TikTok Shop BFCM paradox: ↑ spend = ↑ ROAS. Here is how

Last week, we answered yes to the question: should brands be investing in ads for BFCM?
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This week, we’ll show you the data behind that answer.
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With Charm.io data analytists, we’ve been looking closely at how ad spend efficiency behaves during the holiday window, and the data tells a clear story: brands that scale their spend during peak attention periods are compounding returns.​
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A recent analysis of top-performing TikTok Shops shows that total ad spend peaks in the same month that total revenue does (ok, that's obvious). But more interestingly, revenue growth actually outpaces ad spend growth, indicating that the ads running in those peak months are more efficient, not less.
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Increased ad spend, increased ROAS

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This challenges the usual fear that “everyone spending at once” drives up costs and squeezes margins. In reality, the opposite happens when brands come prepared with strong content, creator pipelines, and sequenced campaigns.

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How to boost your ROAS while increasing your ad spend?
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Across the top 10 TikTok Shops last holiday season, we found that:

• The average ad investment was around $2.5 million during November–December.
• ROAS ranged from 2× to as high as 17×, depending on content maturity and creator readiness.
• Brands that had spent months building creator relationships (like Tarte Cosmetics) were able to scale efficiently when it mattered most.
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What’s driving this efficiency is the evolution of TikTok’s GMV Max strategy: where the platform’s algorithm allocates spend dynamically across videos that actually convert. Rather than manually choosing which ads to boost, brands that trust the system benefit from the same optimization loop that made TikTok’s content engine so powerful in the first place.

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The takeaway: Ad efficiency is about sequencing spend around proven content.

If you haven’t built a base of creators and content, start there before scaling your ad budget. The highest-performing brands are blending creator strategy, affiliate models, and algorithm-led ad optimization into a single, compounding system.
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Together with Charm.io’s CEO, Alex Nisenzon, we break this down in detail in our webinar replay here: Instant access to the webinar.

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