TikTok Analytics: The Streamer's Guide to Your Channel's Insights
So you’re a streamer. You’ve put in the hours, worked hard, and gained a following of people who watch you do the thing you love. First of all, congrats! You’ve achieved something incredibly rare.
If you’ve built a successful online platform, odds are you’re laser-focused on maintaining that success and staying relevant. That way, you can stream for the long haul. You have dreams and ambitions, so you need the right tools to help you reach your goals and grow as a creator.
That’s where TikTok Analytics comes in. It’s one of the most important tools at your disposal as a TikTok creator, so today, we’re going to give a quick guide on how to dig into your channel’s data and leverage it to your advantage. Keep reading to learn how to acquire this TikTok virality superpower.
What Is TikTok Analytics?
If you haven’t met TikTok Analytics, it’s about to become your new best friend. It’s the best thing that happened to TikTok since, well, TikTok!
Essentially, TikTok Analytics allows you to look at key data regarding your TikTok account and specific videos you post. From how many views you get and where they come from to what demographics enjoy you the most, Analytics has a ton of information for you to take in.
Of course, you can always go to each video on your profile and check the likes and comment count. But TikTok analytics allows you to get more granular.
You can access a wealth of data, including:
- Profile views
- Likes, comments, and shares
- Timeline of the above
- Traffic sources
- Search queries
- Top videos
- Demographics
Why Use TikTok Analytics?
Analyzing these metrics can be the difference between your channel becoming a success and getting lost in the depths of the TikTok user base.
The best influencers are glued to the Analytics page. They analyze trends, look at the engagement rates of each video, and develop a content strategy based on how their videos perform.
Here’s a great example. Let’s say you spend a ton of time editing a highlight reel and making it look professional and high-quality. You put your heart and soul into showing off your best clips and believe the TikTok gods will reward your strenuous labor. But lo and behold, the video doesn’t do that well.
The next week, you spend hardly any time on a video of you raging about a mistake you made in the game. What do you know? It gets tons of views.
You may be tempted to think that the algorithm just won’t promote content like clip reels. But then you go into your TikTok Analytics and notice your channel receives a consistent bump in views on Tuesday evenings.
It just so happens that you posted the rager video on a Tuesday afternoon and your highlight reel on a Sunday morning. Upon further investigation, you realize that the problem was the time you posted, not the content itself.
With TikTok Analytics, you might have decided to abandon compilations altogether. You could have missed out on content opportunities, all because you had incorrect information.
All that to say, open your mind to the Analytics page. It’s one of your best creator tools, and it can help support your TikTok strategy with cold, hard facts. It could be the difference between going viral or wasting away into obscurity.
TikTok Insights vs. TikTok Analytics: What’s the Difference?
In short, TikTok Insights is separate from TikTok Analytics. While the TikTok Analytics tools are designed to help TikTokers get data about content creation, TikTok Insights is much more broad.
Insights is a program designed for businesses that want to sell on TikTok. If you have a business account that you want to run ads for, or you want to sell products through the TikTok Shop, you’ll definitely want to look into TikTok Insights. But that’s a topic for a different article.
What Are the Main Components of TikTok Analytics?
The Analytics dashboard can be a bit overwhelming. Let’s discuss how to understand your channel insights by walking through the Analytics page and its various TikTok metrics.
How To Get to TikTok Analytics
To get to your Analytics page, go to your TikTok profile page. Click the three lines in the top right corner and select “TikTok Studio.” At the top of the page, you’ll see the Analytics tool. Click “Get Started,” then “Turn On,” and it will pull up TikTok Analytics.
To make things easy, let’s now discuss each of the five categories listed at the top of the Analytics page: Overview, Content, Viewers, Followers, and LIVE.
Overview
As you can probably guess, the Overview page gives you a general summary of your TikTok content and TikTok metrics.
First, there’s the Key Metrics section. Here, you can analyze your total views, likes, and comments in real-time. This section provides you with the big, heavy-hitting numbers to give you a picture of your channel and its overall performance.
The main thing to look for is trends. You can customize the date range of your analytics reports to analyze your growth rate over different periods of time. You can also represent this data as a graph, giving you a visual representation of how well your profile performs writ large.
Scroll down a bit and you’ll find the Traffic Source section. This section tells you where people are discovering your posts and your profile. Do you get most of your views from the For You Page, or are all of your views coming from your followers on the Following Page? Or maybe the bulk of your views come from sound pages thanks to a trending audio you made.
Finally, there’s Search Queries. This section shows you what search queries people type into the search bar before the algorithm leads them to your videos. It’s a pretty niche, specific piece of data, but it can help show you what type of content the algorithm is rewarding.
Content
Next, we have the Content page. The main purpose of this page is to show you your top posts. Set the custom date range at the top of the page to see which posts are doing the best in that period of time.
