Our benchmarks report reviews common ad performance metrics for TikTok Ads across brands using Triple Whale to monitor and maximize their performance. This analysis includes brands for the period of January 1-December 31, 2025.
READ MORE | A Guide to Ecommerce Metrics
Additionally, we’ll break down the vertical-specific trends with data from the following industries:
TikTok’s reputation as the emerging cost-efficient alternative to Meta and Google is being tested by 2025’s data. CPM climbed +16.00% year-over-year to $13.26, which while still meaningfully cheaper than Meta’s $14.19 overall median, is climbing closer to parity. CPA rose +8.64% to $32.74, while CVR slipped -6.20% to 2.01% and ROAS declined -5.70% to 2.21, indicating that TikTok’s audience is clicking more (+13.74% CTR improvement) but converting at a lower rate than the year prior.
The platform still offers genuine advantages, with lower CPMs than Meta across most industries, a format that drives strong top-of-funnel engagement, and an algorithm that surfaces products to interest-matched audiences at scale. Understanding where your industry sits within these benchmarks is essential for setting realistic goals and building an ad strategy that can take advantage of TikTok in 2026.
TikTok’s CPA profile is one of its clearest advantages over other platforms. Most industries acquire customers for under $22, a threshold that Meta and Google consistently exceed in comparable verticals. Pets & Animals posted the lowest CPA at $13.46, followed by Health & Wellness ($16.87) and Health & Beauty ($18.82). These categories benefit from TikTok’s strength in community-driven discovery, where organic content and paid ads share the same format and audience trust.
Electronics is the clear outlier at $31.25, which is more than double the lowest CPA in the dataset. This category has a longer consideration cycle and higher product complexity, which makes TikTok’s impulse-driven format a less natural fit for driving direct acquisition.
Reach costs on TikTok remain low relative to Meta, and the industry-level spread is comparatively tight, with a $2.54 range from cheapest to most expensive.
Sports & Outdoors earned the lowest CPM at $3.79, with Apparel & Accessories ($4.24) and Lifestyle & Boutique ($4.25) also offering cost-effective reach. These categories align naturally with TikTok’s content culture, where fashion, fitness, and lifestyle content thrives organically and keeps audience engagement high.
Food & Beverage had the highest CPM at $6.33, followed by Home & Garden at $5.69. Even at the top of the range, however, TikTok CPMs compare favorably to Meta’s industry equivalents, reinforcing the platform’s position as a cost-efficient channel for brands looking to diversify reach beyond dominant platforms.
Conversion rate (CVR) tells you what percentage of users who click on an ad actually convert into customers. CVR on TikTok is notably strong for several categories, with five of ten industries converting above 2% — an impressive threshold for a platform whose format is built around discovery and entertainment rather than explicit purchase intent. Home & Garden led at 2.42%, followed closely by Toys, Art, & Collectibles (2.38%) and Apparel & Accessories (2.37%). These categories benefit from TikTok’s visual product showcase format, where short-form video can demonstrate products in context and drive impulse decisions effectively.
Sports & Outdoors sat at the bottom with a 1.49% CVR, a notable gap below the next lowest. The category’s higher-ticket, research-intensive purchase behavior is at odds with TikTok’s fast-scroll environment, which limits the platform’s ability to push audiences through to conversion. Health & Wellness (1.68%) also underperformed on CVR even though it had low CPA, suggesting efficient acquisition may come partly from low price points rather than strong conversion behavior.
CTR measures how often users who see an ad choose to click it. TikTok’s CTR figures are structurally lower than Meta’s — the platform’s full-screen video format means users engage with content differently than with static feed ads. This is expected behavior for the format and does not reflect underperformance on its own.
Electronics led with the highest CTR at 0.73%, followed by Apparel & Accessories (0.69%) and Home & Garden (0.68%). Pets & Animals posted the lowest CTR at 0.49%, consistent with a category where TikTok content resonates emotionally but may not translate directly into shopping behavior.
ROAS is the most direct measure of advertising efficiency as it measures how much revenue is returned for every dollar spent on ads. In 2025, ROAS on TikTok varied more dramatically by industry than any other platform we evaluated, and several figures fell well below break-even on a platform-reported basis. Pets & Animals (0.08%), Food & Beverage (0.49%), and Health & Beauty (0.74%) displayed the lowest ROAS of all industries, representing poor returns on dollars invested. However, it’s possible the platform’s in-feed format drives significant organic lift and delayed purchase behavior that last-click attribution is undercounting. Brands in these categories may be seeing real downstream revenue impact that TikTok’s pixel does not fully capture.
Apparel & Accessories stands apart with a 2.49 ROAS — the only industry to clear 2.0 and the clearest evidence of TikTok’s native strengths. Fashion and style content is among TikTok’s highest-performing organic categories, and that cultural alignment carries over into paid performance. Home & Garden (1.97) and Lifestyle & Boutique (1.88) also posted competitive returns, rounding out the categories where TikTok’s format and audience intent align most naturally with the products being sold.
