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The pixel is installed, leads are coming in, and it seems TikTok sees every result you get. 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, while we see the overall setup picture.
In 94% of accounts advertising their own website, at least one action either never reaches TikTok or arrives under the wrong name. These aren't beginner mistakes: the pixel is set up at launch, and then both the website and TikTok's requirements change. The algorithm learns from an incomplete picture, and the budget works less precisely than it could.
We want every dollar spent on TikTok to work toward results. So we've collected the most common setup gaps and recommendations on how to close them and make your advertising fully transparent.
Data: TikTok ad accounts with spend in September and early October 2026. Accounts using Instant Form and links to third-party platforms such as Kaspi are excluded. Company names and budgets are not part of the research.
Where the gaps hide: it depends on the website type
Landing page with a lead form
Only the form submission reaches TikTok, and for half of these accounts it's the only event. Meanwhile, 58% of these accounts have call and messenger buttons that send no signal. Pass clicks on them as Contact, and offer views as ViewContent.
One-pager and quiz
In almost a quarter of these accounts, the order form or quiz completion is sent to TikTok as Purchase, even though there's no payment on the website. The campaign optimizes for a purchase that never happened.
Check which event the form sends: if a person leaves their contact details without paying, it's a Lead.
Corporate website
Corporate websites account for 47% of spend, yet 44% of these accounts have no pixel in their ads. They run on reach and traffic, and visitors are not used in any way after the campaign.
It's worth installing the pixel even for brand campaigns: it will build audiences for future launches.
Online store
Stores have the best event setup, but 30% of them have no pixel in their ads at all.
If you have a pixel, check the product → cart → checkout → purchase path for breaks. If you don't, start there.
Three traps common to everyone
A person messaged you on WhatsApp, and TikTok never saw it
54% of websites have call or messenger buttons. Only 9% of accounts receive the Contact event. To TikTok, a person who reached an agreement with a manager in a chat simply left the page.
Visitors are collected but not used
91% of accounts with a pixel have no website visitor audiences in their campaigns. That means you can't retarget people who viewed your offer or exclude those who have already submitted a lead.
The event is named differently from what actually happened
In 15% of accounts, Purchase comes from a website with no payment, and 78% of them optimize campaigns for this "purchase". 90% of these cases come from a single page template used by one advertiser: the gap spread to many accounts at once along with the template. Another 19% of accounts receive the outdated ClickButton event, and 10% receive PlaceAnOrder. TikTok has deprecated these events and will stop supporting them in 2027 (TikTok Help Center). More on this in the second article of the series.
Check your account: five questions
- What can a person do on your website? Compare this list with the events in Events Manager.
- Which event is the campaign optimizing for? If it's Purchase, find the payment step on the website. If there's no payment, you need Lead.
- Are ClickButton and PlaceAnOrder still there? Replace them with current events.
- Do you have visitor audiences? Two are enough: all visitors for retargeting and those who submitted a lead for exclusion.
- Is server-side tracking connected? If your budget is growing, connect the Events API before scaling.
Where to start
Take the account with the highest spend and close the biggest gap. Most often, it's Contact or a lead sent under the wrong name.
We noticed that the same 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.
In the next article of the series, we'll break down event setup errors that break optimization.
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