Tiktok has grown from being a hobbyist app where people share funny videos to a major advertising platform full of businesses promoting their products and services. You can use TikTok to create ads to help potential customers discover your brand and develop a fanbase or community on TikTok. However, you need to pay enough attention to TikTok Ads analytics in order to accurately track the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Measuring analytics when running ads on TikTok helps determine how effective your ads are, optimize spending budgets, and improve underperforming ads. It’s not enough to create and fund advertising campaigns on TikTok. You need to check your ads analytics and know how to measure the impact of your efforts. In this guide, we’ll explore how to understand and analyze TikTok ads and the key metrics to monitor.
What do you need to know about TikTok Ads analytics?
On the TikTok app, it isn’t exactly convenient to view detailed analytics of each video. An influencer can use a pro or business account to unlock some metrics that aren’t readily available to other TikTok accounts. But if you’re a brand that wants to run ads and analyze them, you should sign up on the “TikTok for Business” platform.
The TikTok Business Center allows businesses to manage team members, assets, and finances. You can collaborate with partners, create and share campaign assets, and track video performance metrics. Under it, you can access “TikTok Ads Manager” – a complete set of tools and features for creating, managing, and analyzing ads. Both of these web-based platforms are necessary for performing your TikTok analytics.
If you run ads on TikTok, you need an in-depth analysis of campaign results which includes the stats for individual ads and ad groups as a whole. You can also see insights for specifics like video, audience, and comments. There are native dashboards and reports on the Tiktok Ads Manager to help with the ads analysis. You can also create a custom report on the platform or export your data and visualize it elsewhere.
Benefits of TikTok ads analysis
Running ads is a serious commitment to boosting brand or product awareness. It’s a good idea for your team to focus on analyzing your TikTok campaigns every so often. But you shouldn’t simply check out the top TikTok Ads metrics or reports and call it a day. To discover more, you have to go deeper into your ads analytics. Here’s why:
- Gain valuable insights
At first glance, advertisers want to know how many people are seeing their ads and the exact percentage of those taking action. You need to know if your ad creatives are compelling enough and whether you’re targeting the right audience. If your ads are converting properly, your target audience will be taking actions such as signing up, sending a message, subscribing to an email list, making a purchase, etc. You’d be able to easily fix situations where there may be little to no clicks or interactions with your ads.
- Optimize ad spend
It’s easy to waste money on non-converting ads, especially if you aren’t monitoring the campaign analytics. You need to analyze your TikTok ads data to determine which ads are worth spending on and which ones to edit or stop. The insights allow you to spend your advertising budget efficiently rather than spend too much on certain ads. You won’t make the mistake of funding ad campaigns that aren’t set up for success. This allows you to optimize your bids per conversion and maximize the ROI of each ad.
- Monitor campaign health
You can monitor the health of your TikTok Ads campaigns through metrics. The typical campaign metrics on TikTok Ads Manager include total cost, cost per action (CPA), cost per click (CPC), impressions, click through rate (CTR), clicks, conversions, etc. It’s good to analyze these metrics to understand how each campaign is performing. You can easily identify ads that require more attention and those that need to run for a much longer period. We’ll dive deeper into key TikTok ads metrics in a later chapter.
- Identify customer segments
An ideal audience for a company usually consists of multiple customer avatars. You need to know who you’re actually targeting in each campaign for the best results. When creating a campaign, you’d have to select a goal, an audience, and a budget. For the audience section, you’d choose a specific location, demographics (age & gender), and interests & behaviors, i.e. the kind of content they are interested in and the kind of videos they’ve interacted with. TikTok Ads reporting helps you know if you’re targeting the right audience for your campaign and how well they’re responding to your ads.
- Accurate reporting
It’s necessary to perform analysis in order to power your TikTok Advertising reports. After a certain marketing period, you need to compare the performance of various campaigns and target audiences. The best way to do this is through dashboards and reports that visualize your data so you can discover trends and opportunities. Accurate campaign reports help your team or managers to understand the overall results of their advertising efforts and know how to improve the campaigns for better performance.
How to analyze TikTok ads?
TikTok analytics can either be done directly on TikTok Ads Manager or externally using a custom analytics dashboard or report. The ads manager allows you to use out-of-the-box capabilities for TikTok ads campaign analysis and optimization.
