Salad x Advantage Paid Media

The objective

Winning leads and awareness for an ethical money lender

Salad is an ethical UK lender, providing personal loans through open banking and machine learning technology. Salad was established in 2018 following the identification of a severe lack of affordable credit for individuals with impaired credit scores. Open Banking was identified as the technological solution and was championed by CEO Tim Rooney. To date, Salad has lent over £165 million to people working across the UK.

On TikTok, @salad_money has over 14K followers, sharing informational content predominantly designed for their ongoing advertising campaigns.

Working with Advantage Paid Media, the money lender aimed to create a campaign using Smart+ campaign types to drive conversions in the form of lead generation.

The solution

Balancing authentic content with high performing advertising tools

The campaign, which targeted the UK, employed 25–54-year-olds in-market for short-term credit or personal loans, and leveraged TikTok’s Smart+ campaigns to drive leads by targeting content to the most relevant audience types.

The campaign made use of some of TikTok's high-performance tools, including Spark Ads with Lead Generation (Smart+) campaign formats. This range of TikTok advertising tools created a campaign that was both authentically engaging and optimised for high performance.

The content used in the campaign mainly consisted of face-to-camera videos with a warm and informal tone, using a comment reply format along with other informal styles that feel at home on users' TikTok feeds. All creative involved real humans who spoke directly into the camera, were relatable, and matched the demographic of the target audience.

The results

Improving cost-efficiency and performance with Smart+ campaigns

Salad and their agency, Advantage Paid Media, worked closely with their TikTok Ads specialist, who recommended testing Smart+ and Deep Funnel Optimisation in the lead generation campaign.

This suggestion proved highly successful in helping the money lender achieve their campaign goals, resulting in a 63% decrease in Cost Per Application (compared to a non-Smart+ campaign), an 18% decrease in Cost Per Loan, and a 28% reduction in CPM.

These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the campaign’s strategic approach, targeting the people most likely to convert with content specifically designed with them in mind.

The campaign leveraged top-performing videos from previous campaigns, applied exclusions for existing converters (via pixel) and current customers (via list upload), and transitioned from uncapped bidding to tCPA bidding once the campaign had stabilised and begun delivering consistent results.

The improved performance from the Smart+ TikTok campaigns has led to an expansion of the advertising team and an increased overall budget to support continued business growth. The team is now also more open to adopting AI-driven campaigns and tools to enhance both efficiency and scale.

This is a TikTok case study and is solely for informational purposes. Past performance does not guarantee or predict future performance.