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“The team loved it from the start. Planable helps us overview the entire marketing efforts.“
Right now, TikTok is the place to be for potential customers.
So, it’s a no-brainer for businesses to jump on the bandwagon and start reaching the target audience on the trending platform.
But posting content on TikTok is one thing. How can you make sure your content is what your followers live for?
Track key metrics.
That’s the easiest way to know what’s working and what isn’t.
In this post, I will discuss the most important TikTok metrics to track so you can optimize your social media marketing strategy.
What are TikTok metrics?
TikTok metrics are pieces of data that let you measure specific areas of your content performance.
Tracking these TikTok analytics helps you uncover what types of content your audience engages with the most, the best times to post, how your account is growing, and more.
As a result, you can finetune your marketing strategy to align with your audience’s preferences and interests.
This can lead to higher engagement because you post content that best resonates with viewers. In fact, understanding the nuances of TikTok engagement can significantly enhance your strategy, ensuring that your content truly connects and captivates your audience.
Besides increased engagement, why else should you track audience and content metrics on TikTok?
Improve reach and discoverability: The more engaging your content, the more likely TikTok is to suggest your video posts to users outside your follower list. That means more people will discover your brand. You can also gain a larger following on the platform.
Guide strategy and content decisions: Knowing what content your audience engages with the most makes it easier to plan content you know they’ll love. For example, Chipotle posts a lot of memes, user-generated content (UGC), and funny videos. Why? Because the fast-casual Mexican restaurant knows that’s what its audience can’t help but watch.
Drive follower growth: Posting content your audience loves leads to more engagement, which means more visibility. This can help you increase your follower count.
Enhance community building: Tracking comments and shares allows you to gauge the type of content that encourages your viewers to interact, ask questions, or share with friends. You can nurture this engagement to build a stronger sense of community and authentic connection with your audience.
In a TikTok video, one user challenges his girlfriend to make him laugh. If she’s successful, they’ll enjoy some Chipotle for dinner.
Instead of waiting for her to do something to make him laugh, he laughs anyway. This shows that he was probably already planning to get Chipotle. It also shows he’s confident she’ll be happy with the choice as if it’s a shared favorite or an inside joke between them.
Whatever the case, the video has over 31K views and 900+ comments. People love to joke around and feel a sense of community, especially when you throw their favorite restaurant in the mix.
Chipotle has studied its audience and used metrics to understand the type of content they enjoy.
Sold on why it’s essential to track TikTok analytics? Now, for the actual metrics.
We’ve listed quite a few to help you get an idea of how much data you have at your fingertips to improve your TikTok marketing.
1. Video views
Video views represent how many times users have watched one of your videos. This includes when your video starts or plays in a loop.
Video views are important because they can help you understand what type of content grabs attention and makes your audience want to stop scrolling when you show up on their For You Page.
2. Total watch time
Watch time is the total time people spend watching your video. This TikTok metric gives you insights into how people engage with your content.
If your total watch time looks great, you could join the TikTok Creator Fund, which rewards you for original content with a high play duration.
3. Average watch duration
Average TikTok watch duration is the mean amount of time viewers spend watching your video.
A good average watch time is about 15-20 seconds. So, if your video is 30-35 seconds, that means your audience is watching 75% of your video.
Research shows that the longer your TikTok video is, the more views it is likely to get. If it is longer than 3 minutes, it will probably get more than double the views of shorter videos of 6–10 seconds.
TikTok is testing the use of longer videos. According to Statista, the average TikTok video length has increased from 39 to 42.7 seconds from 2023 to 2024.
This signals to the TikTok algorithm that your video is valuable and should be discoverable to users.
The higher your average watch duration, the more likely your content is to capture your audience’s attention from start to finish.
4. Video completion rate
TikTok video completion rate (VCR) is the percentage of users who watch the entire video. A higher VCR can lead to more views and make your content more likely to appear on the For You Page.
5. Most active times
Check on follower activity – The most active times metric shows when your followers are most active on TikTok. You can view this data by day and hour.
For example, your audience tends to use TikTok more on the weekends between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m.
These are the best times to post on a social media platform, as your audience is more likely to see your content then.
Adtech supports effective TikTok campaigns by using audience insights and behavioral data to finetune content targeting and delivery. It does this by analyzing essential metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates (CTR), and conversion performance.
For example, Adtech platforms within TikTok’s Ads Manager provide demographic breakdowns and behavioral patterns. This allows you to segment your audience more precisely and create content that resonates with those specific groups.
Besides, real-time dashboards give you continuous campaign performance feedback, allowing you to adjust ad placements, messaging, or posting schedules as needed.
