How Much Does TikTok Cost—A Complete Guide to TikTok Ad Pricing

The quick rise of TikTok over recent years has made the platform a powerful marketing tool for many businesses. While brands can open business accounts and promote their products and services organically, relying on organic campaigns only may not be effective for businesses that want to grow as fast as possible. Advertising on TikTok is perhaps the best and fastest way to widen your reach, increase your number of followers, improve engagement rates, and generally build your TikTok presence. The burning question is—how much does TikTok cost for paid ads? In this article, we explore TikTok ad prices and teach you how to optimize your campaign budget.

What Are the Minimum Budget Requirements for TikTok Ads?

Whether you’re a small business or a huge brand, you will have to set aside funds for advertising on TikTok. For your ad to go live, TikTok requires you to set up a minimum budget. For an entire campaign, you’ll need at least $500, while the daily campaign budget shouldn’t be below $50.If you’re setting a budget for an ad group level, there are two options:

• Daily budget—The minimum amount is $20
• Lifetime budget—This is calculated by multiplying the minimum daily budget ($20) by the number of days you schedule the ad to run for

Types of TikTok Ads and Their Costs

Businesses should have a clear objective for each campaign when trying to make the best out of TikTok as a marketing tool. You may want to:

• Improve brand awareness
• Sell a product/service
• Increase follower count
• Drive traffic to your website
• Support the launch of a new product
• Generate more views and interactions by going viral

For every campaign goal, there are specific ad options that can help you achieve the best results. TikTok ads can be categorized based on their mode of setup:Self-Service (Ads Manager) Collaborative In-Feed adsBranded EffectsTop-View adsBranded Hashtag ChallengesBrand TakeoversSponsored ads (influencer marketing)

In-Feed Ads

Source: Kerde SeverinThese ads have the form of organic TikTok videos and appear on a user’s For You page. Unlike regular videos, which can be up to three minutes long, in-feed ads can last between five and 60 seconds. This type of TikTok ads is great for driving sales and other conversions since the videos can feature a call-to-action (CTA) button.The price for this ad format isn’t fixed; different ad settings influence the cost per view, but, on average, in-feed ads start at $10 per 1,000 impressions.

Top-View Ads

These videos appear once a day as the first video in the For You feed when users open the app for the first time. Like in-feed ads, top-view ads can be up to 60 seconds long. They’re great for grabbing attention and work well for brands looking to advertise products or services that require longer periods of attention, such as game trailers for soon-to-be-released games, how-to tutorials for new products, and others.Top-view ads are TikTok’s prime ad real estate, and that comes with a hefty price. While the final amount you will need to cash out depends on the specifics of your campaign, you can expect to pay some $65,000 for 7.4 million impressions.

Brand Takeovers

Brand takeovers are five-second ad formats that can be in the form of videos, GIFs, or images that appear as immersive full-screen content within the first few seconds when users open the app. Running a brand takeover campaign isn’t cheap due to its exclusivity—TikTok features brand takeovers by one company per day. Prices for this ad format start from around $50,000 per day.

Branded Effects and Hashtag Challenges

Source: George Pagan IIIBranded effects are custom-made 2D and 3D effects, stickers, and regular or AR filters that can be added to user-generated videos. Due to its interactive nature, this ad format is incredibly effective and engaging and works great for increasing brand awareness and boosting engagement. The cost of this type of paid ad is $45,000 for the period of 30 days.Branded hashtags are ads that businesses use to inspire TikTokers to create videos as a reaction to the brand’s challenge and include its custom hashtag. Businesses that use branded challenges have exclusive access to the performance of the branded hashtag campaign—you can see how much user-generated content gets produced and how much engagement the videos get.This exclusivity also comes at a high price of about $150,000 for six days.

Influencer Advertising

Source: George MiltonApart from TikTok’s native advertising tools, you can advertise your business on the platform by collaborating with influencers. It is one of the most effective ways to enhance the reach of your brand on this social network. You can hire influencers from the Creator Marketplace. Professional content creators on TikTok are always looking for paid partnerships with businesses as this is the main method of making money on TikTok for them, other than getting into TikTok’s Creator Fund.The price for hiring an influencer varies depending on the number of followers they have, the niche they’re in, and your campaign goals. While the most famous TikTokers like Addison Rae Easterling or Charli D’Amelio may guarantee excellent content performance and unprecedented reach, they may be too expensive to hire. The following table shows how much different types of influencers usually charge per post on TikTok:TierNumber of FollowersPrice per PostNano-influencer1–10,000 followers$5–$25Micro-influencer10,000–50,000 followers$25–$200Mid-tier influencer50,000–500,000 followers$100–$1,000Macro-influencer500,000–1,000,000 followers$1,000–$2,000Mega-influencerOver 1,000,000 followers$2,000+Overall, advertising on TikTok can get expensive. To get the most out of your ads, you can optimize ad settings so your campaign can have a better return on investment.

