TikTok, with nearly 5 billion downloads has won the hearts of users in a short period after its launch. So it is easily one of the favorite social platforms for marketers as well to reach their target audience and spread the word about their products and services.
Marketing success on TikTok or any given social media network is not just about going viral overnight or throwing darts in the dark anymore. It’s essential to understand the key metrics of the platform to make the most out of your marketing efforts. With modern software and automation emerging in the world, it has become easier to measure success in a quantifiable way.
Let’s dive straight into finding out how you can measure the success of your marketing campaigns on TikTok and how you can use TikTok marketing analytics to grow your business.
Having a professional account on TikTok provides you access to a vast range of data to help you argue your presence on the platform. This data is available in the form of analytics and insights through which you can track your overall performance and modify your marketing strategies accordingly.
These metrics encompass the overall performance of your profile. They are listed below:
i. Video views – The collective number of times videos on your account have been viewed during a particular period.
ii. Profile views – The number of times your profile was viewed during the given period. This metric helps in measuring users’ interest in your brand. It indicates that people found your videos interesting enough to check out your profile by looking for it.
iii. Likes – The total number of times your posts were liked during the selected period.
iv. Comments – The total number of comments on your videos in the selected duration of time.
v. Shares – The total number of times your videos were shared during a particular period.
vi. Followers – This metric displays the total number of your followers and how the number has changed within the selected duration.
vii. Content Posted – The total number of videos published on your account within that specific period.
viii. LIVE videos – The total number of live stream videos posted on your account within a particular period.
The profile analytics provide collective numbers for all videos posted within a selected duration of time, content analytics provide data for individual posts as well as highlight your top videos that have experienced rapid growth within the last week.
i. Views – The number of views on a video.
ii. Likes – The number of likes on a video.
iii. Comments – The number of comments on a video.
iv. Shares – The number of times a video is shared by other users.
v. Engagement Rate – This is the average engagement on a video. It is calculated by summing up the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks in the video, divided by the number of views multiplied by 100.
vi. Average Watch Time – The average time users spend watching the video.
vii. Completion Rate – The number of times the video is watched towards the end of it i.e. the complete video is watched.
viii. Views by Section – The number of views gained by each section i.e. For You Page, Following Feed, search bar, videos, sounds, and hashtags.
ix. Views by Region – The locations of the viewers on a video. This metric is especially helpful in tracking whether a particular campaign reached the intended demographic of viewers or no
TikTok followers analytics provide valuable information about your audiences such as their demographics, activity patterns, and times of the day they are the most active on the app.
i. Number of Followers – The current number of your total followers.
ii. Net Followers – the number of followers gained and lost during a selected period.
iii. Gender Ratio – A division of genders in your audience.
iv. Country Breakdown – Categorization of audience based on the countries they come from. This is termed as “Top Territories” on TikTok and helps create localized marketing campaigns.
v. Activity Patterns – The times your audience is most active on TikTok, the videos and audios they watch and interact with. This data provides valuable insights about the best times to post content on TikTok to enhance your engagement rates.
TikTok provides separate analytics for livestream videos. These include information about your live videos within the last 7 days or the last month.
i. Number of Videos – The total number of live videos you did within the selected duration of time.
ii. Total View Count – The total number of viewers present in the live videos you did in the given period.
iii. Total Time – The total time you spent streaming live videos on TikTok within a particular period.
iv. New Followers – The number of new followers acquired through live videos in that specific duration.
v. Highest View Count – The highest number of viewers reached on a video at any moment within the given time.
vii. Unique Viewers – The number of distinct individuals who have watched your live videos at least once (despite how many times they replay the video, they are counted as a single viewer) in the selected time duration.
viii. Diamonds – The number of Diamonds earned during live videos within a specific period. During live videos, TikTok users can gift “Diamonds” to creators virtually. These diamonds can be exchanged for real money on TikTok.
Now that you are well aware of the key metrics to determine success on TikTok, let’s move on to understand how to analyze the data and insights. Given the complex algorithm and content delivery mechanisms of TikTok, it’s hard to just estimate the impact of a marketing campaign. Measuring and analyzing the success of your marketing efforts will help you optimize your content strategies and achieve better results for your marketing endeavors on TikTok.
Let’s learn how to measure TikTok's success!
When devising a marketing strategy for TikTok, you start with some objectives in mind to achieve. These could be anything from building brand awareness and engagement rates, generating leads, and boosting sales to driving traffic to your website. To track the milestones for each objective, it’s essential to identify the metrics related to it.
For example, if you are aiming for high engagement rates, you’d track relevant metrics which include the number of views, likes, comments, and completion rate for your videos.
