Ways to measure creator marketing success on TikTok

If you’re crushing it on TikTok, you’ll know it. TikTok makes it easy to see how popular any given video is based on views, likes, and comments. But how can you gauge the success of a full-scale creator-led advertising campaign, with hundreds or even thousands of posts to track? What’s the best way to monitor your brand’s overall footprint on the platform?

Software solutions like badged partner CreatorIQ’s Intelligence Cloud can provide high-level and granular insights into the impact of your creator-led TikTok campaigns. But which metrics should each marketer prioritize? And how can they interpret and act on the results? In this post, we’ll look at the key metrics brands can use to evaluate the impact of their creator-led marketing activities, along with ways to leverage these stats to elevate your TikTok strategy.

Track views to understand your TikTok campaign’s reach

One of the main reasons brands invest in the creator economy is to unlock new audiences. However, estimating the reach of TikTok campaigns based solely on follower count can be challenging. Unlike other digital platforms, TikTok's For You page does not rely solely on follower count to serve content to users, so a video’s popularity isn’t always correlated with the size of its creator’s following. With the right content, a post from a little-known TikTok user has the potential to reach the same number of people as a post from a creator with millions of fans.

Because you can’t make assumptions about a TikTok campaign’s scope based on creators’ audience size, it’s important to monitor views of campaign-related content. Advertisers can look at views directly in the TikTok app to track the number of times that users watched a given creator’s video. Beyond understanding the distribution of individual videos, however, brands will likely want visibility into collective views for all creator content associated with a given TikTok campaign. This data, which is readily accessible in CreatorIQ’s platform, helps benchmark the promotion’s reach and effectiveness at generating awareness among consumers.

Monitor engagement to gauge audience attitudes

If your marketing team’s primary objective is spreading the word about your brand, you might make maximizing campaign views your top priority. But most marketers aren’t only interested in driving awareness—they’re also aiming to strengthen consumers’ affinity for their offerings. In order to understand how deeply campaign content from TikTok creators resonates with audiences, you’ll want to keep an eye on engagement.

Engagement refers to the number of times that viewers interacted with a video by liking, commenting, or sharing it. While engagement is often reported as a single number, marketers can leverage CreatorIQ’s campaign tracking capabilities to examine data on different types of interactions and glean more granular insights. Broadly speaking, engagement measures the strength of audiences’ response to content, meaning that high engagement is a key indicator that consumers are connecting with your brand. Like views, engagement metrics can be applied not only to individual TikTok creators’ videos, but also to creator-led campaigns as a whole. By monitoring overall campaign engagement with CreatorIQ’s platform, brands can assess not only how effectively their promotions reached users, but also whether these campaigns caught users’ attention long enough to elicit a reaction.

Use audience composition insights to align with your target consumers

The potential for success on TikTok means that brands can reach new audiences on an unprecedented scale. However, top-of-funnel awareness, and even engagement, don’t amount to much if the users interacting with your campaigns are unlikely—or unable—to convert.

One way that brands can ensure their TikTok campaigns are seen by the right consumers is by accounting for the demographic makeup of creators’ fanbases. Many creator marketing platforms, including CreatorIQ, provide brands with information on the age, gender, and location breakdowns of a creator's follower base, allowing marketers to plan campaigns that speak specifically to their ideal customers.

However, because popular content on TikTok is distributed via the For You page, the composition of a creator’s following doesn’t always neatly correspond with the demographics of users that an individual post reaches. In order to bridge this gap, savvy marketers should also monitor post-level audience data, evaluating which content formats and themes are resonating with their target consumer cohorts.

With CreatorIQ, brands can access first-party audience demographic data for individual pieces of TikTok content. These analytics help brands understand how effectively campaigns are reaching their intended viewers, and how to adjust their strategies accordingly.

Assess organic momentum with share of voice

While it’s easy to think of TikTok as a powerful marketing engine, it’s also a community. In fact, a 2021 survey by TikTok and Nielsen found that 59% of TikTok users feel a sense of community when they’re on the platform.¹ That sense of kinship means that creator-endorsed products, campaigns, and entire brands often see organic surges in popularity.

Monitoring share of voice—the total number of posts created about your brand—using CreatorIQ allows marketers to evaluate and benchmark overall excitement among content creators. Of course, genuine enthusiasm among TikTokers translates into rising awareness among consumers, making share of voice a priority metric for any brand looking to inspire engagement among TikTok communities. Because sponsored campaigns can easily gain organic traction on TikTok, marketers should also leverage CreatorIQ’s solutions to measure share of voice for specific promotions. Doing so will help them understand the true scope of ensuing conversation, and identify which initiatives prompted wider activity among fans.

Consistent, deliberate measurement is integral to effective creator marketing. However, brands shouldn’t fixate on momentary spikes in key metrics. Sustainable, lasting success requires ongoing effort, and brands need to continually iterate on winning campaigns. They should also keep in mind that creator marketing KPIs don’t operate independently of one another. A video that’s widely distributed offers users more opportunities for engagement than a post with limited reach, while a TikTok marketing campaign that inspires a large volume of content will garner more views, likes, comments, and shares than a smaller-scale initiative. For this reason, marketers should examine metrics holistically, in context with each other, to understand which activities are working and identify areas for improvement.

With the right software platform to track, analyze, and report on key TikTok performance metrics, along with an understanding of how to use these metrics, brands will be fully equipped to plan and execute TikTok campaigns that fuel long-term momentum.

To learn more about monitoring your brand’s creator marketing performance on TikTok using CreatorIQ, reach them through the TikTok Marketing Partners site or directly on www.creatoriq.com.

1. Nielsen Custom Authenticity Study commissioned by TikTok