TikTok has a special chance for influencer marketing because of its vast and highly engaged user base. Brands need to have access to data and insights that can assist them in launching campaigns that are genuinely effective if they are to succeed on this platform.
TikTok was a specialized platform in 2019 with only 8.7% of smartphone users in the UK using it.
According to Statista’s assessment of the UK population with online access, just five years later, in 2024, over half the UK’s online population utilizes the app. The app is very well-liked by younger audiences; 76% of online 18 to 24 year olds use it. However, older generations are also utilizing the app: over 50% of people 35 to 54 years old and 63% of people 25 to 34 years old both use it.
TikTok is a very interesting website. An typical UK user logs on to the platform for roughly 49 hours a month, or 1.5 hours every day. That is more than twice as long as users spend on Instagram every month. Users on TikTok are also more inclined to engage with the content. Surprisingly, its median engagement rate is 6 times greater than Instagram’s at 2.6%.
Additionally, as the platform has become more popular, user trust has increased, offering businesses a fantastic chance. In fact, confidence has grown so much that 52% of individuals who use TikTok weekly are interested in shopping over the site.
If firms use influencer marketing wisely, TikTok provides a useful way to boost exposure and revenue.
Data-driven marketing is a trend that shows no signs of slowing. And with data more readily available than ever, brands that fail to leverage it risk falling behind.
These are the benefits of analytics for brands:
1. Hiring the Right Influencer
With poor data, brands could end up working with influencers who lack real power. A brand may hire an influencer who commands high rates, has 1M+ followers, and looks like a great fit. However, if they had conducted deeper research, they may have found that the influencer’s followers were primarily bots or disengaged. A brand tracking analytics will quickly realise an influencer isn’t effective and be able to redirect their strategy before any significant losses.
2. Creating Effective Content
To create successful content, brands need a big-picture view of the market, sentiment, and their place within the conversation. Without data, there is a significant risk of producing content the target audience doesn’t connect with. This can lead to wasted resources and potentially harm your brand’s reputation.
3. Reaching the Target Audience
Data is crucial for hitting the right target market in influencer marketing. Marketers sometimes choose influencers based on personal preference rather than data, which can lead to misalignment between the influencer’s audience and the brand’s target market. On the other hand, data-driven insights give marketers a better understanding of the demographics, interests, and engagement patterns of an influencer’s audience.
4. Dominating the Conversation and Going Viral
Brands wanting to benefit from influencer marketing by taking over a large part of the conversation and generating user-generated content (UGC) need a deep understanding of their TikTok performance. In addition, creating viral content requires an understanding of which videos are having the most impact. Using TikTok Analytics, brands can identify trends, measure engagement, and fine-tune their strategies to ensure their content reaches a broad audience, sparks conversations, and encourages users to share their related content.
How to Understand the Anatomy of TikTok Analytics?
It’s essential to develop an overview of TikTok’s analytics. Here’s a breakdown of each page and its features:
Overview
The Overview is the first page you land on. It provides a snapshot of your account’s performance over a selected period, such as a week, month, two months, or a custom date range. Here, you can observe larger trends like the number of overall video views, profile views, likes, and comments over the selected period.
This section helps you quickly assess the overall health of your account and identify any substantial changes.
Content
In the Content section of the TikTok analytics tool, you can learn about the performance of individual videos. It tells you which posts connect with your audience and in what way, providing detailed metrics, including the total likes, views, comments, play time, and followers gained from a specific video. In addition, it tells you the average watch time and how many people watched the entire video. You can also learn how many individual unique viewers the video had.
Additionally, it highlights your trending videos from the past week, helping you understand which content had the fastest surge in views.
Followers
The Followers section of TikTok analytics offers detailed insights into your audience, including key demographics like gender, age, and location. It also tracks the times of day when your followers are most active. This information is invaluable. It helps you to schedule posts to maximise visibility and engagement. You can also learn which sounds and videos are popular with your followers here.
LIVE
The LIVE section provides specific information about live broadcasts. You can see the number of viewers, the total duration of views, and the engagement generated during live sessions. This data helps you evaluate the impact of live content on your audience and identify the most effective times and formats for going live.
How Brands Can Utilize Analytics on TikTok
Although “good dance moves” seem to appeal to all age groups on the app, TikTok has grown into one of the most significant communities for brands to connect with younger demographics. Brands like Abercrombie & Fitch are using the channel as a “billion person focus group” to listen, connect, and create with customers. While there is a lot of potential for any brand, it’s important to know where to start and how to track your progress with TikTok analytics.
Read Also: Monetizing TikTok: How to Convert Views Into Sales With Ecommerce
Let’s look at how you can check, interpret, and experiment with your analytics.
It’s important to start your TikTok analytics journey with a business account. Personal accounts are powerful for individual creators, but business accounts are developed to offer more commercial features for brands and businesses engaging the TikTok community. By switching to a TikTok Business account, you’ll gain access to valuable analytics and insights that can inform your content strategy, optimize your performance, and help you connect with your target audience more effectively.
