TikTok Ads has moved past the "should we even try this" phase for most consumer businesses, and the platform in 2026 is considerably more mature than its early-adopter reputation suggests. Whether it is worth your budget still depends heavily on what you are selling and to whom, and the answer looks quite different for DTC and B2B.
The principle that creative is the primary lever, true on Meta, is even more true on TikTok. The platform's format and algorithm heavily favour content that looks native to the feed, unscripted, fast-paced, filmed on a phone, over polished brand advertising. Spark Ads, which let you boost content that looks and feels organic, consistently outperform traditional produced ads for most DTC categories. If your creative pipeline is built around polished studio content, it will likely underperform on TikTok even if the same creative does well on Meta.
This means the operational requirement is different too. Winning on TikTok usually requires a faster, cheaper, higher-volume creative production process, more concepts tested more quickly, rather than fewer, more expensive productions. Businesses that treat TikTok creative the same way they treat a TV or premium social campaign tend to spend a lot for underwhelming results.
TikTok works for B2B in narrower situations than DTC: consumer-adjacent tools that individual professionals discover and choose themselves, freelancer and creator-economy software, or building broad brand awareness in a category where your buyers spend genuine time on the platform. For enterprise software with a defined buying committee and a long sales cycle, TikTok is rarely a strong direct response channel, and campaigns judged on immediate lead generation from it usually disappoint. It can work as an awareness layer if the audience genuinely overlaps, but the expectations need to be set for that role, not for a substitute for LinkedIn or Google Search.
If you run both Meta and TikTok simultaneously, you are frequently reaching overlapping audiences, and reported conversions on both platforms can double-count some of the same people who would have converted through either channel. This makes standalone platform-reported ROAS on TikTok even less trustworthy than usual as a way to judge whether it is worth keeping. An incrementality test, running TikTok in some geographies or holding it out in others, gives a much clearer answer on whether it is adding genuinely new customers or reaching people your other channels were already going to convert.
Beyond performance, TikTok carries a degree of regulatory and platform-continuity uncertainty that Meta and Google do not currently carry to the same extent. This does not mean avoiding the platform, but it is a reasonable factor in how much of your total budget and how much of your team's operational dependency you concentrate there. Treating TikTok as one diversified channel among several, rather than a primary channel you restructure your whole acquisition strategy around, is a sensible hedge regardless of how well it is currently performing.
If you are weighing whether TikTok makes sense for your specific product and audience, get in touch.