TikTok Ads Cost Statistics
- Average Tiktok engagement rate – 5-16%
- Average TikTok Ads CPM – $10
- Average TikTok Ads CPC – $1
- Minimal spend per campaign – $500
- Price to create TikTok video on Canva – free
- TikTok audience’s biggest age group is 18-24 years old (24.7% of the total are male and 18.1% are female)
- TikTok influencer post pricing ranges from $5 to $2,000
Initially, TikTok captured the minds and hearts of a young generation (think Gen Z) but as of 2022 people from all generations watch videos on TikTok, and hence it puts the company’s advertising platform – TikTok Ads high on the list of digital marketing tools for every brand. As of 2021, TikTok got more online traffic than Google, the app was downloaded more than 3 billion times, and spent about 20 hours watching videos on it on a monthly basis.
Following the phenomenal success of the platform, advertising on TikTok quickly followed. Today we can talk about two major ways of running ad campaigns on TikTok – via TikTok Ads platform or via TikTok Influencers.
Let’s begin with the former first.
TikTok Ads: the cost influential factors & how to reduce it
After a few years of work-in-progress, since it was rolled out back in 2019, the TikTok has managed to improve its advertising platform and today its efficiency and easy-to-use are on par with Google Ads or Meta Ads. Obviously, as an app marketer, one of your goals is to increase the app’s user base, while trying to lower expenses. Here is how you can lower your TikTok Ads ad campaign costs.
Just like Meta and other popular social media platforms, brands can run ad campaigns either using the TikTok Ads dashboard themselves or choosing to approach a social media marketing agency that, thanks to their expertise, is capable to lower the costs yet meeting expectations for results.
For starters, the minimal CPM is $0.50 per mile, meaning marketers pay 50 cents for every 1,000 views of their ads. The lower limit for CPC is $0.02 per click and advertisers are obligated to spend $500 per ad campaign.
Similar to other online advertising platforms, factors that influence TikTok Ads costs have to do with how efficient are graphic creatives, level of engagement with ads, smart ad testing strategy, and having a robust analytics system in place.
Now, the tips for decreasing your spending on a TikTok Ads ad campaign can be split between several buckets.
Making TikTok authentic ad creatives
One of the most distinctive features of TikTok Ads ad formats is how well they are blended with user-generated content on one hand but on the other TikTok users still can distinguish between ads and videos generated by the users. Just like a regular video, ads can be liked, commented and shared. This visual similarity leads to high rates of engagement because TikTok users do not perceive those ads as advertising.
Having said that, for this perfect blending to work, advertisers need to make sure their ads are on par with regular video content. Meaning if an ad wasn’t shot in such well known TikTok visual style, it will be standing out for the rest of the feed on the TikTok app and users will just skip it. On the other hand, if an ad was produced in a true TikTok visual style, it will secure it high level of engagement and will require less of your marketing budget.
Partnering with influencers
Influencers are brand ambassadors on many social media platforms but TikTok is a special case. Thanks to its For You page section, which is highly visible to TikTok users, influencers are in a great position to engage with audiences and deliver brands’ messages. The important thing to remember for this tip is that you always need to make sure that you approach the right influencers for your brand, the ones that can actually be authentic in a video creative they will be shooting for your TikTok Ads ad campaign. If you fail to meet this requirement, most likely you’ll waste your Influencer marketing budget and won’t be able to bring down your costs.
Using the right ad format
TikTok Ads platform provides advertisers with multiple ad formats to use and you need to be familiar with each to make the most of it.
The In-Feed Ads format is similar to what Meta offers advertisers, it’s located directly on TikTok user’s “For You” page and this is the one that is meant to blend with regular video content posted by TikTok users.
The Brand Take-over Ads format name speaks for itself, it’s meant to be displayed on the entire app’s screen for a brief period of time (up to 5 seconds) and present brands front and featured to people. This is about as much exposure as it gets. Certainly, this format requires advertisers to be especially careful with their messaging and what that 5-second video ad should deliver within such a short period of time.
The Top Views format is similar to Take-over but it actually doesn’t occupy the entire screen, only a portion, and in this case, it’s the job of an app marketer to create a message catchy enough to users pause and watch an entire video ad.
The Spark Ads format really stands out from the rest because it allows advertisers to make an ad from an existing video that has a high level of engagement and hence has the potential to be an efficient ad.
And finally the Hashtag Challenges format – challenges and hashtags are two major drivers of virality on TikTok and the platform allows app marketers to leverage these powerful tools to run ads.
Conducting split-tests
Despite app marketers’ best efforts to come up with the most efficient ad creatives before launching the ad campaign, in reality, it’s nearly impossible to achieve therefore running a split-test for a TikTok Ads campaign is a must for app marketers. Running several ads with different creatives at the same time and carefully analyzing their performance allows identifying the best performing ad creative to focus your ad campaign on and hence decrease your costs. You also need to remember that different ad creatives resonate with different audiences and because it’s impossible to know a priori which one corresponds to which, a split test is what helps you establish this connection.
Using analytics properly
Finally, it’s absolutely essential to analyze carefully every metric provided by TikTok Ads’ built-in analytics and build working hypotheses about why specific ad creative performs in a particular way. The platform provides both a bird-view look at the entire set of ad campaigns running and a deep dive on a campaign level, with filtering and customizing data points available for analysis.
Now let’s take a look at the key data points that allow app marketers to assess their TikTok Ads campaigns’ efficiency.
To facilitate advertisers to achieve their goals, the auction-based TikTok Ads platform supports a number of business models such as CPM (Cost-Per-Mile or cost of paying for 1,000 ad views), CPC (Cost-Per-Click), CPA (Cost-Per-Action), and CPI (Cost-Per-Install) as a specific case of the CPA model. Aside from these models, app marketers should always remember one of the core principles that underpin any kind of auction-based marketing campaign – if you bid too low most likely your ads are not getting delivered and if you bid too high your TikTok Ads campaign ROI is definitely out of whack.
