TikTok Metrics You Should Be Tracking in 2023

If you have an active social media presence but don’t have a TikTok account, you’re missing a lot of fun and opportunities to reach massive audiences.

TikTok's marketing advantages are undeniable, especially if you want to present your brand in front of younger communities and experiment with fresh and creative ideas.

But how do you measure your success on TikTok? Is it by engagement, reach, views, follower count, or likes and comments?

Because TikTok is a relatively new platform that operates differently from all the social channels marketers have deciphered by now, you have to understand TikTok analytics and know which metrics matter on this platform.

Tracking the performance of your marketing strategy on TikTok can be challenging, especially if you’re new to the platform.

In this article, I've created a list with top TikTok metrics you should be tracking when creating your TikTok marketing strategy.

Let's start! 👇

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Most important TikTok metrics

1. TikTok metrics you can access from the native analytics app

• Overview metrics
• Content metrics
• Follower metrics
• Live metrics

2. Other TikTok metrics to consider

• Engagement rate
• Engagement and viewership journeys
• Hashtag performance
• Followers’ growth
• Top TikTok posts
• Best time to post on TikTok

1. TikTok metrics you can access from the native analytics app

Like any other social media platform, TikTok has KPIs built into the app that you can access by having a TikTok business account.

The native analytics dashboard provides essential TikTok metrics for the following categories: Overview, Content, Followers, and LIVE.

Let’s take them one at a time.

• TikTok Overview metrics

In the Overview tab, you’ll have access to more general TikTok metrics from the last seven days, 28 days, and 60 days, or you can choose a customizable data range.

Here are the TikTok metrics that you can see in the Overview tab:

• Video views - the number of times a video is watched over the selected period.
• Profile views - the number of times your profile was viewed over the period chosen.
• Likes - the number of likes your videos received over the selected period.
• Comments - the number of comments your videos received over the period chosen.
• Shares - the number of shares your videos received over the period selected.
• Followers - the total number of users who follow your TikTok account.
• Content - the number of videos you have shared over the selected period.
• LIVE - the number of live videos you have hosted over the selected period.

• TikTok Content metrics

The second tab available in the platform's native analytics offers more profound insights into your video content performance.

Here are the TikTok metrics that you can access in the Content tab:

• Video posts - this is where you can see your posts from the last seven days, from newest to oldest.
• Trending videos - this is where you can see your top nine videos with the fastest growth in view numbers from the last seven days.

• TikTok Follower metrics

This analytics tab shows KPIs about your followers, including insights about their gender or location. All these TikTok metrics are crucial because you can adjust your content according to their preferences by accessing them.

Here are the TikTok metrics that you can see in the Follower tab:

• Total followers - the total number of users who follow your account, including any changes that occurred in the selected period.
• Gender - this metric shows a distribution of your followers by gender.
• Top territories - this metric shows where your followers are from, ranked by country.
• Follower activity - here, you’ll find insights regarding when your followers are most active on TikTok.

• TikTok LIVE metrics

The last TikTok metrics tab provided by the native analytics platform is the LIVE tab, which offers insights on LIVE videos you have hosted in the previous seven or 28 days.

Here are the TikTok metrics that you can access in the LIVE tab:

• Total views - the total number of users watching your live videos in the selected period.
• Total time - the total time you have spent hosting live videos in the selected period.
• New followers - the total number of new followers you gained while hosting a live video in the selected period.
• Top viewer count - the users who have most viewed your live video at one time in the selected period.
• Unique viewers - the number of users who viewed your live video at least once. This metric helps you estimate your actual audience because a viewer is only counted once, regardless of how many times they replay the video.
• Diamonds - this TikTok metric shows you have many diamonds you've received during your live videos. Diamonds are TikTok's virtual currency for creators, which users can send to creators. These virtual gifts can be exchanged for real money.

2. Other TikTok metrics to consider

While the native app offers a variety of TikTok metrics to evaluate your performance, there are many other essential metrics that can provide you with a detailed overview.

These metrics are provided by TikTok analytics tools, such as Socialinsider.

You can measure the success of your TikTok account and track all the meaningful metrics into a single dashboard.

Let's take a look!

