Before you open the ads manager
Decide what a result is. With cash on delivery, a form fill or a checkout is not a sale. Pick delivered and paid orders as the number you judge everything by, and make sure you can trace an order back to the campaign that brought it.
Fix the page the click lands on. The full price including delivery, real photos, a delivery window, and a way to order in one thumb. A good video sending traffic to a slow page is money spent teaching people your brand is slow.
Make sure you can answer. TikTok traffic peaks late at night in Egypt. If nobody replies until the next morning, you are paying for conversations that go cold.
What actually works in the feed
Vertical, filmed on a phone, no stock footage. The first two seconds have to show the product or the problem, not your logo.
A real Egyptian voice, in Egyptian Arabic, saying the thing a customer would say. Translated copy reads as an ad and gets scrolled.
Price on screen. In a market where most people expect to pay at the door, hiding the price costs you the people who would have bought.
One idea per video. If you need to explain three features, that is three videos, and you will learn which one people care about.
The working order
- Start with three products, not the catalogue
You are looking for the one that moves. Spreading a small budget over forty products teaches you nothing about any of them.
- Film five to seven videos per product
Different hooks, same offer. You are testing the first two seconds, not the product.
- Keep the account simple at the start
A small number of campaigns with enough budget to leave learning beats a dozen campaigns that each get a trickle.
- Give every test a fixed budget and a fixed end
Decide before you launch what you will spend and when you will judge it. Turning ads off at 2am because the day looks bad is the most common way to kill a winner.
- Judge on delivered orders, not on the dashboard
Export orders weekly, mark which campaign each came from, and count what was delivered and paid. That number is the only one that survives cash on delivery.
- Replace the creative, not the targeting
When performance drops on TikTok it is almost always fatigue in the video. New audiences rarely fix a tired hook.
- Scale by adding, not by doubling
Raise budget in steps and keep a winning ad running untouched. Editing a working ad restarts its learning.
Why the same ad works differently in Egypt
Two things change the maths here. Most orders are paid at the door, so an order is a promise rather than revenue, and a lot of buying happens through a chat rather than a checkout. That means the ad is only the first third of the job: the reply and the delivery decide whether you keep the money.
It also means a campaign can show a low cost per result and still lose money, because the results it counted never arrived. Always close the loop back to what was delivered.
What to film when you have no budget for production
The product in a real hand, in real light, doing the thing it is for. A customer unboxing it. A before and after that is honest. Someone saying the objection out loud ("I thought it would be plastic") and then answering it.
Polished production is not a disadvantage, but it is not the thing that wins. A clear first two seconds and an honest promise beat a nice colour grade every time.
Where to start
Pick one product you already sell, film five honest videos for it this week, run them on a fixed budget, and count delivered orders at the end. Everything else follows from what that tells you.