You have a TikTok Pixel but no retargeting: why you're overpaying for your audience

You paid for a new visitor, they left to think it over, and without retargeting to a website visitor audience, you can't bring them back. Meanwhile, someone who has already submitted a lead may keep seeing your ads at your expense.

We put this to the test on an anonymized sample of 500+ TikTok ad accounts running through the Evido by Aitarget platform. Campaigns in these accounts are managed by the advertisers themselves or their agencies. 91% of accounts with a pixel have no website visitor audiences at all. Audiences don't appear on their own: you have to create them manually, and this step is easy to skip when launching a campaign. The pixel collects data you've already paid for, and that data sits idle.

This is the third article in the series. In the first two, we covered what the pixel doesn't see and what it sees incorrectly. Now let's talk about how to stop overpaying: TikTok retargeting, exclusions and lookalike audiences.

Data: TikTok ad accounts with spend in September and early October 2026. Company names and budgets are not part of the research.

The data is collected but sits idle

The two most common situations:

• no visitor audiences at all: 91% of accounts with a pixel;
• audiences are created but not connected to campaigns with spend: another 6%.

Only 3% of accounts actually use audiences, and they're mostly large advertisers.

Three audiences to start with

All three are built the same way. In TikTok, this audience is called Website Traffic: it's a type of Custom Audience. To create one:

1. Open the Audiences section (in the Tools or Assets menu, depending on the interface version) and click Create Audience.
2. Select Custom Audience, then Website Traffic.
3. In the Include block, select the event, time period and pixel.
4. If needed, use Exclude People to specify who shouldn't be added to the audience.
5. Name the audience and click Confirm.

To serve ads to an audience, it must contain at least 1,000 people (TikTok Help Center).

All website visitors

The simplest audience: any account with a pixel can build it from page views. These are people who already know your offer. Show them ads again with a different creative, such as a testimonial or an answer to a common question. Choose the retention period based on your sales cycle: the longer a customer takes to decide, the longer the window.

People who submitted a lead

This audience is used for exclusion. The person has already left their contact details, so there's no reason to pay for more impressions. 85% of accounts with a pixel receive a lead or purchase event, so almost anyone can build this audience, yet only a handful have set up exclusions based on it.

You can also build a lookalike audience from it: TikTok will find people who behave like your customers.

Viewed the offer but didn't submit a lead

This is the warmest segment: the person reached a product or service page and stopped one step short of submitting a lead. This audience requires ViewContent, which only 23% of accounts with a pixel receive. Here's how to build it: in Include, select ViewContent, and in Exclude People, select the lead event. If you don't have ViewContent, start with your event setup: no event, no audience.

Check your account

1. Is there at least one website visitor audience in the Audiences section? If not, start with all visitors.
2. Are the audiences you've created connected to active campaigns? An audience that's created but not connected does nothing.
3. Are people who have already submitted a lead excluded from your campaigns?
4. Is ViewContent coming in? Without it, you can't build an audience of the most interested visitors.

Where to start

Build two audiences: all website visitors and people who submitted a lead. Use the first for retargeting and the second for exclusion.

Audiences are built from events. We noticed that the same event gaps keep recurring across very different advertisers, so we built a TikTok event audit into the Evido by Aitarget platform. It finds these gaps automatically and shows, for each account, what's coming in, what's missing, and what's being sent under a different name. Until November 30, 2026, we're running the audit and setting up the pixel for clients free of charge.

If you run TikTok through Evido by Aitarget ad accounts, launch the audit and get a report on your account ➡️ TikTok event audit on the platform.