How To Optimize Your Campaign Budget

When setting up your ad campaign, you should remember that brands in your niche are targeting the same audience as you. Determining who gets that limited ad space is done through bidding.Depending on the bidding strategy you select, TikTok's auction ads system will optimize its algorithm to keep your spending within your daily budget limit or use cost per result. The strategies include:

1. Bid cap—This is the specific bid price you're willing to pay per optimization goal (click, conversions, impressions, views, etc.). Using this approach means your daily budget will vary based on how much your competition is bidding. If your competition is outbidding you, your budget may not be used up—but this also means your ad won’t do well
2. Cost cap—With this option, the cost per result fluctuates lower or higher than the bid amount. This approach supports the following ad objectives: app installs, conversions, and lead generation
3. Lowest Cap—This strategy factors in your set daily budget. The ads system automatically adjusts to maximize the volume of conversions based on the set budget—the budget will always be spent at the end of the day/campaign

While you can set a budget, the rate at which it is spent and the amount you will end up spending at the end of the campaign depends on the bidding strategy and options you choose.

TikTok Experts Can Help With All Your Advertisement Needs

There is a lot that goes into advertising on TikTok—besides options for setting and optimizing your budget, the platform has numerous features and settings in Ads Manager that you need to understand to be successful on this platform. For many brands, TikTok presents a new set of challenges compared to older platforms like Facebook or Instagram:

• TikTok has a steep learning curve because it’s different from other platforms—the audience is predominantly young, and the platform is fast-paced. For that reason, TikTok content requires a unique style, tone, and voice
• The young audience on TikTok is quick to sniff out traditional forms of advertisements and avoid them

These challenges can easily become problematic for social media managers in small in-house teams as they still have to create a lot of content and plan strategies for other platforms. To overcome these issues, you can always seek the help of a professional social media agency.

Kubbco Can Grow Your Brand on TikTok

As an official TikTok partner, Kubbco has vast experience that you can count on to grow your TikTok business account. Our team of experts—including writers, video editors, graphic designers, social media strategists, paid ad specialists, and others—is committed to creating and implementing winning strategies for your business.The Kubbco team is well-equipped to handle every element of your marketing campaign, including:

1. Testing and building an innovative content strategy
2. Creating and publishing excellent organic content
3. Taking care of daily tasks that come with managing your socials
4. Running and managing independent ad campaigns and promotions
5. Using TikTok Analytics and other advanced tools to track campaign performance
6. Adjusting the approach whenever the situation calls for it

You can learn more about how we approach TikTok for businesses and receive the latest tips and news on social media marketing by subscribing to our newsletter.

Success Stories: essence cosmetics, Matas, and NATURLI’ Foods

We have created high-performing TikTok campaigns for numerous companies and helped brands from different niches get more likes, views, and followers. Tell us what your objectives for the campaign are, and we’ll come up with an approach based on your targets and see the campaign through from start to finish. Here are some of the brands we collaborated with and the results we helped them achieve:

• essence cosmetics—Over a span of two years and two months, this makeup brand grew the number of its TikTok followers by 386,000, thanks to our efforts. At the same time, we created 556 videos that generated over 7.1 million interactions, with 12 of those videos going viral
• Matas—This well-known Danish brand saw its follower count shoot up by 13,500 in just eight weeks. We created 25 videos that generated over 209,000 interactions and 5.6 million views in total
• NATURLI’ Foods—Over 23 weeks, we created ads and organic content for this brand. Our paid ad campaign gathered over 2.9 million views and 49,000 interactions while boosting the brand’s follower count by 1,300. Out of 112 organic videos we created, 20 blew up and got over 100,000 views each

Source: MatasIf you want to achieve similar results with your TikTok business account, reach out to our team, tell us your goals, and we’ll start working on improving your TikTok strategy right away.

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