Your Guide to Understanding and Navigating TikTok Analytics

TikTok is THE social media platform at the moment. As we’ve seen, every social media platform has a period of time where it’s at the peak of its popularity and, as of right now, that top spot belongs to TikTok. Whether you’re a content creator that wants to get a bigger following or a brand working on its marketing, having an account on this video platform is a must.

If you’re just starting out on TikTok, you might be wondering what the best way to measure your success is. There are many different metrics to analyze – from follower count to views, likes, and shares. However, the fact of the matter is that those “key insights” you immediately see are only surface-level. The real TikTok analytics go way deeper and allow you to measure your growth from week to week, see total video playtime, and gather more in-depth information about your audience.

Even though the platform has over 1 billion active accounts, the reality is that reaching a large audience is getting more and more challenging. By leveraging the data and insight you get from your TikTok analytics, you can make your account more popular and gaina higher view-count on your videos. If your brand is new to the platform, it will be harder for you to get exact numbers on some types of data, and you will have to do some guesswork until you figure out your TikTok strategy. However, knowing and understanding your TikTok statistics will be key for you moving forward.

Who Can Access TikTok Analytics?

The first and perhaps one of the most important questions to ask is: who can view TikTok analytics? The good news is that anyone can, as long as he or she has a business account on the platform. According to TikTok, business accounts get access to “creative tools that empower businesses to think like marketers and act like creators.” Sounds fantastic, right? What’s more, it’s completely free! You can set up your account on the platform as a business from the start, or you can make the switch at any time later on

Categories of TikTok Analytics

TikTok analytics can be separated into four distinct categories: Overview, LIVE, Followers, and Content. Let’s take a deeper look at each of them:

Overview Analytics

In the Overview tab, you can see all the analytics from last week, month, or multiple months – you even have the option to choose a custom date, which is super useful if you’re doing a campaign and you only want to see the results you’re getting from that specific source. This is your go-to place when you want to take a more general look at how your account is doing and what kind of results it’s currently achieving on all fronts.

Content Analytics

In this tab, you can see your most popular videos within a selected time range. It also gives you detailed information about your latest posts, including vital metrics such as likes, comments, views, and shares. As you can tell by the name, it’s the place to go if you want to see how a particular video is performing and whether it’s meeting your reach goals.

Follower Analytics

The Follower tab contains information about your followers (naturally). It gives you a long list of important data, such as your audience’s gender, location, age, and more. The follower analytics tab can become your best friend for evaluating your target audience, seeing what kind of demographic is responding to your content, and aligning your marketing strategy to be even more suitable for your viewers.

LIVE Analytics

You can only access live analytics if you actually do live videos on the platforms. This tab provides you with information for the last live videos you hosted, including how much time you’ve spent on live, how many diamonds you’ve earned, and how your follower count has progressed over that period.

Understanding TikTok Analytics

Now that we’ve had a brief overview of what each of the analytics tabs shows, let’s take an even deeper dive into how to check analytics on TikTok, what each metric represents, and why it might be important for you to track its progress over time.

Overview Tab

When you open the Overview tab, you get an instant look into the following metrics:

• Video views: This shows the total number of times your videos were viewed over a particular period of time.
• Profile views: This shows how many people viewed your profile over the course of a selected period. This metric gives you one way to measure interest in your brand, as it shows how many people liked your content enough to want to go ahead and check out the entire profile and your other videos.
• Likes: This shows the number of times your videos were liked in a selected period of time.
• Comments: This shows how many comments your content got in a selected period of time.
• Shares: This shows the number of shares your videos got over a particular date range.
• Followers: This shows the total number of people that follow you on TikTok and how that has changed over a period of time.
• Content: This shows how many videos you’ve posted in a selected date range.
• LIVE: This gives you the number of times you’ve gone on LIVE during a particular period of time.

All in all, you can think of the Overview tab as the main source of analytics for your account. It shows you its key metrics and allows you to quickly analyze how things have been going recently.

Content Tab

The content tab enables you to see the metric for individual videos and thus measure their performance. You can see the following:

• Trending videos: This shows your top nine videos that have gotten the most views over the past week.
• Total video views: This shows the number of times an individual video has been viewed.
• Total likes: This shows the number of likes a piece of content has gotten.
• The number of comments: This shows how many individual comments a video has received overall.
• Average watch time: This shows the average amount of time viewers spend on your content. It shows you just how successful your content is at maintaining the attention of the audience.
• Total play time: This shows the total amount of time people have spent watching your video. Looking at this metric for only one video doesn’t really give you enough information, so you should compare the performance of other posts to measure your account’s average playtime.

