TikTok Ads is bought on CPM only, averaging $10.35. LinkedIn Ads averages $7.48 CPC and $41.40 CPM. Analysis for Germany in 2026.
Germany is continental Europe's largest digital ad market, but it behaves differently from Anglo markets in important ways. Privacy attitudes are notably stricter — consent rates on cookie banners run materially lower than in the UK or France, which means addressable audience pools on Meta and Google are smaller relative to population. CPMs are 15-20% above US baselines for premium inventory. Strong domestic publisher alliances (Ad Alliance, BurdaForward) maintain genuine programmatic competition with Google, and TKP (the German equivalent of CPM) reporting culture remains rigorous. Bundeskartellamt scrutiny of Google and Meta is among Europe's most aggressive, and the TDDDG (formerly TTDSG) layered on top of GDPR makes consent UX a real engineering problem.
Short-form video advertising on TikTok
B2B professional network advertising - premium pricing
The auction, the creative, the budget floor — the three things you actually need to know before picking a platform.
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.
LinkedIn Ads auction is priced at a premium ($6–10 CPC, $30–40 CPM) because targeting is by job title, company, and seniority — data that no other platform has natively. Every click is a self-selected B2B audience, which is why B2B marketers accept the CPMs.
Sponsored Content (single image 1200×627 or 1:1, carousel, video 4:5 or 16:9). Message Ads (subject + 500 char body). Text Ads (headline 25 ch + description 75 ch + tiny image). Video 3s–30min but 15–30s wins.
LinkedIn's minimum daily budget is $10/campaign, but to reach signal on Lead Gen Form campaigns you need $75–150/day. Real B2B budgets on LinkedIn run $5K–20K/month.