The custom analytics solution can be designed in a BI tool, such as Looker Studio or Power BI. It provides advanced features for creating and sharing TikTok ads reports as well as other paid ads platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or LinkedIn Ads. We’ll discuss how you can go about both TikTok Ads analysis methods in this chapter.
Native Analytics on TikTok Ads Manager
TikTok Ads manager has 4 navigation links on the menu bar which are labeled as – Dashboard, Campaign, Tools, and Analytics. However, only three of them are actually concerned with TikTok Ads analytics. Let’s see what they have to offer below:
1. Dashboard
The Dashboard is the first page you’ll visit on the platform and it provides a summary of everything that’s going on with your ads. At the top of the page, you can see stuff like Today’s spends, Top recommendations and Ad group status.Next, you’ll find charts for Overview, Campaign, Gender, Placements, Operating System, and Dayparting.
2. Campaign
You’ll find a table containing your campaigns with columns for name, status, budget, total cost, CPC(destination), CPM, impressions, clicks(destination), CPA, conversions, and CTR. To view detailed stats for each campaign, hover around the campaign name and click View Data. You should see a sidebar such as the one below.
At the top of the report, you’ll find metrics such as Total budget, Total cost, and Today’s spend. Next, there are two sections – Daily and Audience. The metrics on Daily include: CPA, CPC, impressions, CTR, clicks, CVR, conversions, etc. There are also separate charts for Overall trends, Placements, Ad groups, and Detailed analysis.
You can also switch to Audience for a detailed breakdown of those who you’ve been targeting. It gives a clearer understanding of each campaign’s audience. You can see their approximate location, age & gender, interests & behaviors, and device.
3. Analytics
When you hover around Analytics, you’ll see a dropdown submenu with a few links – Custom Reports, Attribution Analytics, Audience insights, Comments Insights, Creative Inspirations, and Video Insights. Let’s discuss how to use each for TikTok Ads analysis.
- Custom reports
You can create custom reports using your own set of metrics or from a template. You can choose to view the dimensions and metrics in a table or switch to trend line view.
- Attribution Analytics
This allows you to compare and measure campaign performance across different attribution windows. It equips you with insights that can inform future strategies.
- Audience insights
It gives extremely detailed insights on Potential Audience and Reached Audience. You can filter and view the reached audience for each campaign, ad group, and ad.
- Comments Insights
You can determine and analyze the sentiments in comments. There are charts to show comment trends, sentiment ratio, comment audiences, word cloud, and all comments.
- Creative Inspirations
This lets you gain inspiration for your own ad creatives through a curation of top ads on TikTok. You can also discover trends that are specific to each location and industry.
- Video Insights
It’s important to analyze each video and see how it’s actually performing. You can check video views and also monitor the charts for trends analysis and comparison analysis.
Custom TikTok Ads analytics in spreadsheets or BI platforms
Although you can use TikTok Ads Manager to perform basic analytics on your data, there are certain limitations you should be aware of. First, you can’t download your report in any other file format apart from XLSX. Secondly, there’s no functionality for collaboration or sharing reports with team members or stakeholders. Thirdly, you are limited to the visualizations and performance metrics available on the platform. So you may want to consider using external platforms with better reporting capabilities..
If you want to create extensive and shareable reports, you should use spreadsheets and BI tools. They allow you to organize your TikTok Ads data, calculate custom metrics, create custom reports and dashboards as well as share to as many people as you’d like. You can use report templates or create yours entirely from scratch.
For example, this is a PPC dashboard template that allows you to visualize your data from multiple ad sources in minutes.
All you have to do is plug in your data sources and set up an auto-refresh schedule. The key metrics have been included but you can filter according to your desired report requirements. This dashboard features data from other social media platforms e.g. TikTok Ads, Instagram, and LinkedIn Ads. Here’s another PPC multi-source template that you can use to analyze your TikTok Ad performance in Google Sheets.
A recommended way to connect two platforms together is through a data automation platform – Coupler.io. It allows you to create dashboards and reports easily by automating data flows from different sources into spreadsheets and BI tools.
- Click Proceed in the form below – you can sign up for a free 14-day trial with no credit card required.
This form will connect TikTok Ads to Looker Studio. But you can also connect TikTok Ads to BigQuery, as well as benefit from other sources and destinations including Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, BigQuery, Moday.com, and Power BI.
