In the UAE, digital advertising budgets have seen a significant increase towards mobile-first as the market begins to shift its focus in this direction. This has become more noticeable for social media advertising, primarily Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram) and TikTok ads, where most mobile users are engaging with these days. However, just because they are engaging with these platforms doesn’t mean that they are converting. We are looking into which platform you should be investing more in to get the most out of your digital advertising budget.
UAE’s social media users have grown significantly over the past few years, with more users rising each year, with upwards of 10.6 million users in 2022. This has had a knock on effect for social media advertising as spend is now projected to reach US$447 million in 2025.
This begs the question of which platform is getting the most attention from UAE users. so far, Facebook is the second most used platform (80.3%), only behind WhatsApp. While TikTok has seen 123% reach in February 2025, indicating that for now it is behind Facebook and Instagram, but there is significantly more growth for the platform in the UAE.
It is also becoming increasingly popular for users in the UAE to use social media to research brands, with 51% of users in the market using these platforms to get to know brands better and make informed purchasing decisions. This is why it’s important to advertise on social media within the market, as with more users researching and engaging with social media content, it allows businesses to capture users at different stages of their purchase journey.
Both Meta and TikTok have different audiences and different approaches to the advertisements they show users. It’s important to know who your audience is and why you are targeting them, ensuring that you are targeting users who are more likely to align with the goals of the advertisement campaign. Do you want to raise awareness about a campaign? Do you want to entice users to buy a certain product? These are things you will need to consider.
Firstly, Meta has been around longer than TikTok, so their targeting is more advanced than TikTok’s, which allows you to be a lot more specific with who you target and why you are targeting them. Because of this, Meta allows you to create custom audiences where you can be as broad or specific as you wish with the campaign, allowing you to go from having a broad reach and refine based on performance or from their insights.
This is fed through engagement factors along with additional data for each campaign, and these campaigns can be spread out across multiple different formats on their products, including appearing in users’ feeds, while scrolling through reels on Instagram or appearing in stories, just to name a few.
This allows you to gather as much information as possible and utilise tools like Meta Pixel and Conversions API for retargeting, allowing you to fine tune your campaign while it’s running and ensuring you are getting the best possible ROI.
TikTok has taken the social media world by storm in its short time on the internet, growing increasingly popular with younger demographics. It is because of the popularity of the platform that brands are now starting to utilise it for advertisement, either appearing as users scroll or with features like TopView, which appears as the user opens the app, and “Branded Hashtag Challenges,” which gets the users to create videos of themselves doing the challenge.
For the audience, the platform is still behind Meta as far as targeting, however, it has improved a lot in the short time it’s been around, but it does allow you to target and tailor an ideal audience It isn’t as sophisticated as Meta.
For the time being, TikTok is better for “Top-of-Funnel” and viral brand awareness campaigns, with the UAE users using social media to research brands. TikTok is still a platform to advertise on. However, it is best utilised for raising awareness for the brand.
Getting the most out of your ads is important and requires the advertiser to know what the campaign is meant to drive. Once these goals are set it’s about getting the best ROI for the campaign’s intent, so when we look at social media campaigns in UAE, depending on the goal of the campaign will depend on what social media platform offers the better ROI.
For campaigns that are in place to drive awareness for the brand or a specific product, the best ROI will be seen on TikTok as the platform drives engagement, conversions that we see mainly from the platform focus on brand follow, app opens, and landing page views. If you want to see more worthwhile conversions, these tend to come from partnerships with influencers or by retargeting using other channels.
Whilst campaigns that want to see ROI come from product conversions and generating sales, it’s best to focus these campaigns on Meta, as users are more likely to convert and generate a sale on these platforms. It also allows campaigns to retarget and ensure potential conversions don’t go amiss, which can also come off the back of insights and data gathered from awareness campaigns on TikTok, allowing you to combine both platforms and get them to work effectively for you.
What is important to remember is that depending on the intent of your campaign, you will have different targets and aims for what you expect out of the campaign. Understanding your audience and the platform you are using will go a long way in allowing you to get the most out of the campaign. Hopefully, this article has helped you determine what platform will be best for the campaign you have in mind and help you make the most out of your digital advertising budget.