Pennock's TikTok Ads Deep Dive Report: Scaling Full-Funnel Growth with Pennock & TikTok
The Full-Funnel TikTok Playbook for Beauty Brands
Data-driven insights from $556K in TikTok ad spend across 8 beauty and lifestyle brands
Executive Summary
TikTok has become the most important growth channel for beauty brands, but most are using it wrong. The dominant playbook treats TikTok as a bottom-funnel conversion machine: run product ads, optimize for purchases, and measure success by last-click ROAS. It feels efficient. It looks accountable. And it leaves enormous value on the table.
This report analyzes $556K in TikTok ad spend across 8 beauty and lifestyle brands managed by Pennock over the past six months, spanning skincare, haircare, color cosmetics, and fashion. The data reveals a clear pattern: brands that invest more heavily in upper-funnel awareness campaigns deliver better blended ROAS, lower CPAs, and more sustainable growth than those that concentrate spend at the bottom of the funnel.
The core finding: Brands allocating 40%+ of their TikTok budget to awareness campaigns delivered an average 4.65x blended ROAS. Brands allocating under 20% to awareness averaged just 0.33x. The difference is not marginal. It is the difference between a profitable channel and a money pit.
Awareness campaigns deliver 2.1x lower CPMs than conversion campaigns ($4.56 vs $9.39 median), providing significantly more efficient reach at the top of the funnel.
Spark Ads outperform owned content on CPM efficiency, delivering 20% lower CPMs ($8.47 vs $10.54 median). Creator-native content wins on TikTok.
31-60 second videos are the sweet spot for driving purchases in beauty, outperforming both shorter clips and longer-form content.
Haircare leads all beauty categories on TikTok with a 5.73x blended ROAS and $25 CPA, followed by fashion (3.78x) and skincare (2.85x).
The State of TikTok for Beauty Brands
TikTok is no longer experimental for beauty. It is infrastructure. One in four beauty shoppers has made a purchase after seeing a TikTok, and 67% say the platform gives them ideas they would not have found elsewhere. With average CPMs between $4 and $8, well below Meta and Google for comparable reach, TikTok offers beauty brands the most cost-efficient awareness channel available today.
But efficiency at the top of the funnel is only part of the story. TikTok has evolved into a true full-funnel platform: TikTok Shop enables native checkout, Spark Ads let brands amplify creator content with paid distribution, and Smart+ campaigns use machine learning to optimize across the entire conversion path. The brands that treat TikTok as a single-objective channel are competing against brands that use all of it.
The problem with bottom-funnel-only strategies
Most beauty brands start on TikTok with conversion campaigns. It makes sense. You want to see purchases, and platform-reported ROAS gives you a number to report to leadership. But this approach has a ceiling. Conversion campaigns target users who are already in-market, which means you are fishing in an increasingly crowded pond. CPMs rise. Frequency increases. Creative fatigue sets in. And you start wondering why TikTok "does not work" for your brand.
Our data shows exactly what happens: brands with less than 20% of budget in awareness see blended ROAS below 0.5x on TikTok. They are spending aggressively on conversion campaigns that have no top-of-funnel pipeline feeding them. The math does not work because the funnel is starved.
What this report covers
This report draws on six months of performance data from 8 beauty and lifestyle brands at various stages, from scaling DTC brands under $10M to established brands above $10M in annual revenue. All data comes from TikTok Ads Manager exports. We analyze campaign-level performance by funnel stage, creative format benchmarks at the ad level, and category-specific insights across skincare, haircare, color cosmetics, and fashion.
Brand names have been anonymized. The data has not.
The Full-Funnel Thesis: Why Awareness Drives ROAS
The central finding of this report is counterintuitive but consistent across every brand in our dataset: the more a beauty brand allocates to TikTok awareness campaigns, the better its blended ROAS.
This is not a coincidence or an artifact of brand size. It holds across established and scaling brands, across skincare and haircare, across different creative approaches. The mechanism is straightforward: awareness campaigns fill the top of the funnel with engaged, brand-familiar users. When those users later encounter a conversion campaign, or search for the brand directly, they convert at higher rates and lower cost.
The data, brand by brand
| Brand | Category | Awareness Allocation | Blended ROAS | CPA | Total Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand A | Haircare | 78.7% | 5.67x | $23.11 | $48K |
| Brand B | Skincare | 41.8% | 4.53x | $49.20 | $265K |
| Brand C | Fashion | 53.3% | 3.78x | $84.14 | $35K |
| Brand D | Skincare | 16.7% | 0.33x | $381.42 | $142K |
Brand A (haircare) allocates nearly 79% of its TikTok budget to awareness and delivers 5.67x ROAS with a $23 CPA. Brand B (skincare) runs a balanced 42/57 split and achieves 4.53x ROAS at significantly larger scale, $265K in total spend. Both demonstrate that awareness investment does not dilute efficiency; it amplifies it.