• Engagement rate

Probably one of the most popular social media metrics among social media managers, the engagement rate is a TikTok metric that is crucial to measure if you want to assess how users interact with your content.

TikTok analytics defines engagement as the sum of video views, profile views, likes, comments, and shares.

TikTok engagement rate is calculated as the sum of likes, comments, and shares on the post divided by the video views for a certain time range. The result is then multiplied by 100.

In Socialinsider, besides average engagement, average engagement rate per post, and average engagement per profile, you can also see your engagement evolution over the selected date range.

Plus, our latest social media industry benchmarks study has demonstrated that TikTok is the most engaging social media platform of the moment, having an average engagement rate of 5.96%, so this is another reason to start your journey with this platform and keep an eye on engagement metrics.

• Engagement and viewership journeys

One of the most common and most difficult tasks that fall under a social media marketer's responsibility is to create viral content (or at least predict which posts are more likely to go viral).

Thankfully now, Socialinsider can help you with this.

By tracking the engagement and viewership journey of every TikTok post, you can pinpoint the moment when your video goes viral and see how long it stays that way. You can also start to understand how long it takes each post to go viral, which will help you set realistic expectations for the future.

To take full advantage of these TikTok virality metrics, you need to:

1. Connect a TikTok account in Socialinsider (your own or your competitors', both are available)
2. Select that account from the left sidebar list and access the TikTok analytics dashboard
3. Open the Posts section on the top navigation bar and choose a post
4. Click on the "See more" button to unlock all post details
5. Examine the engagement and viewership journey data and charts to get TikTok virality insights

• Hashtag performance

Hashtags are a key element to every successful TikTok marketing strategy.

You can create challenges and trends around specific hashtags, and users can search for content by typing in the hashtags they are interested in.

You can track your hashtag performance on TikTok by looking at several metrics.

Hashtag views is a TikTok metric that shows how many times a post with a given hashtag has been viewed.

You can access this TikTok KPI by searching for the hashtag in the search bar.

You’ll see the total number of views that hashtag has, related hashtags, and top videos that use that hashtag.

With Socialinsider’s TikTok analytics feature, you’ll be able to track your most used hashtags and your top used hashtags by average engagement.

• Follower growth

This TikTok metric is pretty self-explanatory, but it's still one of the most important to track if your goal is to grow brand awareness.

Follower growth is a TikTok metric that assesses the net change in the number of followers in the selected date range.

While you can see your growth rate in the TikTok analytics followers' tab, with Socialinsider, you'll have access to more insights and customizable time history.

For example, you'll be provided with a chart to visually observe how your followers grew or reduced over time, beyond the followers' growth percent.

• Top TikTok posts

If you want your TikTok marketing efforts to be worth it, you must know your best-performing posts.

By identifying your top TikTok posts, you'll know which type of content resonates with your audience, making it easier to create successful content in the future.

TikTok provides fundamental analytics insights regarding your top-performing content, but only over the past seven days.

In Socialinsider, you can see your top three TikTok posts and individual post metrics, such as engagement rate, likes, comments, shares, and plays.

• Best time to post on TikTok

When is the best time to post on TikTok?

If you want to make your presence remarkable on TikTok, you need to ask yourself when is the best time to post on TikTok to increase your chances of reaching as many users as possible interested in your content.

According to the Influencer Marketing Hub, these are the best EST hours to post content on TikTok:

• Monday: 6 AM, 10 AM, 10 PM
• Tuesday: 2 AM, 4 AM, *9 AM
• Wednesday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM
• Thursday: 9 AM, *12 AM, 7 PM
• Friday: *5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
• Saturday: 11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM
• Sunday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM

Times marked with * offer particularly high levels of engagement.

However, while this is a good insight, it may be too general. One brand's best time to post on TikTok may be another brand's worst time.

In Socialinsider, you can see which is the best time to post on TikTok based on your posts' average engagement, which is a more reliable indicator of your account's particularities.

Final thoughts

There you have it! The most meaningful TikTok metrics to track, what they mean, and where to find them.

Now that you know how to access TikTok analytics and what to do with the insights, you're on your way to creating the best TikTok content strategies!

And remember - TikTok is a creative platform, so being imaginative and experimental with content is just as important as looking at the right metrics.