Bid Strategy

Your bid strategy is the rule that tells TikTok how to spend your budget while chasing the result you asked for.

When you build an ad group you first pick what a result means to you, a click, an install, a purchase, and then you pick how hard TikTok pushes to get it cheaply. That second choice is your bid strategy. It sits underneath everything else and decides whether the system chases raw volume, guards an average cost, or holds a hard ceiling on every bid.

Say you sell a course and you tell TikTok you want purchases. With one strategy it spends the whole budget and takes whatever purchases the auction offers. With another it slows down to keep your average cost near a number you set. Same audience, same creative, very different spending behavior. In 2026 the main choices are Maximum Delivery, the spend it all option once called Lowest Cost, and Cost Cap, with Bid Cap kept for narrow manual cases.

The strategy only matters if the rest of the ad group can breathe. Starve it with a tiny budget or a thin audience and even the smartest bidding logic has nothing to work with, so it stalls or overpays.

Pick the goal first, then pick how greedy TikTok gets about it.