TikTok has matured from a curiosity into a serious performance channel, but it rewards a very specific kind of creative and a disciplined testing process. I sat down with Hin, founder of Anstrex, to unpack what works right now, how to test on a tight budget, and how ad intelligence can help you spot breakout products before the crowd piles in.
Meet Hin and Anstrex
Hin has spent years in online media buying and launched Anstrex in 2016 to give marketers practical competitive insight. Their TikTok ad intelligence focuses on ecommerce and mobile apps and is built to help you understand which products and creatives are surging, where they’re surging, and why.
Why UGC Wins on TikTok
TikTok’s audience skews younger and places more trust in creators than in polished brand advertising. That’s why UGC-style videos consistently outperform glossy spots. The winning pattern is simple: start with the product in the very first frame, demonstrate a clear benefit immediately, and keep the entire clip under thirty seconds, often closer to fifteen. Authenticity beats perfection every time, as long as the camera work is clean and the usefulness is obvious.
What Sells and What to Avoid
Some categories over-index on TikTok because they are easy to understand in seconds and feel impulse friendly. Think home organisation and cleaning gadgets, beauty and skincare tools like LED masks, everyday mobile accessories, simple wellness and self-care products, and casual fashion and jewellery. On the flip side, high-ticket items, bulky goods, products that are tough to demo quickly, and B2B offers tend to struggle. That doesn’t mean outliers don’t exist, but if you’re starting out and want favourable odds, lean into what repeatedly works.
Paid Beats Hoping to Go Viral
Organic virality is lovely but unpredictable and increasingly rare. Paid campaigns give you control over audience, pace and scale. Begin with tight demographic, interest and behaviour targeting. Set a small daily budget, let TikTok’s campaign budget optimisation push spend to the strongest creative, and expand from there. The most efficient path is to test multiple creatives for a single product rather than many products at once. Once you have a profitable pattern, add the next product and repeat.
TikTok Shop: Low Friction, Thinner Margins
TikTok Shop keeps the buyer in-app, reducing friction and often improving conversion. It’s an excellent place to validate demand when you’re new to the platform. Do remember there is a commission which can reach roughly eight percent depending on factors like category and seller profile. Many brands start with TikTok Shop to gather momentum and then migrate traffic to their own store once the economics justify it. If you’re on Shopify, the integration helps orders flow into your existing stack, which smooths operations while you test.
How Anstrex Spots Winners Early
Anstrex continuously scrapes TikTok ads in ecommerce and mobile app verticals, tracking impressions alongside likes, bookmarks and comments. Rather than chasing raw totals, they model ratios and the velocity of those signals to flag ads with unusually strong engagement quality. That’s where the predictive magic lives, because it highlights promising products before they explode. A second advantage is coverage across more than fifty-six countries, so you can watch a product heat up in one market and redeploy the angle in another with similar tastes and language.
Real Sales Curves from TikTok Shop
Where data is available, Anstrex visualises actual TikTok Shop sales and revenue over time. You can see units sold climbing day by day, spot steep upticks, and recognise saturation as curves flatten. That visibility is rare and highly actionable. If a product’s sales line is accelerating in one region, you can prioritise creative production immediately. If it’s plateauing, you can pivot before you waste budget.
Handling Saturation the Smart Way
Saturation is inevitable on breakout items. The advantage for dropshippers is agility. Because you’re not sunk into inventory, you can switch to the next rising product quickly. This is where a steady feed of ranked opportunities matters. Let intelligence surface the next candidate while you keep iterating on hooks, first frames and demonstrations for the current winner.
A Practical Launch Blueprint
Pick one promising product based on early momentum signals. Record four to six UGC variations that open with the product, hit the primary benefit in seconds and close with a clear call to action. Launch a tightly targeted paid campaign with a modest daily budget and campaign budget optimisation. Cull weak creatives quickly, iterate on the strongest variant, and only then introduce product number two. Keep your edits fast and your promises specific.
Getting Started with Anstrex
If you want to evaluate their TikTok ad intelligence, head to the Anstrex site and navigate to the TikTok product page. Hin mentioned a listener discount of twenty percent on published pricing; check the show notes for the code. Use the platform to prioritise what to test, to borrow winning angles ethically and improve them, and to time launches with real sales curves instead of guesswork.
Final Thoughts
TikTok rewards clarity, speed and proof. If your very first frame shows the product, your next few seconds prove the benefit and your offer is aligned with categories that convert well, you will learn quickly and scale with confidence. Intelligence doesn’t replace creativity, but it makes your creativity compounding rather than random.
Check out the full podcast here.
This episode was brought to you by Nick Trueman, Director of PPC & SEO Agency, Spec Digital