On the other end, Brand D allocated just 16.7% to awareness while spending $142K and delivered a 0.33x ROAS with a $381 CPA. This brand invested heavily in conversion campaigns without building the audience pipeline to sustain them.
Benchmark Data: CPMs, CPAs, and ROAS by Funnel Stage
Understanding the cost structure across the funnel is essential for budget planning. Our data covers 76 campaigns with meaningful spend across 8 brands, providing robust benchmarks that beauty brand marketers can use to evaluate their own performance.
CPM by funnel stage
Awareness campaigns (video views, reach, traffic objectives) deliver a median CPM of $4.56, with a range from $1.91 to $15.56. Conversion campaigns (purchase optimization, Smart+, catalog sales) come in at a median of $9.39, 2.1x higher. This gap reflects the competitive dynamics of conversion-optimized auctions: everyone bidding on the same high-intent users drives prices up.
What this means for budget planning: Every dollar spent on awareness reaches roughly twice as many users as the same dollar spent on conversion campaigns. For brands building TikTok audiences from scratch, this efficiency gap makes awareness the highest-leverage starting point.
Established vs. scaling brand benchmarks
Established brands ($10M+ revenue) in our dataset delivered a median ROAS of 4.53x and a median CPA of $49.20 on TikTok. These brands have the brand recognition and product-market fit that makes full-funnel campaigns work. Awareness builds on existing brand equity, and conversion campaigns benefit from a known product.
Scaling brands ($1-10M) in our dataset are primarily in the awareness-building phase, investing in video views and Spark Ads to establish TikTok as a channel before layering in conversion objectives. This is the right sequence. Brands that skip the awareness phase and jump straight to conversion campaigns typically face high CPAs and unsustainable economics.
| Metric | Awareness Campaigns | Conversion Campaigns | All Campaigns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median CPM | $4.56 | $9.39 | $6.42 |
| CPM Range | $1.91 - $15.56 | $0.72 - $44.75 | $0.72 - $44.75 |
| Median CTR | 0.23% | 1.14% | 0.66% |
| Total Spend | $202K | $292K | $556K |
| Impressions | 52.4M | 26.1M | 86.6M |
The Creative Playbook: What Works on TikTok
We analyzed 744 ads with spend across all 8 brands to identify the creative formats, lengths, and approaches that drive the best performance on TikTok for beauty brands.
Spark Ads vs. owned content
Spark Ads, where brands boost creator or influencer content as paid ads, deliver a 20% lower median CPM than owned content ($8.47 vs $10.54). The blended CPM gap is even wider: $4.85 for Spark Ads vs $6.53 for owned content. Spark Ads look native in the feed, which reduces scroll-past rates and earns better placement from TikTok's algorithm.
For beauty brands: Spark Ads should be a core part of your TikTok strategy, not an afterthought. The CPM advantage compounds over time. At scale, the 20% efficiency gain on Spark Ads can mean tens of thousands of dollars in savings on the same reach.
Video length: the 31-60 second sweet spot
The data is clear: 31-60 second videos drive the most purchases for beauty brands on TikTok (258 purchases), outperforming both shorter clips (0-15s: 4 purchases) and longer-form content (60s+: 104 purchases). This length provides enough time to demonstrate a product, tell a story, and build desire without losing the viewer.
Landing page destinations
Where you send TikTok traffic matters. Ads linking to product pages (PDPs) delivered a $45.35 CPA, 26% lower than the overall average of $60. Homepage destinations, by contrast, saw a $174 CPA. The takeaway: reduce friction. Send users directly to the product they saw in the video.
Category Benchmarks: Skincare, Haircare, and Beyond
Haircare leads on TikTok
Haircare brands delivered the strongest TikTok performance in our dataset: 5.73x blended ROAS with a $25.19 CPA across 3 brands. The visual, transformational nature of hair products translates exceptionally well to video. Before-and-after content is a natural fit, and the category benefits from strong creator ecosystems on TikTok.
Skincare: a more complex conversion path
Skincare brands in our dataset delivered a 2.85x blended ROAS at a $76.30 CPA. The comparatively lower ROAS reflects a category truth: skincare purchases often require more consideration. Consumers research ingredients, read reviews, and compare options before buying. This makes the upper funnel even more important. Awareness campaigns build the familiarity and trust that skincare consumers need before converting.
Notably, the skincare brand with the highest awareness allocation (Brand B at 42%) delivered 4.53x ROAS, while the brand with the lowest (Brand D at 17%) delivered just 0.33x. Same category, dramatically different outcomes, driven primarily by funnel strategy.