6. Views per follower
Calculate your views per follower by dividing the number of views your video gets by the number of followers you have.
Let’s say your video has 30,000 views. And you have 5,000 followers. That means your views per follower is 6. So, each follower viewed the video an average of 6 times.
This is a good metric for gauging how far your content is reaching beyond your followers. It also gives you insight into the quality of your followers.
For example, if you have lots of followers but low views, this could mean your followers aren’t interested in your content.Sony is an example of a brand that has an excellent views per follower ratio. It has 2.7 million followers on TikTok.
This video has over 20 million views. So, for this piece of content, the views per follower rate is 7.48, which is high.
It shows that the video gets tons of engagement and possibly even shares beyond Sony’s follower base.
Likes is one of the oldest social media metrics in the book. This measures how many times users have liked a video by tapping the heart icon.
It’s a great metric to look at because it measures how many users appreciate or enjoy your video.
8. Comments
It’s easy to tap the “Like” button. How many people are commenting on your TikTok posts? A comment requires more effort than a like. People have to physically type out a comment.
So, the number of comments your videos get is a good measure of how people are interacting with your content.
If viewers send your videos to friends, it must be compelling and relatable.
Shares represent how often a user shares your video to their profile or others. To make TikTok content effortlessly shareable at events, in stores, or across other marketing materials, many creators use a QR code generator to create scannable codes that instantly direct people to their TikTok content.
The more shares your videos get, the higher their visibility and the potential for going viral.
10. Engagement rate
To calculate your engagement rate on TikTok, divide the total number of likes, comments, and shares by how many views you have.
Engagement rate gives you a complete picture of how actively your followers interact with your brand and content.
Your average engagement per post against each competitor’s, over the same window. Watch the direction more closely than the absolute figure. A rate that holds steady while a competitor’s climbs is a slow loss.
11. Reach
More than 1 billion users are active onTikTok every month. What an impressive number, right? But chances are, you’ll probably not reach that many accounts.
On the bright side? You could still get your content in front of thousands—perhaps even millions.
Reach measures the number of unique users who have seen one of your posts or ads at least once.
It doesn’t indicate the level of engagement, but it does show the potential audience size your content is attracting.
12. Impressions
Impressions are similar to reach. While reach measures how many unique accounts view a video, impressions include repeat views.
Four metrics are worthless in isolation and load-bearing in comparison: relative engagement rate, follower growth differential, posting cadence against your set, and share of top-performing content.
Every metric above this section tells you how your own account is doing. Whether that is good depends entirely on what the three accounts competing for the same audience did in the same month. A 4% engagement rate is a win or a warning, and your own dashboard cannot tell you which.
13. Follower growth differential
The gap between your growth rate and theirs, rather than your rate on its own. On TikTok a single video can add thousands of followers in a week, and the differential smooths out the noise that makes month-on-month self-comparison unreliable.
14. Posting cadence against your set
Upload volume only means something relative to the accounts you are competing with. If three competitors doubled their output this quarter while you held steady, your flat views are explained.
15. Share of top-performing content
Of the strongest posts across your competitive set in the last month, how many are yours? This is the closest thing TikTok offers to share of voice, and it predicts trajectory better than follower count does.
How to track them without a spreadsheet
Planable Analytics has a Competitors tab where you can track up to five TikTok accounts per connected page and you get:
A comparison table on followers, post volume and average engagement, with movement against the previous period
Trend charts plotting your account against each competitor across the date range you set
Each competitor’s best-performing recent posts with engagement figures
If you are starting from nothing, Planable proposes up to five real accounts based on your own public profile instead of asking you to hunt handles. Data refreshes once daily, and trend comparisons need two days of history before they populate. Analytics is a paid add-on at $14 per workspace per month, as is the social inbox at $9.
One thing to be clear about: Planable assumes more than one person on an account. If you are a solo creator who only needs to see last month’s views, this is more product than the job requires.
Capitalize on TikTok metrics to get the most out of your content strategy
Look at key TikTok analytics to take the guesswork out of marketing on the viral social platform.
You can get all types of data about your content and where it stands in the algorithm. And all you have to do is just follow the numbers.
They’ll bring you closer to your target audience and their preferences. And from there, you can create content they can’t resist.
Ready to take your TikTok to the next level? Get started here for free and let Planable do the magic.
Jeremy is co-founder & CEO at uSERP, a digital PR and SEO agency working with brands like Monday, ActiveCampaign, Hotjar, and more. He also buys and builds SaaS companies like Wordable.io and writes for publications like Entrepreneur and Search Engine Journal.