AOV on TikTok skews lower than on Meta and Google across most industries, reflecting the platform’s audience demographics and its strength in driving impulse purchases at accessible price points. Apparel & Accessories leads at $68.40, followed by Electronics $60.50), both categories where TikTok’s visual format can showcase products effectively and justify a higher transaction value.
Pets & Animals posted the lowest AOV at $12.84, which in combination with its $13.46 CPA creates almost no margin for profitable acquisition when considering just TikTok’s platform-reported data. Health & Wellness ($31.96), Food & Beverage ($31.96), and Beauty ($34.43) also cluster at the low end — categories where TikTok likely drives repeat consumable purchases rather than high-value transactions. For these verticals, profitability depends heavily on customer lifetime value and repeat purchase rates rather than first-order economics.
MER indicates how many dollars in revenue your brand generates for each dollar of paid media, calculated by dividing total revenue by total ad spend. This is different from ROAS, because ROAS divides your total revenue generated from ads by ad spend.
Lifestyle & Boutique led on MER at 0.41, the strongest blended efficiency of any industry on TikTok and consistent with a category that has found a natural home in the platform’s content ecosystem. Electronics follows at 0.38 and Toys, Art, & Collectibles at 0.36 — both suggesting that despite higher CPAs or lower ROAS figures, the broader revenue picture relative to spend is more favorable than platform-reported metrics alone would indicate.
Sports & Outdoors (0.18) and Home & Garden (0.20) sit at the bottom of the MER ranking, pointing to categories where TikTok spend is generating the least revenue return. For Sports & Outdoors in particular, the combination of the lowest CPM ($3.79), lowest CVR (1.49%), and lowest MER tells a consistent story: the platform reaches the audience cheaply, but that audience is not converting or spending at a rate that justifies the investment for most brands in this vertical.
TikTok in 2025 was a platform in transition — still offered reach cost advantages over Meta and Google, but showed early signs of the same efficiency pressures that have characterized those more mature platforms. CPM is rising, CVR and ROAS are declining, and the attribution challenges that have always complicated TikTok measurement are not going away.
TikTok remains a compelling diversification channel, particularly for brands where Meta CPMs have become prohibitive, but the 2025 data is a clear signal that treating it as a low-cost conversion engine requires careful vertical fit and realistic expectations about what the platform’s attribution can and cannot measure.
Get more free ecommerce benchmarks just like this! Check out Trends by Triple Whale.
Our benchmarks report reviews common ad performance metrics for TikTok Ads across brands using Triple Whale to monitor and maximize their performance. This analysis includes brands for the period of January 1-December 31, 2025.
READ MORE | A Guide to Ecommerce Metrics
Additionally, we’ll break down the vertical-specific trends with data from the following industries:
TikTok’s reputation as the emerging cost-efficient alternative to Meta and Google is being tested by 2025’s data. CPM climbed +16.00% year-over-year to $13.26, which while still meaningfully cheaper than Meta’s $14.19 overall median, is climbing closer to parity. CPA rose +8.64% to $32.74, while CVR slipped -6.20% to 2.01% and ROAS declined -5.70% to 2.21, indicating that TikTok’s audience is clicking more (+13.74% CTR improvement) but converting at a lower rate than the year prior.
The platform still offers genuine advantages, with lower CPMs than Meta across most industries, a format that drives strong top-of-funnel engagement, and an algorithm that surfaces products to interest-matched audiences at scale. Understanding where your industry sits within these benchmarks is essential for setting realistic goals and building an ad strategy that can take advantage of TikTok in 2026.
TikTok’s CPA profile is one of its clearest advantages over other platforms. Most industries acquire customers for under $22, a threshold that Meta and Google consistently exceed in comparable verticals. Pets & Animals posted the lowest CPA at $13.46, followed by Health & Wellness ($16.87) and Health & Beauty ($18.82). These categories benefit from TikTok’s strength in community-driven discovery, where organic content and paid ads share the same format and audience trust.
Electronics is the clear outlier at $31.25, which is more than double the lowest CPA in the dataset. This category has a longer consideration cycle and higher product complexity, which makes TikTok’s impulse-driven format a less natural fit for driving direct acquisition.
Reach costs on TikTok remain low relative to Meta, and the industry-level spread is comparatively tight, with a $2.54 range from cheapest to most expensive.
Sports & Outdoors earned the lowest CPM at $3.79, with Apparel & Accessories ($4.24) and Lifestyle & Boutique ($4.25) also offering cost-effective reach. These categories align naturally with TikTok’s content culture, where fashion, fitness, and lifestyle content thrives organically and keeps audience engagement high.
Food & Beverage had the highest CPM at $6.33, followed by Home & Garden at $5.69. Even at the top of the range, however, TikTok CPMs compare favorably to Meta’s industry equivalents, reinforcing the platform’s position as a cost-efficient channel for brands looking to diversify reach beyond dominant platforms.
