TikTok bidding strategies and budgets

This guide is built from TikTok's Business Help Center, starting with its page on available bidding strategies and the pages linked in each section below. It covers the bid strategies you can pick for an ad group, the budget types and minimums, Campaign Budget Optimization, delivery pace and what the learning phase means for when you can change things. Budget and bidding inside Smart+ campaigns are covered in our TikTok Smart+ guide, and the campaign, ad group and ad structure is in our TikTok ads basics guide.

The two bid strategies

TikTok ranks ads by bid and by how relevant the ad is to the viewer, and the bid strategy tells TikTok how to bid for you in that auction. You pick it per ad group, in the Bidding & Optimization section. TikTok's current help page lists two strategies for standard campaigns:

Strategy	What it does	Objectives	Billing events
Maximum Results	Spend-based: aims for the most results your budget can buy in the period, without a target CPA. Cost per result moves with the auction.	Traffic, Reach, Video Views, App Installs, Conversions, Lead Generation, Catalog Sales	CPC, CPM, CPV, oCPM
Target Cost per Result	Goal-based: optimises delivery towards a cost per action you set. TikTok says the average will be around the bid, but the actual CPA can be slightly higher or lower than the target CPA.	App Installs, Community Interactions, Conversions, Lead Generation, Reach, Traffic, Video Views	oCPM, CPC, CPM, CPV

Two details from the same page: Target Cost per Result is the default for the Reach and Video Views objectives, where Ads Manager also shows a suggested bid (an estimate from your settings and the account's historical CPM and CPV, not what you will pay). And for Conversions campaigns, Target Cost per Result is only available when the optimisation goal is set to Conversion. Both strategies can show unstable costs and high CPMs before a Conversions campaign passes the learning phase.

If you have read older articles that use other names for TikTok's bid options, go by what Ads Manager and the help page show today. For how the same choice works on other platforms, see our guides to Meta bid strategies and LinkedIn ads bidding.

Choosing between them

TikTok's bidding best practices page puts the choice simply: If you don't have a specific Cost Per Result goal, we recommend using Maximum Results. Use Target Cost per Result when you need the cost per action to stay close to a number. Its advice for each:

• Maximum Results: set a daily budget of 10 times your average daily CPA from the past 7 days to get through the learning phase. Expect cost per result to swing more when competition is high, for example in a promotional season, and expect a higher cost per result as you raise the budget.
• Target Cost per Result: set the budget to at least 10 times the CPA bid. If the ad group can't spend its budget, TikTok says to raise the bid by at least 20%; its budget and bidding FAQ adds that an unspent budget under this strategy usually means the CPA bid is too low, and the alternative is to switch to Maximum Results.
• Reach and Video Views with Target Cost per Result: bid the highest cost per result you can accept from the start rather than starting low and raising it, and don't cut the bid straight away if results miss the target, because that leads to a sharp drop in spend.

To work out the bid itself, TikTok's bidding and budget solutions page suggests starting from what a new customer is worth to you and how much of that you are willing to spend to win one; that figure is your target CPA. You can change bids on many ad groups at once with Bulk Edit on the Campaigns page, by an amount or a percentage.

Switching strategy on a live ad group

Hybrid Bidding lets you switch an ad group between Maximum Results and Target Cost per Result while it is spending, from the ad group's edit page, instead of launching a new ad group. It works for Sales, App Promotion, Lead Generation and Traffic. TikTok says it does not currently support TikTok Shop or Value Based Optimization, nor TikTok Ad Network in the upgraded Smart+ experience.

TikTok's tips for Hybrid Bidding:

• Maximum Results to Target Cost per Result: wait until the ad group has at least 5 conversions and has run at least 3 days, and set the target to the average CPA it achieved over the past 3 days.
• Target Cost per Result to Maximum Results: you can switch at any time; set the budget to the amount you are willing to spend, since there is no cost target any more.

TikTok's example is a sale period: switch to Maximum Results for scale during the event and back to Target Cost per Result afterwards.

Value bidding for apps: Target ROAS and Highest Value

For app campaigns that optimise for purchase value or ad revenue (TikTok calls this Value-based Optimization for app), the bid strategies are different. TikTok's comparison page sets them out:

	Target ROAS	Highest Value
Type	Goal-based	Spend-based
Best for	Strict, clear ROAS targets	Scaling fast, or finding out what ROAS you can reach
Bid input	A target cost per result and ROAS; TikTok suggests basing it on your TikTok ROAS over the last 7 days for the same region and event	None
Budget	More than 30 times historical CPA or more than 3 times your historical average campaign budget	The amount you plan to spend
What to expect	Daily spend may fluctuate; cost or ROAS held around the target	Daily spend is stable; cost per result may fluctuate

Both can optimise for Day 0 or Day 7 value, with some combinations limited by platform or requiring the TikTok SDK on iOS. TikTok's Target ROAS page lists it for Smart+ App Campaigns under the App Promotion objective. The value data has to reach TikTok first, through your SDK or measurement partner. For the same idea on Google, see our Target ROAS guide.

Daily and lifetime budgets

Budgets are set at campaign level, ad group level or both. TikTok's budget overview describes the two types:

• Daily budget: the average you are willing to spend per day, suited to always-on campaigns you check daily.
• Lifetime budget: the total for the whole run, suited to launches and promotions with fixed dates. TikTok says the spend may not be allocated evenly across each day, but it won't exceed the total lifetime budget by the end of the campaign.

Rules that catch people out:

• You can change the amount after launch, but not the budget type: daily can't become lifetime or the other way round once the campaign is published.
• A daily campaign budget needs daily ad group budgets. A lifetime campaign budget allows either at ad group level.
• When an ad group reaches its budget, delivery pauses until you raise the budget or extend the schedule.
• The campaign budget should not be lower than an ad group budget, which TikTok says can cause delivery issues.

