Why is My TikTok Ad Not Delivering?

You’ve crafted what you think is a winning TikTok ad creative, set your budget, and launched your campaign, only to be met with a dreaded “Not Delivering” status with zero impressions. This silence can be frustrating, especially when you’re ready to see results. This guide will walk you through the most common reasons your TikTok ads aren’t running and give you a clear, step-by-step process for troubleshooting the issue and getting your campaigns back on track.

First Things First: Check the Ad Review Status

Before you start panicking about your audience or budget, the first stop is always the ad review process. Every single ad submitted to TikTok goes through an automated and sometimes manual review to ensure it complies with their advertising policies. This is the most common and earliest checkpoint where delivery can get stuck.

1. Your Ad is "Under Review"

If your campaign just launched, there's a strong chance it's simply stuck in the normal review queue. TikTok's system needs time to check your creative, landing page, and targeting.

• How Long It Takes: While many ads are approved in a few hours, TikTok officially states it can take up to 24 hours. If you launch a campaign at night or over the weekend, expect a slightly longer wait.
• What to Do: Be patient. Refreshing the dashboard every five minutes won't speed it up. If 24 hours pass and your ad is still "Under Review," it's reasonable to contact TikTok support for a nudge.

2. Your Ad was "Not Approved"

This is a clear stop sign. TikTok has actively disapproved of your ad for violating one of its policies. When this happens, TikTok will usually provide a reason, though it can sometimes be a bit generic.

• Common reasons for disapproval include:

The Fix: Read the reason for disapproval carefully. Don't just resubmit the same ad. You'll need to edit the creative, caption, or landing page to address the specific issue TikTok flagged and then submit it for review again.

Solving Audience and Targeting Problems

If your ad is approved but still not delivering, the next place to look is your targeting. Your audience settings can single-handedly make or break a campaign's ability to get impressions.

1. Your Audience is Too Narrow

You might think narrowing your audience to a super-specific niche is a smart way to find qualified customers, but if you go too far, you can choke the algorithm. TikTok's system needs a large enough pool of users to find a rhythm and start delivering your ad effectively.

• What it Looks Like: The "Audience Size" indicator in your ad set settings will appear as "Too Narrow." This often happens when you layer multiple precise interests, behaviors, and demographic filters on top of each other.
• Example: Targeting users aged 18-24 in a single city who are interested in "skateboarding" and have engaged with hashtags like #kickflip and have watched videos from creators in the "extreme sports" category might leave you with an audience of only a few thousand people, which is too small for TikTok to serve properly.
• The Fix: Broaden your targeting. Remove one or two of the most limiting layers. Start with broader interest categories before adding lookalike or custom audiences later on. Let the algorithm have some room to work.

2. There's Too Much Ad Set Overlap

This happens when you run multiple ad sets with very similar targeting at the same time. For example, if you have two active ad sets both targeting women aged 25-40 who are interested in "skincare" and "makeup," they are essentially competing against each other in the same auction.

This self-competition confuses the algorithm, drives up your own costs, and can result in one or both ad sets failing to deliver properly.

• The Fix: Consolidate your ad sets if the targeting is nearly identical. If you need to keep them separate, use exclusions. For example, in Ad Set B, you could exclude a custom audience of people who you targeted in Ad Set A. This ensures you're reaching distinct groups of people.

Fixing Budget and Bidding Strategy Issues

Money talks. Your budget and bid strategy tells the TikTok algorithm how competitive you're willing to be in the ad auction. Setting it too low is like trying to buy a front-row seat with spare change - you'll get outbid every time.

1. Your Budget is Too Low

TikTok has minimum budget requirements (e.g., $20/day per ad set), but simply meeting the minimum is often not enough to gain real traction, especially in a competitive niche. A very low budget can cause your campaign to stall before it ever gets a chance to learn.

• The Fix: Ensure your daily budget is high enough to generate at least a handful of conversions. As a general rule, a budget of at least $50 per day is a more realistic starting point to gather meaningful data and achieve consistent delivery.

2. Your Bid Cap is Too Low

When you use the "Bid Cap" strategy, you're telling TikTok the absolute maximum you're willing to pay per result (like a click or conversion). If you set this cap significantly lower than what other advertisers are paying, your ad will never win an auction, resulting in zero impressions.

