One of the challenges that aspiring TikTok advertisers and agencies often run into as they plan their TikTok Ads campaigns is benchmarking.

How do our results stack up against the industry or even just other campaigns we manage? How do we know if our TikTok ad campaign is successful compared to other campaigns?

Having benchmark data for other TikTok video ads could be incredibly valuable for determining just how effective your campaigns are relative to the industry. It could also give you an idea of just how much TikTok ads cost so that you can plan properly.

So we spent $103,368 in 30 days on TikTok ads to find out just what our internal benchmarks are. Let’s take a look! 

How We Pulled TikTok Ads Benchmark Data

To get benchmark data for our TikTok ads, we did it the good ole fashioned way. We rolled up our sleeves and dug into the data from our TikTok Ad Account. We took a sample of 9 partners across 7 industries and 33 campaigns. From there, we calculated aggregates of their KPIs for 30 days.

Keep in mind that this is an aggregate of data across a couple of different campaign objectives (Traffic and Conversions) and each client has different TikTok ad creative. So your individual benchmarks may look different depending on your chosen campaign objective and the quality of your assets. 

So… How Much Do TikTok Video Ads Cost?

Nailing down the answer to that question can be a bit tricky. As is with most things in marketing and social advertising, the answer is that it depends.

There are a number of different factors that influence the cost of your TikTok advertising efforts. Things like:

• Ad objective
• Audiences
• Industry
• Ad Placements
• Ad format
• Creative and Ad Text
• Landing Page

In 2019, AdAge released a report that said TikTok ads could cost anywhere from $50,000 to $120,000. Across the Internet, the consensus on the first page of Google is that TikTok ads start at $10 per CPM.

If those TikTok ad costs feel expensive, there’s hope still. Our benchmark data showed a range of individual CPMs from $5.71 to $26.51. We saw CPCs in our TikTok Ads Manager as low as $0.90. So startups and scaleups can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that advertising on TikTok is possible even if you may not have a massive budget.

Average CPC

CPC or cost per click is a measure of how much it costs for a click on your TikTok ad. Low CPCs are every advertiser’s dream and it would mean that your ad is effectively driving traffic to your landing page. Influenced by a host of factors like targeting, copy, creative, campaign objective, and placements, driving down the cost per click can be a challenge.

Our individual CPCs from this dataset ranged from $.90 to $4.85. E-commerce partners definitely had the highest CPCs of all of our industries in the dataset. EdTech had the lowest average CPC with $.90.

Average CPM

CPM or cost per 1000 impressions is a measure of how much it costs to get your ads in front of your target audience. A higher CPM could be a good indicator that your audience is too narrow or too competitive.

The campaign objective you select will also influence the CPM of your ad campaign. When you run a traffic campaign or a video views campaign, typically you can expect the CPMs to be lower than if you selected a conversions campaign.

In our dataset, the average CPM was $12.85. Our lowest CPM came from the Business and Industrial industry with a CPM of $8.06. Our highest CPM came from the e-commerce industry with a CPM of $26.51.

Average CTR

CTR is a measure of what percentage of people clicked through to your website from your TikTok video ad. The combination of your video, your copy, and your targeting will influence your CTR. A high click-through rate is typically an indicator that you’re getting in front of the right people in your audience that are interested in your ad, and that said ad is strong and resonates with your audience enough for them to click it and visit the landing page!

In our dataset, the average click-through rate for our TikTok ads was .64%. Again the Finance & Industrial interests came out on top with a CTR of 1.03%. The technology industry had the lowest click-through rate at 0.26%.

Average Hook Rate

Ad hook rates (AKA thumb stop rates) are vital to benchmarking success on TikTok. They’re a reliable way to evaluate video ads’ performance. With TikTok hook rates, you can determine if your ads actually arrest the attention of TikTok users. The video ads hook rate is calculated by dividing 2-second video views by impressions.

The highest video ads hook rate came from the Technology industry with a rate of 26.91% Bringing up the rear was EdTech with a hook rate of 3.11%. The average hook rate was 13.99%.

Average Cost Per View

Cost per view as the name implies is a measure of how much each view of your TikTok ad costs. While an impression measures the number of times your ad was seen on screen, a view measures the number of times your TikTok video or video ad was played, excluding replays.

A higher cost per view could mean that your video creative isn’t appealing to your target audience.

Our average cost per view was $0.01. Our industry costs per view ranged from $0.01 to $0.03. E-commerce had the highest cost per view at $0.03.

Takeaways

Having this benchmark data in our back pocket is not only helpful as a TikTok Ads agency, but we can also share it with our partners who are considering advertising on TikTok to help them put performance into context. 

Even though several of the KPIs fall into a range, it still helps us figure out what costs we want to aim for and helps our partners know what they may expect when we get started. The best part is, the more partners that explore TikTok, the more data we have to continue to build upon our benchmarks and consistently update them so we can be working off of the most relevant data!