Metricool has published an interesting study on social media advertising that leaves us with some fairly striking conclusions. To do so, it analyzed 628,969 campaigns from more than 40,000 advertisers worldwide, with an ad spend volume of $471,491,072.74, using data from the period January-June 2026.
And although it focuses only on campaigns run on TikTok and Meta (Instagram, Facebook), I believe it is well worth reviewing in detail. For example, do you know which of those environments has cheaper campaigns?
The short answer is TikTok... at least if we look at cost per impression, click, and lead. However, Meta still holds some advantage in engagement, and the study does not offer a comparison of sales ROAS between the two platforms.
For example, if we look at the CPCs (costs per click) across both environments, the difference is huge: the average CPC on Meta is $0.07, more than double the $0.03 recorded on TikTok. It is true that the campaigns analyzed on TikTok handle a considerably higher average budget ($949.83 versus $304.03), but they generate nearly eight times more clicks, which means they turn that additional spend into results far more efficiently.
“A Traffic campaign on TikTok generates nearly 8 times more clicks than the same campaign on Meta, and costs less than half as much per click. Therefore, TikTok’s stronger performance is not explained only by its larger budget, since the platform is turning that extra spend into much greater results,” Metricool explains.
That large gap, with costs more than twice as high, also remains when analyzing the cost per lead of the campaigns run. As a result, CPL on TikTok is $2.69, compared with $6 on Meta. In addition, the trend also favors TikTok, whose CPL has dropped 33% in just one year, while Meta’s rose 14%.
As for reach, measured in CPM, TikTok also comes out ahead, although by a smaller margin. TikTok’s CPM ($0.38) is only 22% lower than Meta’s ($0.48). In any case, both costs have increased over the past year: +5.5% in TikTok’s case and +8% for Meta.
In engagement campaigns, the outcome changes: Meta achieves 10.8 interactions for every dollar invested, compared with TikTok’s 8.2, even though the latter generates a higher total volume of interactions.
Given these figures, we might think that brands would overwhelmingly choose TikTok Ads for their campaigns, but nothing could be further from the truth.
According to Metricool’s data, nine out of ten accounts analyzed run campaigns “only” on Meta (91.51%). Meanwhile, 4.76% advertise exclusively on TikTok and 3.73% combine both platforms, a small segment in which there are major differences depending on account size. Among Tiny accounts (those investing less than $100 per month) that advertise on both platforms, TikTok captures 44.34% of the budget, around seven points more than a year earlier. It is the most balanced split of all segments.
When campaigns are broken down by company size, one notable paradox stands out: it is precisely the largest accounts, the Huge ones (those investing more than $10,000 per month), that post the lowest ROAS of all segments (3.97x), even below Tiny accounts (4.75x). Metricool highlights that this “happens despite the fact that total investment in sales campaigns more than doubled, from $62.9 million to $151.8 million.”
“A bigger budget does not automatically mean greater efficiency. That is one of the clearest conclusions from this year’s data,” explains Juan Pablo Tejela, CEO and co-founder of Metricool.
Specifically, if we focus on Meta, ROAS fell from 5.48 to 4.57 in just one year, “despite the fact that both investment and generated revenue increased. Therefore, each dollar invested delivers less than before,” the authors explain.
Another striking factor is the major differences in campaign profitability depending on the country the advertiser comes from. The overall ROAS of Meta sales campaigns is 4.57, but that is exactly what it is: an average. Brands in Norway generated more than $12 in return for every dollar invested, while brands in Germany generated $3, and brands in the United States posted an average of $2.42.
Image: ChatGPT
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