TikTok's primary features accurately reflect today’s social media users’ preferences. It mainly publishes short-form videos, is predominantly mobile-based, and uses a unique algorithm to keep users engaged.
TikTok offers exceptional value for brands. As an advertising platform, it’s typically cheaper than the likes of Meta (Facebook and Instagram). Furthermore, TikTok ads are reported to reach more than 1.5 billion adult users each month.
Even organic content has the propensity to reach millions of people on TikTok. You don’t need a large account to go viral.
The key to maximising your chances is to gain a deeper understanding of TikTok metrics and analytics. Monitoring the numbers behind your content and interpreting what they mean can help you improve consistently.
In this article, we explore the engrossing world of TikTok metrics. By the end, you will have a better understanding of the app's analytical side, which will empower you to boost content performance and drive new customers to your business.
Let’s dig in.
- TikTok analytics overview
- Why your business should use TikTok analytics
- How to access your TikTok analytics
- Key TikTok metrics to monitor
TikTok analytics overview
The topic of analytics is a daunting one for many marketers.
Social media trends are constantly changing and so too are the algorithms that power them. What’s relevant today could be obsolete tomorrow. At the surface level, dealing with data and interpreting content performance can easily become overwhelming.
However, with a good marketing strategy, you can gain experience, and use the complexities of TikTok metrics to your advantage. With time, you’ll find that certain patterns and analytical trends don’t actually change too much. By staying consistent, you can leverage metrics that make a genuine impact on your business.
Why your business should use TikTok analytics
If marketers had it their way, every TikTok post would land perfectly, hitting their audience on the money, and gaining viral status. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality of social media. Sometimes, content falls flat.
Furthermore, running multiple social media accounts can be time-consuming, especially for businesses with limited resources. If this is the case, then why would social media managers spend even more time on analytics, like TikTok metrics?
Here’s the thing, investing in analytics the right way can pay back significantly.
If you remain data-driven consistently, your content performance will reap the rewards. Plus, you can look to management tools to optimise social media while maintaining tie efficiency.
If you’re still deliberating about whether you should use TikTok metrics, here are some more benefits.
To determine what’s working (and what isn’t)
TikTok is known as a platform from which you can easily go viral. Some accounts with a couple of hundred followers have videos with millions of views.
While all of the above is true, it gives marketers a false sense of TikTok and what content works. For every random faceless account with a viral video, there are thousands, if not millions more that have little to no views and engagement.
Just like with the rest of your digital marketing efforts, your approach to TikTok should be strategic. Metrics and analytics allow this.
With TikTok metrics, you can quickly identify what videos best resonate with your audience and what content is helping you reach your overall goals. Remember, views aren’t the be-all and end-all. An entertaining video can reach millions but if this doesn’t result in new customers, leads, or sales, do these views have real value? Probably not.
TikTok metrics can provide key insights such as:
- Impactful topics
- Content to avoid
- Demographic information
- Target market’s most active periods
- Best posting times
Paying attention to the numbers removes the guesswork, giving you more confidence and assuredness when you post.
Reach your target audience
In its early years, TikTok was widely regarded as a Gen-Z app with no real relevance to other demographics.
This may have been the case several years ago. However, today, TikTok user demographics paint a very different picture. Gen-Z represents the biggest audience, but it’s a relatively even playing field.
Source: Exploding Topics
Most importantly, close to 65% of its users are aged between 20 and 49. This age group represents the most valuable digital audience in terms of spending power and likelihood of making online purchases.
What’s more, TikTok has an advertisement conversion rate of around 1.1%, which makes it comparatively strong against other popular social networks, including Instagram and Twitter.
Source: Exploding Topics
TikTok’s flexibility means you can tailor your content to your target audience. From here, use analytics to gain the insights you need to consistently meet their needs and eventually, convert them (or hit your other goals).
With a more informed strategy and content creation process, you’ll have more freedom to take chances with experimental videos or engage in challenges and trends.
Prove strategy effectiveness
Whether you work as an in-house social media manager or juggle multiple clients independently, proving the value of social media can be difficult.
Since many brands use social media to increase awareness, develop a community, and gain trust with their audience, success can be hard to quantify. However, when you dig into the analytics, you’ll find that TikTok has plenty of useful metrics that can align with all types of goals.
If you have more traditional goals, like generating leads or sales, it’s even easier to put together insightful reports. TikTok analytics allow you to prove strategy effectiveness and return on investment in social media campaigns. This is extremely useful when presenting to stakeholders and clients.
Learn from your mistakes
When you’re data-driven, all mistakes can be rectified as learnings. After all, you can’t go viral with every video.
If a piece of content doesn’t give you the desired outcome, take a look at the analytics and identify the determining factors. Make a note of what caused the video to fail and use this knowledge to improve your strategy going forward.
How to access your TikTok analytics
Like with other social media networks, TikTok allows you to access your analytics directly on the app. Fortunately, it’s a quick and easy process. Below, we take you through the steps for mobile and desktop.
Accessing TikTok analytics on mobile
- Step 1: Look for your account’s profile icon on the bottom right corner of the screen. Push it.
- Step 2: Hit the button with the three vertical lines in the top right-hand corner.
- Step 3: Push “Creator Tools”.
- Step 4: Hit “Analytics”.
- Step 5: Explore the data and gain insights.
Note: The specific directions can vary between Apple and Android apps and may change with updates. If you’re struggling to find the analytics, simply Google search how to access them for the specific model of your phone.
Accessing TikTok analytics on a desktop
- Step 1: Log into your account via TikTok.com.
