Bigo Ads Agency Account: Who It Is For and What It Costs

It's an ad account in a Business Center that an agency runs through Bigo's Agency Portal, a tool Bigo gives agencies for managing business centers, ad accounts, balance and members. You can't sign up for it on a form. Bigo tells agencies to contact their sales or account manager.

Three details from that page tell you how the setup works.

• The agency allocates balance to each Business Center, and it can add or take away funds, in cash or coupon.
• Members get invited by email and allocated to a Business Center.
• There are two roles. An Admin has full authority over the Business Center. An Employee can see it but can't edit it, and manages only the ad accounts authorized to them.

So ask which role you'd have, and whether you'd get a login at all. A provider who runs the account for you and one who hands you the keys are selling different things.

Look at where the users are before you look at anything else. Bigo publishes a country table, undated, and it says more than any sales deck.

It's an Android channel, by a wide margin in nearly every row. The table's regions are South Asia, South East Asia, MENA, CIS and the Americas, with Western Europe absent. Bigo's formats are native image, native video and playable ads, and its objectives cover traffic, app installs, website conversions and app engagement.

A word on reach. Bigo's home page says over 600 million daily active users across mobile apps and web platforms. Its Media Kit says nearly 400 million monthly active users, with Likee above 100 million and imo above 200 million. Both are Bigo's own figures, neither has a date we can pin down, and they don't reconcile. Plan from the country you're buying, and ask for a current number for it.

Four lines make up the real cost, and only one of them is a fee.

Put Bigo's own suggestions together and you can price a first test. It recommends 1 campaign with 5 ad groups per country and 2 to 3 ads in each, and $50 a day per new ad group. That's $250 a day per country, or $1,750 for a week, and 10 to 15 ads. A test on one country with one video is telling you very little.

You'll see CPM comparisons for Bigo floating around. CPM moves with the country, the format and the offer, so a number from someone else's campaign won't survive contact with yours. Your own test will tell you more than any benchmark, and the budget above is what that test costs.

Going direct is entirely possible. It's just slower and heavier than most buyers expect, because the process assumes a company with paperwork and a bank account.

Whichever way you go, one rule catches people. The promotion link on your campaign should match the one on the account, otherwise you might not be able to start the campaign. You can add several links to one account, so add them up front.

Campaigns go through manual review by audit teams, normally within 1 working day, covering the store page, URL, headline, primary text, creatives and logo. Working hours differ by area, so a Friday evening upload may wait.

Those rules are the reason a one-size creative fails here. The same ad can pass under the open-country rules and fail in Saudi Arabia. If you're running crypto in India, our breakdown of the disclaimer rules has the wording and the checklist.

Check your own vertical against this table too. On Bigo we group verticals into Standard, such as ecommerce, dropshipping, apps and gaming, lead generation and sweepstakes, and Regulated, such as nutra, dating and iGaming. Crypto, finance and forex are assessed case by case. That's how we sort them for pricing. Bigo's review still has the last word on the ad, and a nutra claim that promises results will fail under the text rules whichever group it's in.

Bigo's own setup advice is decent and short, so start there.

• Start each country with 1 campaign and 5 ad groups, then add campaigns once the account is stable.
• Keep videos and images in separate ad groups.
• Set budget at ad group level unless you need a hard stop. A campaign budget below the sum of its ad groups can starve them.
• Keep audiences broad at first, and avoid state or city limits, which cut volume.
• Remember that language targeting reads the imo or Likee language setting, which may not be the person's mother tongue.
• Bid your expected CPI, or 20% below it. Bids far above the market can overspend the ad group.
• A total budget doesn't control daily spend, and it can go in the first day.

For web campaigns, Bigo suggests the conversion objective with oCPC, and optimizing on shallow events such as a button click or add to cart during the learning phase. Set up the Pixel before you start, since that's how Bigo says to record and evaluate web performance. For deep-funnel optimization on apps, the option stays off until in-app events reach Bigo from your MMP and the app has 20 events in 7 days.

We have a direct agreement with BIGO Ads, so your account doesn't come through a chain of resellers. You work with a manager, because Bigo doesn't run through the Adtucon Platform. They handle setup and top ups with you, and turn Bigo's regional rules into a brief before your creatives go to review. We don't hand you a login and disappear.

Before you pay, tell us the vertical, the countries and your budget, and we'll say whether Bigo makes sense for it. If it doesn't, you'll hear that from us. We don't have a counted delivery time for Bigo, so we won't print one. Ask in chat and you'll get a date.

Bans happen here as on any platform. You'll hear the reason from a person, we'll fix what can be fixed and resubmit with you, and if an account can't come back you get a new one at no charge. Opening an account costs nothing.

Our Bigo Ads accounts page has the verticals and the setup, and the full list puts Bigo next to the other platforms. For fees in general, read what agency accounts cost. TikTok and Snapchat are on our public price list and Bigo isn't, so it stays a message in chat.