Social Ads Report 2026 (Metricool)

Summary:

This report looks at how ads perform on Meta and TikTok and tries to answer an important question: where should brands put their next social ad dollar.

It was published by Metricool, a social media management and analytics company. Metricool sells tools for planning, running, and measuring social content and ads, so it has a clear commercial interest in showing useful cross-platform ad insights.

The main goal is to compare Meta and TikTok across the marketing funnel, from awareness to traffic, leads, sales, and return on ad spend.

Metricool’s report is based on campaign data from 44,355 advertisers worldwide. That sample covers 628,969 paid campaigns and about $471.5 million in ad spend. It compares the same January to June window in 2025 and 2026.

The biggest finding is that Meta still dominates usage: 91% of advertisers in the sample ran ads only on Meta, while just 3.7% used both Meta and TikTok and 4.7% used only TikTok. But among advertisers using both, TikTok gained a little more budget share year over year.

TikTok also had higher average spend per campaign than Meta.

More insights:

• For top-of-funnel visibility, TikTok looked cheaper, with a lower CPM than Meta and more impressions per campaign.

• For traffic campaigns, TikTok stood out even more: it delivered nearly eight times more clicks and a much lower cost per click.

• For engagement campaigns, Meta was the stronger platform, getting similar engagement rates with less spend and more interactions per dollar.

• For lead campaigns, TikTok looked stronger again, with about twice as many leads at less than half the cost per lead.

• For sales, TikTok's reported cost per conversion looked much lower than Meta's, but that result came from a very small pool of TikTok sales campaigns. On Meta, the report says ROAS for sales campaigns fell from 5.48 to 4.57, meaning brands still made sales but got less back for each dollar spent than the year before. It also says bigger Meta advertisers had worse ROAS than smaller ones.

Note that this is a vendor report from a company that benefits from cross-platform ad analysis. The findings are based on observed campaign data, but only from advertisers inside Metricool's dataset, so this is not a random sample of all advertisers.

Some parts of the report compare unlike campaign objectives across platforms, and the sales comparison is especially shaky because TikTok's sales sample is tiny and self-selected. ROAS is also only available where purchase value is tracked, which the report says is about 64% of Meta sales campaigns, so missing tracking could skew country results.