Budget Best Practices
Last updated, April 2023

Every penny matters, especially for small businesses. We understand that ad budgets make up a large portion of your marketing spend, and we want to help you best optimize this spend on TikTok Ads Manager.


The problem for many people is how to know how much to spend. Going too far in either direction can be a problem. We know making budget decisions can be tough, so we've put together some best practices for you to use when considering your budget.


Tips for getting started

  • ​For your campaign budget, we suggest leaving the budget open.

  • ​We suggest using Daily Budget instead of Lifetime Budget for your ad group budget.

  • ​When selecting Bid Cap or Cost Cap as your bidding strategy, we suggest your initial budget should be at least (20 * targeted CPA).

  • ​If you are running an App Installs campaign and want to optimize it to drive specific actions within your app, we recommend using App Event Optimization (AEO). When using AEO, your initial budget should be no less than $100 and cover at least (20 * targeted deep conversion CPA). Learn more about App Event Optimization.

  • ​When you are running a Conversions campaign and you select Conversion as your Optimization Goal and Lowest Cost as your Bid Strategy, your initial budget should be at least (20 * targeted CPA) and no less than $100. You can also refer to the daily average ad spend of your previous ad groups within the same account to get an idea of how much budget you should set.


Tips for optimization

  • ​When you are running a Conversion campaign and select Conversion as your optimization goal, we highly recommend that you do not make any targeting, bid, or budget changes before it passes the learning phase. For these types of ad groups (oCPM), achieving 50 conversions is the most significant indicator of passing the learning phase.

  • ​After passing the learning phase, we recommend that you keep your budget within a 50% range of your previous budget.

  • ​After passing the learning phase, we recommend that you keep your bid within a 20% range of your previous bid.

  • ​In order to allow the campaign time to adjust, we recommend that you allow at least 2 days between making targeting, bid, or budget changes.

  • ​When running with Lowest Cost bid strategy, if you start running the ad group or changing the daily budget in the middle of the day, you might notice a spending discount based on the actual remaining effective hours of delivery.


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