With the continued rise of TikTok’s popularity, you may be wondering whether it’s worth advertising on the platform – and if you’ve already been running ads on Instagram and Facebook, how Meta Ads and TikTok Ads compare.
Both platforms are capable of delivering leads and sales, but they differ in some important ways that could influence where you allocate your budget.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the key differences between Meta and TikTok advertising, covering placements, budgets, targeting options, and performance, so you can make an informed decision about which platform suits your business.
Placements
Meta Ads Placements
On Meta, you have a huge variety of inventory options for where your ads can appear.
We recommend most clients start with Advantage+ and let Meta handle placement optimisation for you, but you can go manual if you prefer. This lets you focus on just Instagram or just Facebook, and then drill down further into stories, reels, marketplace, messenger, and so on.
TikTok Ads Placements
With TikTok, your options are more limited. You have TikTok as a network, plus Pangle, their solution for app developers promoting on third-party apps.
We typically run ads just on TikTok itself, and with Meta, we stick to Meta’s own platforms rather than the Audience Network, as we find this delivers better results for our clients.
Budgets
From a budgetary perspective, Meta gives you more flexibility on Instagram and Facebook Ad budgets.
You can technically set a daily budget as low as £0.75 at the ad set level…although we wouldn’t recommend going that low.
TikTok has a higher barrier to entry. The minimum budget you can set at the ad set level is £20 per day. Try to go a pound lower and the platform simply won’t allow it.
This is worth considering if you’re testing campaigns with smaller budgets or want granular control over spend across multiple ad sets.
Location Targeting
Location targeting is where Meta Ads still hold a significant advantage; particularly for UK-based businesses with physical locations or service-based businesses that only serve customers in specific areas.
On Meta Ads, you can go hyper-local. You can bulk upload postcode sectors in the UK and target based on those, which is fantastic for businesses that serve a specific radius or want to ensure their budget is tightly focused on a particular area.
On TikTok Ads, the most granular level you can target in the UK is the county level; in the case of London, that means Greater London as a whole. If you want to focus on a very specific area, your budget won’t work as hard on TikTok.
Audience and Interest Targeting
TikTok Ads doesn’t offer anywhere near the granularity that Meta Ads does when it comes to audience inputs.
For example, if you’re targeting people interested in cars on TikTok, you can only drill down to people who’ve interacted with a specific hashtag, or with a broad purchase intent for example sedans and / or SUVs:
On Meta Ads, you can still aim to target people with interests in specific brands and even specific models. Type in “Audi” and you’ll find interest options down to the Audi Q5:
That said, you wouldn’t necessarily want to focus your audience too narrowly on either platform. Like all ad platforms, their algorithms want sufficient data to figure out who your ideal customers are – those most likely to complete the “conversion action” (e.g. phone call, online purchase) you want.
Whether you like it or not, Meta will now take your inputs purely as suggestions and will expand beyond your selections:
Similarly, TikTok Ads want to expand beyond the inputs you give them, but at the time of writing they still give you the option to limit purely to your selection criteria:
As TikTok Ads suggests, if you’re not an advanced practitioner we usually recommend enabling this option.
TikTok Ads vs Meta Ads Performance: How Do They Stack Up?
Both platforms are completely capable of delivering leads and sales for your business.
However, we’re currently finding for our PPC services clients that TikTok Ads generally generates a higher cost per acquisition and lower ROAS than Meta Ads.
That being said, results depend heavily on your creative, your offer, your audience and a whole host of other factors.
One area where TikTok does excel is organic reach. Each piece of content on TikTok gets to perform on its own merits, whereas on Meta your reach is partly driven by your follower count.
So if you’re investing in video content for ads, that same content could work harder for you organically on TikTok than on Instagram or Facebook.
Conclusion
Both Meta Ads and TikTok Ads can play a part in a paid social strategy, but they’re not interchangeable.
Meta offers more placement variety, lower budget minimums, and significantly more granular targeting – particularly for hyper-localised location based advertising.
As it stands, for most of our clients, Meta Ads delivers stronger results and the better return on investment.
TikTok has higher minimum budgets and less precise targeting, but it’s a platform worth testing, especially if you have strong video creative and want to tap into its organic reach potential.
If you need help getting started with either platform, or want a second opinion on your current setup, get in touch – we’re happy to help.
