- CPM Parity, Budget Gap: TikTok’s $0.32 CPM rivals Meta’s $0.33—but brands allocate 85% more budget per TikTok campaign.
- Campaign Spend: Average TikTok Reach campaign costs $561.70 vs. Meta Awareness at $302.96, reflecting higher creative and production demands.
- Impression Levers: TikTok’s 9 billion impressions skew toward Reach and Video Views; Meta’s 105 billion deliver broader objectives like Traffic and Sales.
- Format Matters: Short-video ads on both platforms can hit 10–20 million users, but authenticity and context (e.g., loop earplugs vs. street interviews) drive performance.
- Strategic Balance: Use TikTok when you need immersive, narrative-driven reach; lean on Meta for cost-effective awareness and precision traffic goals.
Despite a $0.32 CPM on TikTok versus $0.33 on Meta, average TikTok campaigns demand nearly double the budget.
Metricool’s latest Social Ads Study reveals a striking paradox: TikTok offers virtually identical cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) to Meta - $0.32 versus $0.33 - yet brands invest 85.45% more budget per TikTok Reach campaign than per Meta Awareness effort.
For expert marketers, understanding why top-of-funnel visibility on TikTok commands such a premium is essential to crafting balanced, ROI-driven media plans.
CPM Parity Masks a Budgetary Chasm
At first glance, TikTok’s ultra-low $0.32 CPM undercuts entrenched assumptions that newer platforms always cost more. However, the average spend per TikTok Reach campaign clocks in at $561.70, compared to $302.96 for Meta Awareness—an 85% uplift. This gap reflects:
- Creative Production Demands: TikTok’s short-form video format often requires rapid iteration of vertical assets, sound mixing, and trend-savvy editing, pushing budgets higher.
- Agile Optimization Strategies: Brands frequently allocate additional daily budgets to fuel TikTok’s algorithmic “For You” push, knowing front-loaded spend maximizes early reach.
- Broader KPI Ambitions: Many TikTok campaigns blend reach with video-view, engagement, and even direct-response goals, blurring the line between pure awareness and performance.
Impressions vs. Investment: A Tale of Two Scales
Despite the higher-per-campaign investment, TikTok campaigns only generated 9 billion impressions in the study period, versus 105 billion on Meta. The distribution of objectives underscores each platform’s strengths:
| Objective | TikTok Share of Impressions | Meta Share of Impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Reach / Awareness | 34.1% | 34.4% |
| Video Views / Traffic | 19.9% | 20.0% |
| Traffic / Sales | 12.5% | 17.4% |
| Conversions / Leads | 13.4% | 9.8% |
| Lead Gen / Engagement | 10.4% | 16.3% |
| App Promotion | 9.7% | 2.2% |
On TikTok, nearly one-third of impressions focus on Reach, followed by Video Views—signaling that brands lean on immersive storytelling. Meta’s vast impression volume allows more emphasis on Sales and Engagement objectives, demonstrating its strength as a multi-stage funnel workhorse.
Campaign Case Studies: Tactics That Captured Attention
Metricool’s report highlights that Preply’s short-form lesson teasers each generated between 10 million and 20 million unique impressions on TikTok. One ad led with a rapid-fire montage of learner success stories, while another leaned into timely hooks like “Level up your Spanish by summer.”
By rotating these two distinct creative angles, Preply maximized its campaign reach and kept its content feeling fresh in users’ feeds—illustrating how alternating concepts can sustain high visibility on TikTok’s algorithm-driven platform.
For another campaign, Loop Earplugs amassed 1 million to 10 million impressions on TikTok using unpolished, user-generated–style clips of real people testing the product in noisy settings.
Meanwhile, Migros Online secured 1.5 million unique impressions on Facebook and Instagram through a street-interview format—professionally shot videos of shoppers demonstrating the grocery app in action. These results show that TikTok’s audience responds to authentic, on-the-ground storytelling, while Meta’s platforms still reward more structured, authority-driven content.
Strategic Takeaways for Expert Marketers
- Invest Heavily—but Intentionally—on TikTok: Allocate larger budgets to capture the algorithmic boost, but keep daily pacing controls tight to avoid overspend.
- Tailor Creative & Objectives: Use TikTok for brand storytelling and early-funnel video engagement; reserve Meta for broader-funnel objectives like traffic, sales, and lead generation.
- Leverage Cross-Platform Synergy: Repurpose core creative ideas across both platforms but optimize format (vertical vs. horizontal), pacing, and calls to action for each environment.
- Monitor CPM vs. Spend Efficiency: Track both CPM and cost per desired action (e.g., view, click, lead) to ensure higher TikTok budgets translate into planned outcomes.
- Test Boldly, Refresh Quickly: With TikTok’s trend-driven nature, refresh assets bi-weekly and experiment with user-generated-style content to sustain performance.
Ready to Rebalance Your Top-of-Funnel Spend?
The data makes one thing clear: low CPM alone won’t guarantee cost-effective visibility. By investing strategically across TikTok and Meta—matching budgets, formats, and performance goals to each platform’s unique ecosystem—marketers can achieve both scale and efficiency in their 2025 social ad strategies.
