Best practices for bidding strategies in TikTok Ads Manager

A bidding strategy in TikTok Ads Manager is a guideline that tells TikTok how to bid for you in the ad auction, by managing parameters like cost per result and budget utilization. Bidding helps you reach more people and achieve your marketing goals by competing for ad placements. TikTok Ads Manager provides two main bidding strategies:

• Maximum Delivery: A spend-based strategy that aims to deliver the highest volume of conversions within your defined budget.

• Cost Cap: A goal-based bidding strategy where TikTok optimizes the delivery of your ads to achieve a specific cost per action (CPA) defined by you.

Consider the following best practices when you pick a bidding strategy that aligns with your business and marketing goals.

Bidding strategy goals

The goal of the Maximum Delivery bidding strategy is to maximize the number of conversions you get within your budget, without optimizing towards a specific target CPA. This strategy is useful if your main goal is to get as many conversions as possible, regardless of the exact cost per conversion.

The goal of the Cost Cap bidding strategy is to ensure that the cost per action stays as close as possible to the target CPA you set. Cost Cap is useful if you have a specific budget in mind for each conversion.

Best practices for Maximum Delivery bidding strategy

If you want to achieve a high volume of conversions, especially during a specific time period such as a promotional season, Maximum Delivery may be the right bidding strategy. Consider that cost per results may fluctuate day to day based on the changes in the auction environment, and that you will see more volatility in your cost per results during periods of high competition. If you don't have a specific Cost Per Result goal, we recommend using Maximum Delivery.

• You should set up a daily budget of 10 times your average daily CPA from the past 7 days to pass the learning phase.

• For post-learning Phase (conversion events only), increase the ad group budget by at least 20% at a time. Increasing the budget will often result in a higher cost per result.

• If you are concerned that the cost per result may get too high, we recommend you use hybrid bidding to switch Maximum Delivery to Cost Cap and set a bid that you can accept while increasing budget.

Best practices for Cost Cap bidding strategy

If you are looking to keep costs around a specific goal regardless of marketing conditions to ensure the cost per action remains as close as possible to the target CPA, the Cost Cap may be the right bidding strategy for you.

• Set the budget to be at least 10 times the CPA bid to align with the recommended bid-to-budget ratio and support delivery.

• If your Cost Cap campaign runs into low budget utilization issues, increase your bid by at least 20%.

• Use Cost Cap when you increase your budget to control volatility.

• Use the suggested bid in TikTok Ads Manager to meet the minimum required bid-to-budget ratio.

If you are using Reach/Video view objectives on auction to use Cost Cap:

• Set the highest Cost Per Result bid you can accept. Bidding directly at a high price performs better in comparison to starting out at a low bid and gradually increasing later.

• Do not decrease bid immediately if CPA/ROAS doesn’t meet target, wait and see if the system will adjust. Decreasing the bid immediately will lead to a drastic spending drop.

Maximum Delivery and Cost Cap together

You can apply and pair bidding strategies to meet diverse campaign goals. When you have a clear CPA target, use Cost Cap and Maximum Delivery together to balance costs while maintaining high conversions.

Next steps

• Learn more about available bidding strategies in TikTok Ads Manager.

• Learn about TikTok Pixel and how to set up and verify TikTok web data connections for accurate tracking and measurement.

• Learn about the learning phase in Bidding & Optimization.

• Learn about hybrid bidding.