An entertainment and consumer products brand, well-known for their party games, turned to WorkMagic to understand TikTok’s true commercial impact across their uniquely complex sales mix — TikTok Shop, Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Traditional attribution models were unable to connect purchases across marketplaces, retail, and social commerce, leaving the team without a trusted baseline for evaluating TikTok’s performance.
A geo lift test with WorkMagic revealed that TikTok had been driving significant downstream demand across Amazon, Target, and Walmart, with a majority of value occurring off-platform, and out of sight for the brand.
“The lift test helped provide additional perspective on how TikTok activity can influence downstream performance across marketplaces. The results reinforced the importance of considering incrementality and off-platform impact when evaluating channel performance.”
The brand’s unique sales mix required more than traditional attribution
The brand leaned heavily into TikTok as one of its primary engines of cultural relevance and growth, but understanding what TikTok was actually driving across Amazon, Walmart, and Target proved nearly impossible. Platform dashboards measured TikTok Shop outcomes with confidence, but the brand suspected far more demand was converting off-platform.
Unlike a typical DTC brand, their products are purchased across four different ecosystems — each with its own attribution rules, customer journeys, and data limitations:
The brand needed a way to combine TikTok Shop conversions with the halo effect happening on their other sales channels to truly understand the impact of TikTok Ads and confidently scale their investment.
WorkMagic ran a pause-to-measure test to reveal TikTok's true incremental impact
In partnership with WorkMagic, the team designed and launched a pause-to-measure geo lift test that compared matched holdout markets (where no ads were shown) against exposed markets that received ads.
By ingesting data from TikTok's Marketing API into the WorkMagic platform and pairing it with sales and location data from Amazon, Target, and Walmart, the team was able to build an accurate picture of TikTok's full incremental impact.
With the halo effect measured, TikTok's true impact was 166% higher than previously reported
The lift test run by WorkMagic identified what traditional attribution could not: an accurate breakdown of where TikTok-driven incremental sales were landing.
The team found that while 37.5% of sales had taken place on TikTok Shop, another 62.5% of TikTok Ads' impact had occurred on a combination of Amazon and retail stores.
With these figures, the platform recalculated key metrics — this time, grounded in incrementality.
Before the test, TikTok's iROAS sat at around 0.8x. With visibility into its halo effect, iROAS rose to more than 2.0x, a 166% increase in efficiency that dramatically shifted how the team would allocate budget for TikTok within their marketing mix.
With halo visibility included, the iCPA recalculation revealed that TikTok’s true cost efficiency had been significantly understated, dropping by 68% once off-platform conversions were properly accounted for.
TikTok sales scaled by 64% after lift test results
One of the strongest signs of confidence came after the test concluded:
In the 30 days following the lift test, the team increased their TikTok spend, achieving a 64% increase in total sales, while further improving iROAS by 24% — showing that the lift test had allowed the brand to further improve their efficiency on TikTok.
With a clear read on how TikTok drives demand across TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, and Walmart, the team was finally able to scale their investment with certainty rather than intuition.