▶ 38:00 Fernando Campos has heard of about 300 videos per product a month as a first goal, then 600. ▶ 4:52 Social Commerce Club sees brands start to reach $2,000 to $3,000 of GMV a day at around 1,000 videos. ▶ 53:40

The count is only half of it. Jordan West says to post three types of video, because with only offer closes GMV Max can only reach buyers already close to buying. ▶ 5:51 He aims for enough variety that the system can find new pockets of demand, instead of a hundred copies of one video. ▶ 21:52 Social Commerce Club has seen brands with 500 plus videos where not one got through into delivery, which it calls a content problem. ▶ 48:54 Sebastian Betancur opens with a pain point your customer feels in the first 3 seconds, plus a promise. ▶ 8:30

Even a good video can sit outside the campaign. Jose Torres's team tries to add 50 to 100 videos a day by hand, because sometimes the algorithm picks new ones up way too late. ▶ 2:41 A missing video can be added with the spark code the creator sends ▶ The Media Elephant 13:11: in Ads Manager, go to Tools, Creative Library, Add authorized TikTok post, then enter the code. ▶ The Media Elephant 13:36

Which leaves the next question: who makes all these videos, and what do you pay them?

That is where affiliates come in. Jon Reiter says it is great to have a foundation of affiliates before you start running GMV Max. ▶ 12:40 ZoCo Marketing calls getting more creators through the door the biggest thing you can do to improve a GMV Max campaign. ▶ 14:32 Sebastian Betancur says affiliates who made 10 to 50 videos for one specific product saw GMV Max pick up all of them. ▶ 4:03

Then come the samples. Social Commerce Club's minimum is about 100 samples a month if you need to be tight on samples, and 250 to 350 is ideal for most brands. ▶ 22:23 It looks less at follower count and more at a creator's GMV tier and proven TikTok Shop sales. ▶ 17:40 Spread the work out, too: with only one affiliate, Duff warns, all your ad spend goes to that one affiliate. ▶ 7:37

Next is what you pay once ads push a video. Shop ads commission is what an affiliate earns when GMV Max pushes their video. ▶ Jon Reiter 9:00 Without a separate shop ads rate, Jon Reiter warns, you pay for the ad and a full commission on the same sale. ▶ 9:19

He puts the shop ads rate around 10%, or about half your open collaboration rate. ▶ Jon Reiter 9:13 Brands Meet Creators gives an example of a 30% open commission with an ads rate of 5 or 10%. ▶ 6:28 Social Commerce Club recommends 10 to 15% for the open organic commission. ▶ 23:28 Put your own rates in below to see what one sale costs you once ads push it.

Your best creators are a different deal. The top mistake Social Commerce Club sees in audits is target collabs set at the same commission as open collabs. ▶ 26:25 Duff suggests offering a big affiliate 35, 40 or 50% commission plus ad spend. ▶ 6:58 Jordan Kilgour tests creators with careful sampling, then offers higher commission, a retainer and a place in a brand community ▶ 17:00, with example retainers of commission plus $500 a month, or $300 a month plus 25 videos. ▶ 17:30

Last, make sure their videos reach the campaign. Some bigger affiliates do not auto allow their videos, so Jordan West collects their spark codes and adds them himself. ▶ 6:02 Social Commerce Club says to collect creators' spark codes so the most content reaches GMV Max, especially without auto select on. ▶ 27:37 And the winners are rare: Brands Meet Creators found the top 1% of videos bring in 80% of GMV. ▶ 8:51

Even with videos and creators lined up, some campaigns will not spend, and some spend and lose money. What do you check first?

Start with the videos. Jon Reiter says a weak result is almost never an ads problem; it is almost always a creative problem. ▶ 14:25 He shows a product that got a lot of conversions but stopped spending because there weren't enough videos, with only about five posted. ▶ 9:06 Jordan Kilgour says that with no winning creative in delivering, ROI will most likely sit under 1. ▶ 13:04

Then look at the queue. Never let it reach zero, says Jordan Kilgour: delivering videos wear out and nothing new is there to replace them. ▶ 13:48 Videos fall into not delivering when they hit creative fatigue. ▶ 12:58 If product cards stay above 50% of sales for weeks, Jordan West says your videos are not creating enough demand. ▶ 3:22

If the videos are there and it still will not spend, look at the target ROI next. A campaign that does not spend its daily budget likely has a target ROAS too high for TikTok to hit, says ZoCo Marketing. ▶ 16:01 If it is still not spending after a couple of days, slowly drop the target ROI until it spends. ▶ 13:07 Jordan Kilgour drops it in steps such as 0.2, from 2.0 to 1.8. ▶ 30:14 Run through the checklist below before you change anything.

Here the tutorials disagree on how fast to move. Jordan Kilgour changes the ROI target about every two days, sometimes three. ▶ 30:31 The Media Elephant does not touch target ROAS or daily spend for at least 7 days, and prefers 10 ▶ 9:59, and says each edit resets the algorithm. ▶ 10:20

Then count the products in one campaign. Jordan Kilgour found an account running 20 products in one GMV Max campaign. ▶ 2:59 In that case, $8,000 was spent and $4,700 generated. ▶ 2:08 He also found the old campaign spent its budget between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. every day. ▶ 10:18

Some videos you take out on purpose. To stop one video taking spend, Fernando Campos excludes it by its caption, so the whole affiliate is not blocked. ▶ 5:36 The Media Elephant takes out videos that hurt the brand, such as bottom of funnel videos or ones making medical claims. ▶ 11:20 And keep an eye on your shop score: Social Commerce Club warns that if it drops to 3 from 3.5, your ads will shut off. ▶ 33:32

Once it spends and the ROI holds near your target, the question turns to how fast you can grow it.

Scaling starts with sales volume. Fernando Campos goes for sales volume first and profit second, because, he says, sales volume unlocks everything. ▶ 1:25 Jordan Kilgour says the hardest part is getting past 50 sales a week, and after that growth gets much easier. ▶ 26:15

Jon Reiter raises the budget slowly, step by step, and keeps a close eye to make sure it actually matches. ▶ 13:47 The Media Elephant increases in steps of about 15 to 20%, week over week, without pushing the algorithm too hard. ▶ 14:12 ▶ 14:24 Plan your steps in the ladder below.

Jon Reiter's rule: change your budget often, your target very rarely, and your products almost never. ▶ 13:18 Jordan Kilgour does move the target as sales build, step by step, such as 0.7, 0.8, 1, then 1.2 ▶ 9:00, and gives each change three to five days to see where it lands. ▶ 33:53

Scale still rests on the videos. Jordan Kilgour sees better results with over five or six videos delivering, and calls 15 to 25 a good place to scale. ▶ 13:19 Jordan West sees more content get delivery when brands loosen ROI targets or raise spend. ▶ 22:15

On big days, some brands watch by the hour. One brand Duff describes checked hourly from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and raised the budget 20% whenever ROI beat target. ▶ 13:55 Duff also sets the budget higher at the start of the day, even if he does not plan to spend that much. ▶ 14:10 Jose Torres runs max delivery the hour before his best sales hour, because that is when he expects a profitable ROI. ▶ 7:02

Jose Torres also puts a $50 to $200 creative boost behind a video to get it in front of a new group of people ▶ 9:01, and removes the boost if the overall campaign ROI drops. ▶ 10:20 Social Commerce Club says the second that budget pulled back, its Meta ads and Google had to work harder to make up for the lost touch points. ▶ 43:29