The Complete Guide to TikTok Analytics

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What is TikTok analytics?

TikTok analytics refers to the data collected from content to help content creators and brands track the performance of videos. It includes video metrics, such as views, likes, comments and shares, as well as information about your profile and followers. Along with your creativity, leveraging analytics is key to creating your TikTok marketing strategy.

Why are TikTok analytics important for your business?

You’re probably familiar with the experience of balancing social media trends while growing your brand’s following and engagement. Managing social’s fast-paced nature can be tough, especially if you have limited resources. Using TikTok for business analytics is a must because it helps you keep up with trends, but it also requires you to dive deeper to differentiate your audience and identify their specific behaviors and preferences.

Here’s some of our other top reasons using TikTok analytics for business is so important:

1: Create a data-driven content strategy

TikTok analytics will help you create a data-driven TikTok marketing strategy by pinpointing your most engaging videos and uncovering information about your audience, like when they are the most active and their location.

The insights you receive can inform your content topics, best posting times, potential content creators and influencers to collaborate with, relevant trends and more.

2: Connect with your target audience

The community-oriented nature of TikTok allows brands to cater to their niche and target audience. TikTok analytics gives you the insights needed to create content that resonates and engages your target audience. And, if done correctly, you can optimize your strategy for conversion as well.

For example, you can view hashtags to determine relevant trends or to inspire TikTok challenges and campaigns.

3. Prove return on investment

TikTok analytics can provide the evidence you need to prove your return on investment. And if you’re able to create a compelling data story, it’ll be easier to justify a need for more resources for your campaigns.

How to access native TikTok analytics

Like other social media apps, TikTok offers native analytics. Here’s how to access TikTok analytics via mobile and desktop.

How to access TikTok analytics from mobile

1. Tap the profile icon in the bottom right-hand corner.
2. Tap the three vertical lines in the top right corner and click Creator Tools.
3. Tap Analytics.

How to access TikTok analytics from desktop

1. Log into your account by going to TikTok.com. (You can also go to tiktok.com/analytics if you are already logged in).
2. Hover over your profile icon, then select View Analytics.
3. On the TikTok homepage, hover over your profile icon and select Business Suite.

4. This will take you directly to the Analytics section of your account.

TikTok insights and metrics to monitor

Here’s a breakdown of what’s available in native TikTok analytics:

TikTok Account overview

TikTok has four primary analytics sections: overview, content, followers and LIVE. Within each of those categories are sub-categories of analytics.

Video views

This area shows you a bar graph of how many views your videos have received in the last seven days. You can also view video engagement for the last 28 days, 60 days or set a custom date range to get a better understanding of your growth, and any fluctuations or trends.

Profile views

This section reveals the number of profile views over your desired date range (last seven, last 28, last 60 days or a custom date range), which can help you identify the type of content that’s driving people to your profile.

The overview tab also shows you:

• The number of likes, comments and shares for each video
• The number of comments you’ve received
• The number of videos you’ve shared

TikTok follower analytics

The third tab in your TikTok analytics is all about your follower stats. Seeing exact followers on TikTok and in-depth information about audience demographics is always helpful to ensure your content is resonating with your target audience and supporting follower growth.

Followers

This area tells you the total number of accounts that follow you along with your net followers. Net followers show the number of new followers minus the number of unfollows in the last 7 days.

Growth rate

This tells you the number of followers you gained or dropped against the previous date range.

Gender

A basic pie chart with the percentage of your followers by gender.

Age demographics

This section breaks down your followers by age group.

Top countries and cities

This section highlights the top five countries and cities your followers are located.

Most active times

This part of TikTok analytics shows the average times your followers are active. You can view these times by hours and days. Ideally, you’ll want to post your content before daily user activity peaks.

Using this information strategically will help you determine the best times to post on TikTok to reach the most followers. Pay attention to the tallest bars in the graph to see when most of your followers are online, then base your TikTok posting schedule around that.

TikTok content analytics

The next tab in your TikTok analytics is the content tab. This section shows more specific information about the actual TikTok content you’re publishing, including your most viewed video. All content metrics are available for the previous seven days only.

The content tab also shows you some of the same information you can see in the overview—total likes, comments and shares.

Video posts

Here you’ll see views at a glance for the last nine videos that you posted in the last seven days. You’ll also get a glimpse into whether you stayed on par with your post frequency from the previous period, or if you posted more or less content.

Trending videos

This section shows the top nine videos with the fastest growth in view numbers over the past seven days.

Video views by section

In this section, you’re able to see how people found your video, whether it was from your profile or if it appeared on their For You feed.

Video views by region

This section gives you insight into the region your video reached and where viewers are from so that you can see exactly where your content performs best.

Average watch time

This is the average length of time people watched your videos—a good indicator of whether your videos are engaging to audiences. You will also see how often users stayed until the end to watch your entire video.

Total play time

This is the cumulative watch time for all users who viewed your video, a helpful metric for comparing the performance of your videos.

TikTok LIVE analytics

If you click on the TikTok LIVE tab, you will be taken to the LIVE Center. If you’ve hosted live videos in the past 28 days or week, in LIVE Center you’ll be able to see insights such as:

• Total views: The number of viewers for your live videos within your selected date range.
• Total time: The time you’ve spent hosting live videos within your selected date range.
• New followers: TikTok users who began following you while you were hosting a live video within your selected date range.
• Top viewer count: The highest number of live video viewers at one specific time within your selected date range.
• Unique viewers: Viewers who watched your live video at least once (even if a viewer replays your video, they are counted only once).
• Diamonds: Virtual gifts that users may send you—you can exchange these for money through TikTok.
• Viewer ranking: The viewers with the highest gift count and watch time.

Also, consider checking out the LIVE Academy to learn tips and tricks for livestreaming on TikTok.

Viewing TikTok analytics with Sprout Social

Leveraging TikTok native analytics can improve your content strategy, but you will uncover even more insights by analyzing data in a tool like Sprout Social.

Sprout’s automated, presentation-ready reports take the manual work out of reporting, and make it easier to compare your performance on TikTok to your other networks. Sprout’s TikTok integration helps you:

• Compare your results over time: While TikTok’s native reporting shows you metrics over the past 60 days, we’ll keep all of your historical TikTok data once it’s connected to Sprout. This enables you to view month-over-month or year-over-year comparisons to track how your videos perform over time.
• Measure everything in one view: Evaluate all of your TikTok-specific metrics in one view with a dedicated TikTok Profiles Report.
• See how TikTok compares across social networks: Want to see how TikTok performs against similar content (e.g. Instagram)? Look at your post performance across networks in the same report automatically.

Use TikTok analytics to grow your business

Now that you know how to navigate TikTok’s analytics dashboard, you’ll need to make sure you’re keeping an eye on the rest of your social media as well. It can be challenging and time-consuming to combine data from multiple native analytics reports across every social platform. Add in the task of keeping up with trends on top of making creative content and you’ve add a lot more responsibility to your plate.

That’s where Sprout Social comes in—our social media management tool can help you keep track not just of TikTok, but other networks too like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Our platform’s deep analytics and automation will save you time, so you can have more space to be creative and experiment.

Keep up with what consumers most want out of short-form video with our TikTok integration.