• Symptoms: Your approved ad has a healthy budget and a good audience size, but delivery is flat at zero.
• The Fix: If you're new to a market, start with the "Lowest Cost" bidding strategy. This lets TikTok automatically bid whatever is necessary to get you the most results for your budget, giving you valuable data on the market rate. If you must use a Bid Cap, try increasing it in small increments (10-15%) until you start seeing delivery.

3. You're Stuck in the "Learning Phase"

Every new ad set enters a Learning Phase, where TikTok's algorithm is rapidly experimenting to find out who is most likely to convert. To exit this phase and achieve stable delivery, an ad set needs to get about 50 conversions within its first 7-10 days.

If your budget is too low, your bid is too restrictive, or your audience is too narrow, you simply won't get enough conversions to exit the learning phase. This results in the "Learning Limited" status and choppy, inconsistent delivery.

• The Fix: Ensure your budget is sufficient to achieve those 50 conversions in a week. If a single conversion costs you $10, you technically need a budget of $500 over that week ($70/day) to have a strong shot at exiting the learning phase. Also, avoid making significant changes to the ad set (budget, creative, targeting) during this time, as any edit will reset the process.

Revamp Your Ad Creative for TikTok

TikTok is a creative-first platform. Its algorithm is designed to push videos that capture attention and drive engagement. If your ads are boring, overly corporate, or just don't fit the platform's vibe, the algorithm will bury them, leading to poor delivery even if your technical settings are perfect.

1. Ad Fatigue Has Set In

If a campaign was delivering just fine and then suddenly stopped, you might be dealing with ad fatigue. This means your target audience has seen the same creative too many times, and they've started ignoring it. You'll see your Click-Through Rate (CTR) drop and your cost-per-click (CPC) rise right before delivery tanks.

• The Fix: You should be refreshing your ad creative every 2-4 weeks at a minimum. Duplicate your existing ad set, introduce 1-2 new video concepts, and test them to see what resonates.

2. Your Creative Doesn't Look Native

Highly polished, horizontal-format studio ads stick out like a sore thumb on TikTok and get scrolled past instantly. The best-performing ads don't look like ads at all.

• The Fix: Create content specifically for a 9:16 vertical view. Use trends, authentic-sounding user-generated content (UGC), direct-to-camera testimonials, and simple phone-shot videos. Grab the viewer's attention in the first three seconds before they swipe away.

A Quick Troubleshooting Checklist

Feeling overwhelmed? Follow this checklist in order to diagnose the problem systematically.

1. Check Ad Status: Is it "Approved," "Under Review," or "Not Approved"? This is your first clue.
2. Verify Schedules: Is your Campaign and Ad Set toggled on? Are you sure you haven't scheduled it to run only during off-hours?
3. Review Budget and Bid: Is your daily budget well above the $20 minimum? If using a Bid Cap, is it competitive? Try switching to "Lowest Cost" to test for delivery.
4. Analyze Audience Size: Is it labeled "Too Narrow"? Could your ad sets be competing against one another?
5. Evaluate Creative Performance: For ads that stopped delivering, check the CTR. If it has plummeted, it's time to refresh your creative.
6. Inspect Your Pixel: If optimizing for conversions, use the TikTok Pixel Helper Chrome extension to ensure your pixel is firing correctly on your landing page. A broken pixel kills conversion campaigns.

Final Thoughts

Seeing your TikTok ad stuck at zero impressions is a common hurdle, but it's almost always fixable. By systematically checking your ad's review status, targeting settings, budget structure, and creative quality, you can identify the bottleneck and make the necessary adjustments to kickstart delivery and begin reaching your audience.

Understanding which TikTok campaigns are actually working requires connecting ad spend data with actual sales results from platforms like Shopify or Salesforce. This is often a manual, time-consuming process. We built Graphed to solve this problem by connecting all your platforms in seconds. You can then ask simple questions in plain English like, "Show me my top-performing TikTok campaigns by ROI this month" or "Create a dashboard for my e-commerce funnel, from ad click to purchase." It turns hours of data wrangling into a 30-second conversation, so you can focus on making adjustments that grow your business.