The brief
Rewayat is a restaurant group in Islamabad that I run paid social for (the Meta side of 2025–26 is its own case study). TikTok was added in 2025 around the same moments the Meta campaigns were built on: occasions people eat out for, and new venues opening.
What I did
Started with the occasions. The first three campaigns in 2025 were built around Mother’s Day, Eid al-Adha and Independence Day on 14 August. Each ran as its own campaign rather than one always-on campaign.
Gave the big moments their own push. From November 2025 TikTok ran alongside Meta for the bigger rooftop restaurant in the I-8 Markaz building, teased from November 2025 and opened in January 2026, and for the Hunza season, plus a sales campaign in December 2025 and a second Independence Day campaign in August 2026.
Ran the rooftop as a video-views campaign. The rooftop videos were bought on video views, with a second rooftop campaign alongside the first, so the number that mattered was how long people stayed with the video.
Results
Across the nine campaigns Rewayat had 3,656,451 impressions, 1,038,298 two-second views and 444,769 six-second views. In 2025 the three campaigns reached 1,033,889 people at $0.12–0.18 per thousand and sent 5,129 clicks at $0.03 each.
Impressions on TikTok were cheap across the board. Where the campaigns really differed was in how long people watched:
| Campaign | Six-second view rate | Average watch time |
|---|---|---|
| Rooftop video views | 41.7% | 12.1 seconds |
| Rooftop, second campaign | 36.2% | 11.7 seconds |
| Independence Day, 2025 | 29.0% | 10.5 seconds |
| Independence Day, 2026 | 18.0% | 10.9 seconds |
| Hunza season, 2026 | 4.3% | 2.9 seconds |
| Eid al-Adha discount, 2025 | 1.3% | 2.2 seconds |
| Mother’s Day, 2025 | 0.9% | 1.1 seconds |
The Eid and Mother’s Day campaigns bought the cheapest impressions in the 2025 account, at $0.06 per thousand, but almost nobody stayed with them. The rooftop video held four in ten people past six seconds, for twelve seconds on average, and still had the lowest cost per thousand people reached in the 2026 account, at Rs39.50.
In short
On TikTok, cheap impressions are easy. The rooftop and Independence Day videos held people for 10 to 12 seconds; the Eid and Mother’s Day campaigns held them for one or two, and that gap is the number worth building the next brief around.