You are building next quarter's budget and need a number for "how much do TikTok ads cost." TikTok will not give you one. Every ad runs through an auction, so your price depends on who else is bidding for your audience and how watchable your ad is.
You still need figures you can put in a spreadsheet. Below are the ones that hold up: the enforced platform minimums, the CPM and CPC ranges most advertisers land in, and the reason two brands targeting the same audience can pay very different effective prices.
The only fixed numbers: TikTok's minimum budgets
TikTok Ads Manager enforces two spend floors:
- Campaign level: $50/day minimum
- Ad group level: $20/day minimum
Auction ads have no minimum contract. Any brand with an Ads Manager account can start at those floors. Premium reservation formats (TopView, Branded Hashtag Challenges) are negotiated directly with TikTok and priced in the tens of thousands; everything in this post covers the auction ads a normal brand budget runs on.
The floors are lower than a useful test. One campaign with two or three ad groups for creative testing means a meaningful TikTok test starts around $1,500-$3,000/month. That gives the algorithm enough spend to exit the learning phase and gives you results you can read.
Typical TikTok ads pricing: CPM and CPC ranges
Auction prices move with market, season, and audience, but most advertisers report these ranges:
- CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions): roughly $5-$15, with $10 a common midpoint. TikTok CPMs run cheaper than Meta's for comparable audiences; attention on the platform is still under-priced relative to time spent.
- CPC (cost per click): roughly $0.20-$2.00, driven by how clickable the creative is and how competitive your vertical is.
- Cost per conversion: varies too much by product and price point to generalize. It is downstream of the two numbers above plus your landing page.
Plan for the top of each range in Q4, in expensive verticals (finance, insurance, legal), and on narrow retargeting audiences. Broad targeting with strong creative lands near the bottom.
What drives your TikTok ads cost
Five inputs, in rough order of leverage:
- Creative quality. The auction rewards ads people watch. Creative with high watch-time that looks like a native post gets shown more and charged less; creative that reads as an ad from the first frame pays a penalty on every impression. This is the biggest lever you control.
- Objective. Reach and traffic objectives are cheap. Conversion objectives cost more per impression because you are bidding on higher-intent delivery.