- Step 2: Hover your mouse over your account’s profile icon, then click “View Analytics”. Or, hover over your account’s profile and click “Business Suite”. This also takes you to the analytics page.
ProTip: While it’s useful to use the app to access analytics if you want to take a quick look, it’s not always efficient.
For example, if you have multiple social media apps or manage several clients, you’ll need to manually log in and out of each account for each client to find information.
Having a social media management tool with a universal dashboard allows you to access multiple platforms from multiple clients in one place.
Furthermore, TikTok only allows you to download seven-day reports. If you want access to more in-depth analytics over longer periods, you’ll need a social media management tool, like Sendible.
Coming soon to Sendible: TikTok Reporting!
We're working and tweaking behind the scenes to launch TikTok Reporting in Sendible 🚀. Giving you the insights you need to measure your TikTok success. Soon, you'll be able to track performance, engagement, and growth—all from one place.
Key TikTok metrics to monitor
Most marketers will be familiar with standard TikTok metrics, such as likes, shares, and comments. But, these barely scratch the surface of what the app is capable of.
With TikTok, you can dig deeper and get details on the growth of your channel over various periods. You may also analyse content performance by playtime, follower activities, and engagements.
One convenient element of TikTok’s analytics setup is that it’s divided into segments. This makes it easier to decompartmentalise the data and work through it logically. Let’s go through the most important categories and identify the metrics you will find in each one.
#1 Overview
The first subset of analytics you’ll come across is the Overview. As the name suggests, it provides a broad look at your channel’s performance.
From a quick glance, you’ll be able to see how your content is doing. It’s important to keep an eye on the overview section to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Scrolling through this tab, you can view important TikTok metrics, such as:
- Followers: Your overall follower count is available on the profile page, but in the Overview section, you can use a filter to see how many new followers you gained during a specific period.
- Likes: Access Likes for your Tiktoks (you may also filter the information for a specific period).
- Shares: View how many shares your videos have.
- Comments: Check the number of comments you have on your videos.
- Video views: Note how many times your TIkToks have been watched.
- Profile views: See how many times TikTok users viewed your profile.
This information alone provides tremendous insight into the overall performance of your channel. You can easily spot what’s working and what isn’t.
#2 Content
The next section is the Content tab. Here, you’ll find more details on your actual content. Some of the data from the Overview tab is repeated here, such as likes, comments, shares, etc. It’s worth noting that you’ll only see analytics from the past seven days here so don’t leave it too long to check your Content tab.
A useful feature of this section is that it shows you how your content performed compared to the previous seven days. You can also take a look at the Trending Videos section to see what TikToks were most popular in the past week.
Other key TikTok metrics in the Content section include:
- Average watch time: This is a critical metric that gives you the average time spent watching your videos. Use this data to determine what length videos work best for your audience.
- Total play time: The total amount of time spent watching your videos.
- Video posts: The number of videos you shared in the previous seven days compared to the week before.
- Video views by section: This shows you where your video viewers are coming from—for example, the For You page (FYP), hashtags, audio, or searches.
- Video views by region: You’ll find important information on the regions your viewers are from, providing insights into where your content is best received.
#3 Followers
As you might expect, the Followers section gives you information on the demographics of your audience. Knowing who is actually following you goes a long way in determining what type of content to create.
Important TikTok metrics in the Followers section include:
- Growth rate: The number of new followers (or lost followers) during a specific range.
- Gender: Breakdown of the gender profile of your followers by percentage.
- Top countries and cities: The top five countries and cities where your followers are located.
- Most active times: The times of day that your followers are active, displayed by hours and days.
- Videos watched by followers: List of videos watched by your followers.
- Audio listened to by followers: Popular audios among your audience.
It’s essential to distinguish between Content and Followers analytics. Content shows you information on who’s watching your videos, while Followers provides data on your actual followers. You may find that your content isn’t gaining much traction from your followers, which is a useful insight for curating future posts.
One of the key metrics in this section is “Most active times”. Use this information to determine when your content should be posted. An efficient way to make sure your videos upload at the right times is to use a scheduling tool.
It’s also useful to see what videos your followers are watching and what audio bytes they enjoy. This can help you create more appealing content in the future.
Pro Tip: If you want to read more about optimal posting times on TikTok, check out this article: When Is the Best Time to Post on TikTok in 2024?
#4 LIVE
The final tab in the analytics section is for TikTok Lives.
Accounts with one thousand or more followers have access to this feature. If you don’t plan on using the LIVE centre, this section doesn’t apply to you. If you do, you can find all the metrics you could want on your live sessions from the past week (or up to 28 days), such as:
- Total views: Number of users who viewed your live sessions during a selected period.
- Total time: Number of hours spent hosting TikTok lives during a selected period.
- Top viewer count: Peak live video viewers during a selected period.
- Unique viewers: Number of users who watched your live sessions at least once (rather than the total number of viewers).
- New followers: New TikTok followers sourced from live video sessions during a selected period.
- Viewer ranking: List of live video viewers who contributed the most gifts and watch time.
- Diamonds: Virtual gifts received through the live platform. These can be exchanged for money.
Coming soon: How can Sendible help with TikTok metrics and analytics?
TikTok is a powerful marketing tool, made even more effective when you leverage the data it provides. That said, data analysis is cumbersome and time-consuming, especially if you work on multiple channels. To boot, a lot of TikTok’s data only covers the previous seven days.
Fortunately, we at Sendible are working hard on simplifying your reporting on TikTok success. Until our TikTok analytics are released, you can check out our robust Reporting Hub and features that will make tracking of metrics a breeze.
