TikTok, with its highly engaged and large user base, offers a unique opportunity for influencer marketing. However, to truly succeed on this platform, brands must access data and insights that can help them launch truly effective campaigns.
This article will guide you through the essential aspects of TikTok's analytics, giving you the tools to create a successful and measurable influencer marketing campaign.
In 2019, TikTok was a niche platform, attracting only 8.7% of the UK's smartphone users.
According to Statista's study of the UK population with online access, just five years later, in 2024, over half the UK's online population uses the app. It's highly popular with younger audiences, as 76% of online 18-24-year-olds access the app. Nevertheless, older generations are also engaging, with 63% of 25-34-year-olds and around 50% of 35-54-year-olds also using the app.
TikTok is a highly engaging platform. The average UK user spends approximately 49 hours a month on the platform, which equals 1.5 hours daily. That's over double the time people spend on Instagram each month. TikTok's user base is also more likely to interact with content. Its median engagement rate is 2.6%, a shocking 6x higher than Instagram's.
In addition, user trust has grown with the platform's popularity, creating an excellent opportunity for brands. In fact, confidence has grown so significantly that 52% of those who use TikTok weekly are interested in shopping through the platform.
TikTok offers brands an effective route to increase visibility and sales if they approach influencer marketing correctly.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
TikTok offers businesses a range of metrics and insights. While the platform isn't overly complex, it can take some time to adjust to its features and make the most of the available data.
Here’s a quick guide to setting up TikTok analytics:
It's essential to develop an overview of TikTok's analytics. Here's a breakdown of each page and its features:
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.
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.
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.
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.
To make the most of TikTok's analytics tool, brands must set clear objectives that fit with TikTok's analytics.
First, define clear goals that TikTok's software can track. Do you want to increase brand awareness, reach a wider audience, or boost engagement? Other objectives could include driving website traffic by encouraging viewers to click through to your website or landing pages.
Next, set your goals to a specific date range, for example, "Gain 500 new followers in the next two weeks." These should be realistic objectives and within your reach based on your current performance.
Businesses must have a deep understanding of TikTok's engagement metrics, as these are arguably the most important metrics for influencer marketing.
While reach and impressions tell you how many people have seen your content, engagement metrics show how many people found it compelling enough to make them act. These are the feelings that will grow loyalty, create a community, and increase sales over time.
Engagement metrics include total likes, comments, shares, saves, and the overall engagement rate, which is calculated by dividing the total number of interactions by the number of followers and multiplying by 100.
Here are a few tips for improving engagement on TikTok:
Inspiration and creativity are essential, but new ideas for content can also emerge directly from your followers.
Analysing data from TikTok analytics about your followers' demographics, interests, and engagement patterns helps you tailor your content to meet their preferences and needs. Key metrics to consider are age, gender, location, active hours, and the types of content that generate the most engagement among your followers.
Furthermore, examining follower behaviour can reveal valuable insights into emerging trends and shifts in preferences. Use the Follower tab to learn which sounds and videos your followers enjoy.
Observe the details of these videos: their length, mood, emotional tone, style, and associated trends. This data-driven approach will enhance your performance on TikTok, keep your target market engaged, and prevent you from creating content that misses the mark.
Creating content quickly by hopping on trends is a key strategy for success on TikTok. It also increases the chance of going viral.
The platform's analytics dashboard offers insights into sound trends, popular memes, and emerging content styles, enabling marketers to adapt swiftly and create content that resonates with their audience. By discovering which trends are gaining traction and understanding how your target audience interacts with them, you can ride the wave of viral trends to ensure your content reaches a wider audience.
Once you've identified trending topics and formats, incorporate them into your content planning to maximise reach and engagement. This might involve using popular sounds, participating in viral challenges, or creating meme-inspired content that aligns with your brand's voice. However, make sure you move fast; trends don't tend to stick for long on TikTok.
You can use TikTok's Discover tab and the TikTok Creative Centre to search for trending hashtags, sounds, and creators.
These tools allow you to view the popularity of a hashtag over a set date range, helping you identify which hashtags are most popular in your industry. This can help you view the videos that are connecting most with users in your niche.
While TikTok's analytics are beneficial for brands, they don't offer deep insights. Let's compare TikTok analytics with other tools and platforms.
TikTok analytics are generally quite accurate. However, TikTok data may take time to sync, and it is only updated daily. It is an easy-to-use dashboard that provides a wealth of information, but brands may need more. For example, TikTok doesn't offer insights into influencers or your place in the conversation.
There are a few free tools available for brands on tight budgets. Social Blade offers basic insights into TikTok influencers. In addition, Kolsquare offers a free calculator to help you learn how much a collaboration with an influencer would cost. Check out the KOLculator here.
However, these tools are free, and their capabilities are limited. As a result, brands will need to pay in labour and time if they use these tools to guide campaigns. Brands need to weigh these additional costs against the price of a more extensive tool.
Brands seeking total control and the best performance on TikTok should consider third-party tools. There's no need to pay for a tool right away; shop around, test the software, and discover what's right for you.
Here at Kolsquare, we offer a free demo of our software, which is designed to simplify every stage of your TikTok influencer marketing. Start with a quick search to discover compatible influencers alongside all the data you need, including engagement rates, how trustworthy their audience is, a breakdown of their followers, and more.
Once the campaign is running, you have automatic AI-driven insights just a click away. Discover how your campaign is progressing, who is mentioning your brand, and where you are in the conversations.
Book a demo today and learn how Kolsquare can transform your TikTok marketing strategy.
Any brand can improve its campaign with third-party tools. However, they are most important for brands that have:
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