The Transformation Story: Before and After Full-Funnel
One brand in our dataset provides a particularly compelling case study for the full-funnel approach, not because of its success, but because of its journey.
Brand D: a cautionary tale
Brand D is an established clean skincare brand ($10M+ revenue) with a long history on TikTok. Over time, the brand worked with multiple agencies and tested a wide range of campaign types: traffic campaigns, community interactions, conversion campaigns, retargeting, lookalike audiences, follower growth, and TikTok Shop ads.
Across $142K in total spend and 32 campaigns, Brand D delivered a 0.33x ROAS with a $381 CPA. The vast majority of that spend went into conversion-focused campaigns with only 16.7% allocated to awareness.
The pattern: Brand D spent heavily on conversion campaigns without building an awareness pipeline. Each new campaign started from scratch with no warm audiences, no brand recognition on the platform, and no compounding returns. The brand was paying premium conversion CPMs to reach cold users who had never heard of them on TikTok.
Compare this with Brand A (haircare), which allocated 79% to awareness and achieved 5.67x ROAS at a fraction of the spend. Or Brand B (skincare), which spent twice as much as Brand D but with a balanced funnel strategy and delivered 13.7x better ROAS.
Brand D's story is not unusual. It is, in fact, the default path for most beauty brands on TikTok: start with conversion campaigns, struggle with high CPAs, try different agencies, test different tactics, all without addressing the fundamental issue that the top of the funnel is empty.
The recent shift to a full-funnel approach, introducing video view and consideration campaigns alongside conversion efforts, has begun to change the trajectory. The early data on awareness efficiency is promising, and the playbook is clear.
Pennock's Full-Funnel TikTok Framework
Based on the data in this report and our experience managing TikTok for beauty brands, here is the framework we recommend for building a profitable full-funnel TikTok presence.
Phase 1: Build the awareness engine (Months 1-3)
Budget allocation: 60-80% awareness, 20-40% conversion. The goal is not immediate ROAS. It is building a warm audience that will convert at scale. Use video view campaigns with Spark Ads to put creator content in front of interest-based audiences. Target a CPM under $5 and focus on video completion rates rather than clicks.
Creative approach: Lead with 31-60 second creator content. Prioritize Spark Ads over owned content for the CPM advantage. Focus on pain-point-driven narratives: show the problem, show the transformation, show the product. Avoid polished studio ads at this stage; UGC and creator content performs better and costs less.
Phase 2: Layer in conversion (Months 3-6)
Budget allocation: Shift toward 40-50% awareness, 50-60% conversion. Your awareness campaigns have now built retargeting pools and lookalike audiences that will make conversion campaigns more efficient. Launch Smart+ campaigns targeting users who have engaged with your awareness content.
Creative approach: Maintain Spark Ads at the top while adding product-focused content for conversion. Send traffic to PDPs, not homepages. Test TikTok Shop if your brand is eligible. Native checkout reduces friction significantly.
Phase 3: Optimize and scale (Months 6+)
Budget allocation: Find your brand's optimal ratio. Our data suggests 40-60% awareness is the sweet spot for established beauty brands, but this varies. The key metric is blended ROAS across the entire funnel, not campaign-level ROAS on individual objectives.
The compounding effect: As your awareness investment builds brand recognition on TikTok, you will see conversion efficiency improve over time: lower CPAs, higher conversion rates, and organic brand search volume that does not show up in ad attribution. This is the full-funnel flywheel.
The rule of thumb: If your TikTok awareness allocation is below 30%, you are likely leaving money on the table. If it is below 20%, your conversion campaigns are probably struggling with high CPAs and you may be concluding that TikTok "does not work" for your brand. It does. You just need to feed the funnel.
About Pennock
Pennock is a female-owned performance marketing agency built exclusively for beauty and lifestyle brands. With 95+ brand partners and a team of cross-disciplinary marketing experts, Pennock combines the strategic depth of a large agency with the agility and responsiveness of a boutique partner.
We drive DTC growth through paid media management across TikTok, Meta, Google, and Amazon, combined with SEO strategy and creative optimization, all grounded in real-time data analysis. We do not just chase ROAS. We build sustainable growth engines that compound over time.
Ready to build a full-funnel TikTok strategy for your beauty brand?
Contact us at nikki@pennock.co or visit pennock.co
Methodology
This report analyzes six months of TikTok Ads Manager data from 8 beauty and lifestyle brands managed by Pennock. Total analyzed spend is $556,016 across 86.6 million impressions. Campaign classification (awareness vs. conversion) is based on campaign objective as indicated by campaign naming conventions and TikTok objective settings. ROAS figures use TikTok's all-channels purchase attribution. All brand data has been anonymized. Creative format analysis covers 744 ads with recorded spend. CPM and CTR benchmarks are median values to reduce the impact of outliers.