The Content page ranks your post by three metrics you can toggle between most views, most likes, and new followers. It gives you your top 10 in each category. This feature can be one of the most helpful in Analytics.
If you have one post that has been among your top posts for a while, you can start creating more of that type of content in hopes it will catch on the same way the first did.
Click on each video for more detailed metrics. You can see overall video views, total play time, average watch time, and your new follower count after that video. You can also look at details regarding your retention rate, which is useful in helping you refine your content.
This section also provides great data about your viewers and their demographics. You can discover how many new viewers you receive, which gender is watching your videos the most, and the spread of your viewers based on age.
Demographics like these help you develop a targeted TikTok marketing strategy. Double down on the age groups you’re succeeding with and target your content to them.
Finally, the analytics page is where you can use the Promote feature if you want to boost your video on the algorithm. For a few dollars, you can get the algorithm to push your content to more people, which could give a number of videos a much-needed boost.
Viewers
This page is all about getting into the mind of your average viewer, which is one of the most important aspects of content creation. If you read any section of this article, it’s this one.
The viewer page is where you can analyze the viewing patterns of your average viewer across the entire TikTok platform. For starters, you can see the total number of viewers your account has brought in over a custom time frame.
But the most important feature of this section is below that. First, you can see the top creators that your viewers also watch. Take some time to scroll through this section and watch some of the content.
Ask yourself how you can continue to capture these viewers. Are you making content that’s similar to these other creators? Are you growing at similar rates? How often do these creators post? What types of videos are most successful on their page?
All of these questions can help you refine your strategy. You want to play to your target demographic by making content they enjoy, and this page tells you exactly what types of TikTok videos your viewers are enjoying.
You can also see the top 10 posts that your viewers also watched. You’ll likely start to see patterns in your viewers’ behavior, which you can utilize to your advantage. All this info can help you peer into your viewers’ minds to better understand them and make better content.
Followers
The Followers tab is another incredibly useful feature. Your number of followers is your foundation, your core, your biggest fans. This page provides a bit more detail about your online friends.
For example, you can look at your overall follower growth, but the most important information is at the bottom. This is where you can get into the nitty-gritty about your TikTok followers: gender, age, top countries, top cities, and more. Keep in mind that this information is about your biggest fans, so it’s important to utilize it when you determine your posting strategy.
The most important data point on this page is at the very bottom. Here, you’ll find which days and which hours your followers are most active. It’s how you can develop a specific posting schedule to help your videos perform as well as possible.
To understand how important this is, let’s talk a bit about the TikTok algorithm.
A Quick Aside: How the TikTok Algorithm Works
When you post a video to TikTok, the app doesn’t put it on the For You Page right away. Before that, it will show your video to a small subset of your followers. If it performs well with these followers, then TikTok will show it to a larger group of people.
Your video gets sent to the For You Page if it performs well after that. TikTok will keep showing your video to larger and larger groups of people if it continues to garner views and engagement with these groups. But as your video stops getting engagement, the algorithm will slow down sending it to people’s FYPs.
Because of this process, your video must perform well when you first post. If it doesn’t do well with your core group of followers, it will never make it to the For You Page. Therefore, you must post your videos when your followers are online.
LIVE
Finally, we have the newest feature on the Analytics Page. If you livestream on TikTok, this page will be important to you. Here, you can see all of the data we’ve mentioned so far — but this time, it’s specific to the viewers who engage with your LIVEs.
You can see how many total views you’re getting, your views over a certain period of time, and viewership data for each specific LIVE you’ve hosted.
You can even see who your top viewers are, check out their profiles, and DM them directly from the page. This feature allows you to get to know your viewers individually and keep building connections with them if you hit it off during the broadcast.
There are also helpful sections under “Tools and Resources.” From subscription services to the LIVE Academy, there are tons of ways that TikTok can help you improve your livestreams so you get flush with diamonds every time you go live.
Your Data Is Your Key to Success
You should now have a better idea of how to look at TikTok Analytics and how its insights can help you level up as a TikTok creator. This data can help you understand how well your channel is performing and why.
From there, you can develop the best content strategy for your specific channel. The best part about TikTok Analytics is that it’s personal to you. Using it lets you gain unique, particular data about your audience.
So take this information and head to your TikTok Analytics. If you use your data correctly, you can watch your channel grow and spread your success to other platforms.
For more tips and tools to help you with TikTok content creation, check out Powder, a gamer's and streamer’s number-one assistant for making viral videos.
—
💡If you're a gamer, content creator, or video editor looking to save time and money clipping short, shareable highlights and creating montages from your latest gameplay sessions or long streams, get access to Powder for PC (Windows) now. Powered by AI.💡Learn more about Powder at our website or join our Discord, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn communities!