By going through your follower analytics, you get valuable insights about your followers' demographics (age, gender, location) and activity patterns on the app. This data helps you identify whether your content is tailored to your audience’s needs.
Furthermore, it can be used to get to know and understand your audience better in terms of their likes and dislikes, behavioral patterns, pain points, interests, preferences, and expectations from the brand. This helps refine your buyer’s persona and craft content that resonates with them to encourage engagement on your content and drive action.
The analytics about your content can be used to compare the individual performance of each post. It’s a great way to pinpoint what sort of videos your audience prefers and show the most engagement. So you can create more similar content to drive user engagement and interactivity on your content.
This also enables you to identify what your audience is developing interest in if you are planning to experiment with something new on your profile. Comparing your videos with each other in terms of their performance is a great way to find out what works for you and your audience best. Doing this often will help you in generating new content ideas for your future videos.
Depending on how users interact with your videos, you can derive what they expect from your brand. Observe common discussions and themes going on around your brand by going through comments under your posts. Apart from that, follow relevant hashtags to get feedback about your brand.
All of these interactions can be used to modify your content strategies, work on user feedback, and get new concepts for future videos on TikTok.
The beauty of TikTok lies in its diverse video formats and the creative freedom it offers to every individual on the platform. Having a professional account on TikTok opens up a whole new world of possibilities through data analytics. It provides you room for experimenting with multiple video formats such as dance, how-tos, lipsync, ASMR, duets, stitches, trending audio, or challenges.
Through content analytics, you can know what sort of videos are liked by your viewers the most. The videos with higher engagement are an indication of the kind of content your audience expects from you so you can include more of it in your overall content strategy.
Hashtags are also an effective means to track the performance of a particular series or campaign running on TikTok. The more popular the hashtags, the better the results. Branded hashtags and challenges are a great way to encourage user-generated content grouped under one umbrella. This makes it more convenient to track the overall performance.
Moreover, staying updated with trending hashtags is a great way to come up with new ideas for branded hashtags and challenges to include in your content marketing strategy.
Conducting a thorough analysis of your insights now and then is critical to achieving success on TikTok. Make it a habit to go through your analytics section regularly to keep track of your overall performance.
Doing this will allow you to identify your audience’s content preferences and any loopholes in your marketing strategy. This way you can work on improving and modifying your strategies more efficiently as compared to making assumptions out of nowhere.
In light of the analytics and insights, measuring the impact of your marketing success alone is just not enough. It’s essential to make data-driven decisions that contribute to your long-term success. Here are a few TikTok marketing best practices to help you optimize your overall content strategy.
TikTok is where new trends are born every other day and users love jumping on the bandwagon. As a brand, it’s highly critical to stay updated with recent trends and challenges to make the most of TikTok marketing. Incorporate the relevant ones that align with your brand values into your content marketing strategy to embrace the custom of TikTok and grow exponentially.
TikTok is all about encouraging and driving engagement. It’s not just about creating visually aesthetic content. It’s about creating content that inspires and sparks action in the audience. Even if you are a marketer, you are supposed to create content around your brand that seems rightfully authentic. It doesn’t have to be sales or imposing on the viewers to make the purchase. A simple fun video can do the job well and intrigue the audience to find out more about your brand.
A platform like TikTok predominantly thrives on user engagement. It’s equally imperative for brands and creators to keep their audience hooked to their content. The algorithm is also constantly working to deliver highly personalized content to each user on the app. So the more your content is tailored to your audience’s interests, the higher the chances of the algorithm pushing it.
This is not just a proven way to maximize the reach and visibility of your content. It also helps you reach the right people, the ones who will truly appreciate your brand.
Apart from tracking your performance, it’s also necessary to make yourself aware of what other TikTok marketing companies working within your industry or niche are up to. Go through their profiles and observe what sort of content they are posting and how their audience is interacting with it.
Furthermore, search for relevant keywords and hashtags and analyze what you find in the results. What kind of content gets the most user engagement and how is it structured? See how your content will fit in there and where it stands. Study user engagement patterns and tailor your content to their liking accordingly.
No matter how you choose to keep your audience engaged, the most important part is to trust and enjoy the process as you go about it. The platform is still evolving and there are updates every other day. As much as it is essential to stay updated about trends and innovations, there is no need to hesitate to make mistakes. Take your time to learn from them and experiment until you figure something substantial out of it.
The journey to success on TikTok is certainly not an easy one, but it’s worth it! There is no one-size-fits-all answer to what is going to work for you and your audience. It’s something you are going to unscramble over time. Your analytics and insights are going to help you significantly in unraveling the secrets to making it big on TikTok. Instead of making assumptions in the dark, focus on making data-driven decisions and you will notice the difference in your outcomes!
