Google Ads PPC averages $2.17 CPC. TikTok Ads is bought on CPM only, averaging $3.60. Analysis for India in 2026.
India is the world's highest-volume, lowest-priced major digital ad market — CPMs run roughly 60% below US baselines, while audience scale exceeds half a billion connected users. Google (including YouTube) and Meta dominate, but the Indian platform mix is genuinely different: ShareChat and Moj have meaningful share in tier-2/tier-3 cities, Hotstar/JioCinema drive premium video, and Flipkart Ads competes with Amazon for retail-media spend. Language is the central strategic decision — Hindi is necessary but insufficient, and serious advertisers run campaigns across 8-12 Indian languages for full national reach. Mobile-first is absolute: nearly all consumption is on smartphones, often with limited data plans, which shapes creative duration and format choices. The DPDP Act 2023 is now reshaping consent and cross-border data flows.
Search advertising on Google - pay per click on search results
Short-form video advertising on TikTok
The auction, the creative, the budget floor — the three things you actually need to know before picking a platform.
Google Ads runs a real-time second-price auction on every search query. You pay per click, and your effective CPC is a function of your bid, Quality Score, and competitor bids — high-intent commercial keywords (finance, legal, insurance) can 5-10x the platform average because auction density is brutal.
Responsive Search Ads: up to 15 headlines (30 chars each), 4 descriptions (90 chars each). Google mixes them dynamically. Sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets are effectively required to stay competitive.
Budget floor to reach statistical signal: roughly $50–100/day per campaign, or $1.5K–3K/month per keyword theme. Below that, learning phase never stabilizes.
TikTok Ads runs on CPM ($8–12 typical, higher for premium placements like TopView). CPC is available but the platform's optimization heavily favors CPM-bid campaigns. Auction density is lower than Meta but growing quickly; creative quality dominates.
9:16 vertical video (1080×1920), 9-60s (best performance 15-30s), native-feeling — polished ads underperform UGC-style creative here by 2-3x. Sound-on is standard. Captions optional but boost completion.
$500/day ($15K/month) is the practical floor for the Traffic and Conversion objectives to exit learning phase in a reasonable window. Smaller budgets work for Awareness and Video View goals.