Some objectives also offer a Dynamic Daily Budget: you set an average daily amount and TikTok may spend up to 25% more on busy days and less on slow ones, with the week (Sunday to Saturday) capped at seven times the daily figure. TikTok's example: a 50 USD daily budget may spend 62.50 USD one day and 37.50 USD another, and no more than 350 USD in the week.

Budgets control spend; how and when TikTok actually charges you depends on your billing option, covered in our TikTok Ads billing guide.

Minimum budgets

From TikTok's budget pages:

Level	Daily budget	Lifetime budget
Campaign	Must exceed 50 USD	Must exceed 50 USD
Ad group	Must exceed 20 USD	20 USD × the number of scheduled days (including past days)

So an ad group scheduled for 31 days needs a lifetime budget of at least 20 × 31 = 620 USD. Those are the floors the system accepts, not what TikTok recommends for results. Its budget best practices page suggests higher starting points tied to your cost per result: 50 times the current CPA for upper-funnel and shallow conversion goals (100 USD or equivalent where there is no CPA yet), 20 times for app installs and 10 times for deep conversions such as purchases (200 USD or equivalent). The same page suggests leaving the campaign budget open at first and using daily budgets on ad groups.

Campaign Budget Optimization

With Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) you set one budget on the campaign and TikTok shares it across the ad groups, aiming for the most conversions at campaign level rather than per ad group. You turn it on with a toggle when you create the campaign, then choose daily or lifetime budget and Maximum Results or Target Cost per Result. Delivery type is fixed at Standard, and all ad groups in the campaign must share the same optimisation goal.

TikTok's notes on it:

• Set the campaign budget to the real amount you want to spend, and make sure the ad group budget covers at least 5 times the target CPA.
• Run 3 to 5 active ad groups with 2 to 3 creatives each. TikTok says CBO does not function when there is only 1 ad active group in the campaign.
• Wait at least three days or 50 conversions between adjustments, and keep each change within 30% of the current daily budget.

The trade-off is the same one Meta advertisers weigh between campaign and ad set budgets; our Meta campaign vs ad set budget guide walks through when each makes sense.

Standard and accelerated delivery

The delivery type, set in the ad group's Budget & Optimization section, controls how fast the budget is spent:

• Standard spends as evenly as possible across the period, following traffic, so a one-day ad may spend most in the evening if that is when traffic peaks. It is available with both bid strategies.
• Accelerated spends as fast as possible, for short pushes such as a deal event or a launch weekend. It is only available for Target Cost per Result ad groups on lead generation, website conversion and some app promotion goals. TikTok warns that CPA can fluctuate a lot in the first three days and stabilises by the fourth, so cost-sensitive advertisers should avoid very high budgets with it.

The learning phase and budget changes

TikTok's learning phase page describes it as the period when the system works out the best users for a campaign, with performance that may fluctuate. Volatility starts to decline after about 25 campaign results or 7 days. Pausing, edits that restart learning, and an unreasonable budget or number of creatives all get in the way.

On how much to raise a budget, TikTok's pages don't all give the same number. The budget overview (updated July 2026) says no more than 40% per adjustment during learning and no more than 30% after it, and no more often than every two days. The budget best practices page says to stay within 50% of the previous budget after learning, the bidding best practices page says to raise a post-learning ad group budget by at least 20% at a time, and the CBO page says within 30%. Our reading of them together: once out of learning, raise in steps of roughly 20 to 30% and wait at least two days between changes.

To see whether an ad group is still learning and how spend is tracking, use the reports described in our TikTok ads reporting guide.

How we set TikTok budgets and bids

This is our own practice, not TikTok's guidance:

• We start new ad groups on Maximum Results with a daily budget, and only add a cost target once there are a few days of real CPA data to base it on.
• We work out the budget from the target CPA and the multiples above before launch, and if the client's budget can't cover them we run fewer ad groups rather than splitting a small budget thin.
• We write down every bid or budget change with the date, so a jump in cost can be matched to a change rather than guessed at.
• We don't judge a new ad group until it has left the learning phase, unless it is clearly spending with no results at all.

If you want help setting this up, see our services.

Frequently asked questions

What is the minimum budget for TikTok ads?

TikTok's help pages say a campaign budget, daily or lifetime, must exceed 50 USD, and an ad group daily budget must exceed 20 USD. An ad group lifetime budget must be at least 20 USD times the number of scheduled days, for example 620 USD for 31 days.

Which bid strategy should I use on TikTok?

TikTok recommends Maximum Results if you don't have a specific cost per result goal, since it spends the budget on as many results as it can. Use Target Cost per Result when you need the cost per action to stay close to a number, and give it a budget of at least 10 times the bid.

Why is my Target Cost per Result ad group not spending?

TikTok's FAQ says the CPA bid is most likely too low. Its advice is to raise the bid, by at least 20% according to its bidding best practices page, or switch the ad group to Maximum Results, which does not need a bid.

Can I change a TikTok budget from daily to lifetime?

No. You can change the amount after the campaign is published, but not the budget type at campaign or ad group level. To change the type, create a new campaign or ad group.

How long is the TikTok learning phase?

TikTok says volatility typically starts to decline after about 25 campaign results or 7 days from when the campaign enters the learning phase. Pausing it or making edits that restart learning delays that.

For budgets and bidding on Google Ads, see our guides to Google Ads budgets and bidding and Target CPA. For more on TikTok, see TikTok ads targeting and TikTok Spark Ads.