It’s important to start your TikTok analytics journey with a business account. Personal accounts are powerful for individual creators, but business accounts are developed to offer more commercial features for brands and businesses engaging the TikTok community. By switching to a TikTok Business account, you’ll gain access to valuable analytics and insights that can inform your content strategy, optimize your performance, and help you connect with your target audience more effectively.
Like any social media platform, there are several metrics and performance indicators available on the app. Here’s how TikTok groups your available insights into account and content performance:
Overview metrics
This is the first section you’ll see when logging in the analytics section. Here, you’ll receive snapshots of key metrics such as follower growth, video views, profile views, likes, comments, and share with options to update time frame and download your data.
This is a good place to evaluate performance over time, in particular as you grow your community.
Content metrics
The content section of TikTok analytics offers detailed insights into individual videos. Metrics like total views, likes, comments, shares, average watch time, and traffic sources provide a comprehensive picture of your video performance.
Understanding these metrics allows you to identify your most engaging content and make data-driven decisions for future videos. You’ll also find a trending videos section to help identify surges around particular TikTok content.
Follower metrics
Audience should always be your first consideration in where to go or grow with your account activity. You might discover your followers are mostly from Kenya or even just growing slowly compared to other brand accounts.
The follower section is where you’ll frame an understanding of who engages with your content. This section provides detailed information on total followers and audience demographics, including gender distribution, top countries, top cities, and the most active times when your followers are online. These insights help you tailor your content to resonate with your target audience and optimize your posting schedule for maximum reach.
LIVE metrics
The LIVE tab provides analytics for businesses that host live videos on TikTok. You can track metrics like total views, total time spent hosting live videos, new followers gained during live sessions, and even virtual gifts earned through the Diamond system.
What Can TikTok Analytics Tell You?
TikTok is a powerful content creation tool that benefits from experimentation. Some of the best brands on TikTok are constantly trying new things.
While analytics provide valuable insights, it’s important to consider them as a source of insight rather than strict guidelines. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and take risks. That’s where a thoughtful measurement strategy and regular use of TikTok analytics can teach your brand “how to dance,” so to speak.
Once you have a solid understanding of your TikTok analytics, it’s time to optimize your strategy. Here are a few tips to help you maximize your reach and engagement:
Which content outperforms your average engagement rate
Analyze your content metrics to identify videos that have garnered the highest views, likes, comments, and shares. Look for patterns and themes that resonate with your audience. This will give you valuable insights into the type of content that works best for your brand or logical trending content or conversations that your brand should engage with.
How to refine your posting schedule
Use the data from the “Followers” tab to determine when your audience is most active on TikTok. Schedule your posts during these peak times to increase the likelihood of reaching a larger audience and generating higher engagement. Remember to test because sometimes your highest engagement happens because you’re simply posting, so give yourself time to learn when your audience is active and engaged.
What content formats work better than others
While it’s important to stay true to your brand’s identity, don’t be afraid to try out different video formats and styles. TikTok is known for quick, creative, and engaging content, so experiment with trends, challenges, storytelling techniques, or collaborations with influencers to keep your content fresh and engaging. Analytics can clue you in to what content experiments have legs for long-term usage.
How your audience wants to engage
Pay attention to the comments section of your videos and respond to your audience’s feedback and questions. Engaging with your viewers not only helps build a stronger connection, but also signals to the TikTok algorithm that your content is valuable and worthy of promotion. And you might notice new ways your audience is using TikTok, which should inform your content strategy.
Which trends are meaningful to your brand
TikTok analytics keep you up to date on the latest – and ever-evolving – trends on both TikTok, but also with a highly engaged, digital-first audience. Your brand can stay relevant and incorporate new trends into your content strategy, when relevant. Keep an eye on trending hashtags, influencers, and challenges that are gaining traction. By staying in tune with the TikTok community, you can leverage these trends to create content that resonates with a wider audience.
Summary
TikTok is a unique social media platform where your brand’s reach and engagement may explode with the possibility of going viral. Your brand can get a noteworthy return on investment by coordinating its TikTok approach with appropriate content, tracking pertinent metrics over time, and utilizing these insights to iteratively enhance its campaigns.
Using a TikTok analytics platform like Emplifi Analytics, which can consolidate all of your brand accounts for actionable information and a consistent picture of how TikTok compares with your established brand channels, makes this process much simpler. When it comes to engagement, TikTok frequently beats other platforms, and a lot of marketers publish twice as frequently on TikTok as they do on other platforms like Instagram Reels.
But how to track those insights and adjust your strategy based on that performance?
This is where a unified analytics platform helps. You’ll be able to track your strategy across channels, share insights, and iterate strategies based on what each social account tells you about your target audience.