Followers Analytics

How do you see who viewed your TikTok? The Followers tab! This sections helps you gain insight into your audience. It shows you not only demographic stats such as gender, age, and location, but also your followers’ interests, which can help you gather inspiration for your next posts and even a future campaign. When you open this tab on any device, you will see the following categories:

• Gender: Here, you can see the percentage of your followers of each gender. If you’re happy with what you’re seeing, you can continue posting the same kind of content.
• Top territories: This shows you where your followers are from, ranked by country. That information can be valuable if you’re looking to make local content and start localized promotions. Pro tip: you will get at least five countries listed.
• Follower activity: You can see the days and times of the day when your followers are most active on the platforms. If you notice that activity is always high at particular intervals, you should prioritize posting at those times.
• Videos your followers watched: In this section, you will see what kind of content is popular with your followers. It’s a good place to look at when you lack inspiration and want to create new content. It’s also where you can find potential content creators to collaborate with.
• Sounds your followers listened to: TikTok trends are often associated with audio tracks. This section allows you to see which sounds are currently popular with your followers. Trends tend to come and go on TikTok quickly, and this “metric” can help you keep track of them and create content that gets a ton of views.

If you’re looking to get more followers and grow your audience, try creating content that’s not as niche and has more universal appeal. If you don’t want to take that route, you can consider including influencers in your marketing plan, as that can give you exposure to new audiences and different communities. The Followers panel is where you can find what your current demographic is like, and that way, you can evaluate how to go about broadening it.

LIVE Metrics

Some brands and content creators love to do live videos as a way to interact with the audience and gather attention. The good thing is that TikTok measures how effective this type of content is and provides you with a series of metrics on its analytics tab. These include:

• Total views: This shows how many viewers were present during all your live videos in a selected date range.
• Total time: This shows how much time you’ve spent on live videos during a particular period of time.
• New followers: This indicates how many followers you’ve gained while hosting a live video.
• Top viewer count: You can see how many users viewed your live video at one time.
• Unique viewers: This metric shows the number of people who watched a live video at least once.
• Diamonds: When you go live on TikTok, you enable viewers to give you virtual gifts that can be exchanged for money. This stat shows how many gifts you’ve managed to receive.

By looking at these metrics, you can evaluate whether going live is worth it for your account or not. These metrics provide you with a comprehensive overview of your content and show you if it’s effective at helping you develop your brand on the platform.

Other Important TikTok Analytics

Along with these main tabs that provide you with key insight into your TikTok account, there are a few other metrics that you can use for your analysis:

Hashtag Views

Did you know you can see how often a post containing a certain hashtag has been viewed? You can search for the hashtag in the “Discovery” tab to see this data. From there, you will see an overview of the search results at the top of the screen, and then you can see the number of views, other related hashtags, and some of the top videos that have used this hashtag.

Total Likes

On your TikTok profile, you can also see the total number of likes you’ve managed to gather on all the videos you’ve ever posted. This metric can help you determine the average engagement you receive. Watch and note this number each week to watch your progress!

TikTok Engagement Rate

There are many ways to calculate your engagement rates on social media, and TikTok isn’t any different from other platforms in that regard. Marketers use two formulas to calculate it:

• ((Number of likes + Number of comments) / Number of Followers)) *100
• ((Number of likes + Number of comments + Number of shares) / (Number of followers) *100

Since like and comment metrics are visible on TikTok, you can easily compare them to the kinds you get on your other social media accounts. You can also look for influencers’ engagement rates before deciding to hire them to promote your business.

Average Engagement Estimate

If you want to get an estimate of an account’s average engagement, you can do the following:

• Go to a profile, and click on “Likes” to get the total.
• Count the number of videos posted.
• Divide the likes by the number of videos.
• Divide this number by the total number of followers the account has.
• Multiply by 100.

You need to consider that most engagement rate formulas don’t only include likes but also comments, so it’s not a good idea to compare the results you get with our formula to those received from another. We like to skip counting comments because counting comments is more time-consuming, and this formula gives you a quicker way to compare accounts. Plus, not all comments are valid (there are spam bots out there).

How to Use TikTok Analytics to Expand the Reach of Your Brand

TikTok doesn’t give you all of that insight for no reason! The main reason you can access all of this data is to help you understand your audience better and to help you find ways to grow your followers. The more videos you share, the more analytics you will see, and you will see not only how your overall content is performing but what kind of videos work better than others – that way, you can make adjustments as you go and save time not creating videos that won’t gain attention.

If you use TikTok follower analytics correctly, you can

• Narrow down and discover new content topics
• Learn the best times to post
• Understand what makes your followers engage with you
• Determine which influencers to work with to promote your brand
• See whether all your efforts are paying off and feel encouraged to keep creating

Use TikTok to Grow Your Business

You should hopefully have a better grasp of how to use TikTok analytics and have learned some ways to improve your overall marketing strategy. Refer back to this article as you’re investigating your analytics dashboard! But remember, that’s not the only thing you need to keep an eye on. While growing your TikTok, keep an eye on all the other social media platforms you use is just as crucial. However, we know It can be time-consuming and even challenging to combine that data and use it purposefully, but it’s worth the effort. This is where you should consider getting an app that helps you manage your social media profiles, which makes your job a lot easier.

Over time, as you monitor your engagement on different platforms, you can make an informed decision on which ones to keep and focus on. That way, your efforts will be more streamlined and will help you get better results.

If you want to learn more about growing your brand on social media and for more TikTok tips, make sure to check out our other blog posts and follow Camberlion on all social media platforms for content tips and advice every week!