- Next, you’ll connect your TikTok Ads account and choose the settings.
Transform data allows you to organize and clean your data while Manage data lets you connect your destination account. Then, you can also proceed to set up a custom schedule to automatically import TikTok Ads data. Once you complete the settings and run the importer, you should find your TikTok campaign data in the destination.
With a smooth and efficient data integration process, you’re able to create dashboards and reports that can help to provide better TikTok Ads analytics. You can also connect your TikTok Ads data to pre-made Coupler.io dashboard templates. They help to power plug-and-play reports that can self-update and aggregate metrics with TikTok Ads data.
Key metrics to monitor in TikTok Ads
It’s time to mention those metrics that you need to measure and include in your TikTok Ads reports. Here is a list of 10 important KPIs to track in your campaign analytics.
- Impressions – total number of times an ad was shown to TikTok users.
You need to know the number of active users that have seen your ads in order to measure the exposure your TikTok marketing campaigns are getting. It helps to determine the efficiency of your budget and the exact ad placements where your target audience are coming across the ads.
- Clicks (conversions) – number of clicks on an ad.
When users are interested in your ad, it’s natural for them to engage with it. They can click to perform certain actions such as signing up, sending a message, etc. It helps to calculate the ratio between those who clicked and those who completed the action.
- Clickthrough rate (CTR) – percentage ratio of clicks to impressions.
CTR indicates how well your audience is being compelled to click on your ads. If it’s low, you’d have to change your ad creatives, CTA, or targeting for better results. You need to optimize your ad for success by working towards getting a high engagement rate.
- Conversion rate (CVR) – percentage of users who completed an action after clicking your ad.
An important performance metric that helps to determine the success of your campaign. It helps to calculate how well ads are meeting their goals, refine your overall campaign strategy, and also determine if you’re generating acceptable ROI at the end of the day.
- Cost per click (CPC) – average cost of a click.
You can optimize your bid strategy and plan your advertising budget efficiently with the help of this metric. Lower CPC means that you’re paying less for each click and your ads would become more cost-effective. Note that CPC varies depending on the industry.
- CPM – average cost per thousand impressions.
Budget planning is very important when running TikTok ads. You need to know the cost of showing your ads to user accounts. Lower CPM means that you’re spending less to reach a thousand impressions. You should also compare this metric between your ads.
- Cost per action (CPA) – average amount spent on a conversion.
When trying to measure performance, you should analyze cost per each action. It allows you to evaluate the amount spent on conversions such as a purchase, free trial sign up, or a sales call. With a lower CPA, you can expect to have a larger ROAS.
- Total cost – total amount of money spent on your campaign, ad group or ad.
You need to track your ad spend in real-time as well as review the total amount spent over a period of time. It helps to compare your ad spend with other performance metrics and determine whether you’re spending the right amount of money on your campaigns.
- Frequency – number of times each unique user saw your ad.
Sometimes, it’s nice to show ads to the same users multiple times but you shouldn’t overdo it. If you’re targeting a limited audience, they might get tired of seeing your ads. It’s best to have a broad audience and test each customer segment with your ads.
- Reach – number of unique user accounts who saw your ad at least once.
If you’re looking to improve brand awareness, you should pay attention to the reach. It helps to determine which customer segments have seen your ads. You can also measure the effectiveness of your campaign by checking the quality of users reached.
What is the key value of TikTok Ads analytics for your business?
Social media ads help to push your brand to potential customers. TikTok is one of such platforms to leverage if you’re targeting a younger audience especially for e-commerce. After running campaigns, you have to analyze in order to make sense of your data and inform decisions. You can choose to rely on native TikTok Ads analytics or integrate with an external platform for better reporting capabilities. If you need help with setting up your data infrastructure or business analytics, feel free to reach out to Coupler.io’s data consulting experts.
Borys Vasylchuk Performance Marketing Expert at Coupler.io with 6+ years of experience in creating, managing, and optimizing PPC campaigns in B2B SaaS products. Before Coupler.io, I worked in SE Ranking and Loio, which definitely contributed to developing my marketing skills. I embrace a full-stack user acquisition approach, including running ads, designing ad creatives, optimizing landing page experience, and measuring analytics. View all posts
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