Conversion rate (CVR) tells you what percentage of users who click on an ad actually convert into customers. CVR on TikTok is notably strong for several categories, with five of ten industries converting above 2% — an impressive threshold for a platform whose format is built around discovery and entertainment rather than explicit purchase intent. Home & Garden led at 2.42%, followed closely by Toys, Art, & Collectibles (2.38%) and Apparel & Accessories (2.37%). These categories benefit from TikTok’s visual product showcase format, where short-form video can demonstrate products in context and drive impulse decisions effectively.
Sports & Outdoors sat at the bottom with a 1.49% CVR, a notable gap below the next lowest. The category’s higher-ticket, research-intensive purchase behavior is at odds with TikTok’s fast-scroll environment, which limits the platform’s ability to push audiences through to conversion. Health & Wellness (1.68%) also underperformed on CVR even though it had low CPA, suggesting efficient acquisition may come partly from low price points rather than strong conversion behavior.
CTR measures how often users who see an ad choose to click it. TikTok’s CTR figures are structurally lower than Meta’s — the platform’s full-screen video format means users engage with content differently than with static feed ads. This is expected behavior for the format and does not reflect underperformance on its own.
Electronics led with the highest CTR at 0.73%, followed by Apparel & Accessories (0.69%) and Home & Garden (0.68%). Pets & Animals posted the lowest CTR at 0.49%, consistent with a category where TikTok content resonates emotionally but may not translate directly into shopping behavior.
ROAS is the most direct measure of advertising efficiency as it measures how much revenue is returned for every dollar spent on ads. In 2025, ROAS on TikTok varied more dramatically by industry than any other platform we evaluated, and several figures fell well below break-even on a platform-reported basis. Pets & Animals (0.08%), Food & Beverage (0.49%), and Health & Beauty (0.74%) displayed the lowest ROAS of all industries, representing poor returns on dollars invested. However, it’s possible the platform’s in-feed format drives significant organic lift and delayed purchase behavior that last-click attribution is undercounting. Brands in these categories may be seeing real downstream revenue impact that TikTok’s pixel does not fully capture.
Apparel & Accessories stands apart with a 2.49 ROAS — the only industry to clear 2.0 and the clearest evidence of TikTok’s native strengths. Fashion and style content is among TikTok’s highest-performing organic categories, and that cultural alignment carries over into paid performance. Home & Garden (1.97) and Lifestyle & Boutique (1.88) also posted competitive returns, rounding out the categories where TikTok’s format and audience intent align most naturally with the products being sold.
AOV on TikTok skews lower than on Meta and Google across most industries, reflecting the platform’s audience demographics and its strength in driving impulse purchases at accessible price points. Apparel & Accessories leads at $68.40, followed by Electronics $60.50), both categories where TikTok’s visual format can showcase products effectively and justify a higher transaction value.
Pets & Animals posted the lowest AOV at $12.84, which in combination with its $13.46 CPA creates almost no margin for profitable acquisition when considering just TikTok’s platform-reported data. Health & Wellness ($31.96), Food & Beverage ($31.96), and Beauty ($34.43) also cluster at the low end — categories where TikTok likely drives repeat consumable purchases rather than high-value transactions. For these verticals, profitability depends heavily on customer lifetime value and repeat purchase rates rather than first-order economics.
MER indicates how many dollars in revenue your brand generates for each dollar of paid media, calculated by dividing total revenue by total ad spend. This is different from ROAS, because ROAS divides your total revenue generated from ads by ad spend.
Lifestyle & Boutique led on MER at 0.41, the strongest blended efficiency of any industry on TikTok and consistent with a category that has found a natural home in the platform’s content ecosystem. Electronics follows at 0.38 and Toys, Art, & Collectibles at 0.36 — both suggesting that despite higher CPAs or lower ROAS figures, the broader revenue picture relative to spend is more favorable than platform-reported metrics alone would indicate.
Sports & Outdoors (0.18) and Home & Garden (0.20) sit at the bottom of the MER ranking, pointing to categories where TikTok spend is generating the least revenue return. For Sports & Outdoors in particular, the combination of the lowest CPM ($3.79), lowest CVR (1.49%), and lowest MER tells a consistent story: the platform reaches the audience cheaply, but that audience is not converting or spending at a rate that justifies the investment for most brands in this vertical.
TikTok in 2025 was a platform in transition — still offered reach cost advantages over Meta and Google, but showed early signs of the same efficiency pressures that have characterized those more mature platforms. CPM is rising, CVR and ROAS are declining, and the attribution challenges that have always complicated TikTok measurement are not going away.
TikTok remains a compelling diversification channel, particularly for brands where Meta CPMs have become prohibitive, but the 2025 data is a clear signal that treating it as a low-cost conversion engine requires careful vertical fit and realistic expectations about what the platform’s attribution can and cannot measure.
Get more free ecommerce benchmarks just like this! Check out Trends by Triple Whale.
See how CPA, CPM, ROAS, and conversion rates shifted across 10 industries on TikTok this year — and what it means for your 2026 strategy.
Body Copy: The following benchmarks compare advertising metrics from April 1-17 to the previous period. Considering President Trump first unveiled his tariffs on April 2, the timing corresponds with potential changes in advertising behavior among ecommerce brands (though it isn’t necessarily correlated).
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