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How to Analyze TikTok Ads

Cody Schneider•

Running TikTok ads without knowing how to read the results is like flying blind. You're spending money, but you have no idea if you're gaining altitude or heading for a nosedive. This guide provides a clear, straightforward process for analyzing your TikTok ad performance, helping you turn raw data into smart decisions that actually grow your business.

Key TikTok Ad Metrics You Need To Know

Before you can analyze anything, you need to understand what you're looking at. The TikTok Ads Manager is full of metrics, but they generally fall into three categories that mirror your customer's journey: awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Top-of-Funnel Metrics (Awareness)

These metrics tell you how many people are seeing your ads and your initial cost to reach them. They're useful for understanding brand visibility and initial ad appeal.

  • Impressions: The total number of times your ad has been displayed on screen. One person could see your ad multiple times, and each view counts as an impression.

  • Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen your ad at least once. This metric helps you understand the size of the audience you’ve touched.

  • CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): How much you’re paying for one thousand people to see your ad. A low CPM can indicate that your targeting is efficient or that you’re advertising in a less competitive space.

  • CPC (Cost Per Click): The average amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. A lower CPC is generally better, but it's meaningless without conversions.

  • CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who saw your ad and then clicked on it (Clicks ÷ Impressions). A high CTR suggests your creative is compelling enough to grab attention and spark curiosity.

Mid-Funnel Metrics (Consideration & Engagement)

Once you’ve captured their attention, you want to know if people are actually engaging with your ad. These metrics measure interest and how well your video is holding viewer attention.

  • 6-Second Video Views: The total number of times your video was played for at least six seconds. This is a strong indicator that your hook — the first few seconds of your video — is effective at stopping the scroll.

  • Engaged Follows: A relatively new metric, this counts followers who engaged (liked, commented, or shared) within an hour of following you. It helps a brand understand not just how many followers it's driving but also the quality, or “stickiness,” of those followers.

  • VTR (View-Through Rate): The percentage of total impressions where your video was played completely. For fast-paced TikTok content, even completing a short 15-second ad is a big win.

  • Engagements: The total number of likes, comments, shares, and saves your ad received. High engagement signals that your creative resonates with the audience and can result in better ad delivery from TikTok's algorithm.

  • Ad Spend: The total amount of money you've spent on a Campaign, Ad Group, or Ad during your selected timeframe. Always keep an eye on this!

Bottom-of-Funnel Metrics (Conversion)

This is where the money is made. These metrics show whether your ads are driving the actions you actually care about, like sales, leads, or sign-ups. (Note: Accurate conversion tracking requires correctly installing the TikTok Pixel on your website.)

  • Conversions: The total number of times a desired action (e.g., "Add to Cart," "Complete Payment," "Submit Form") was completed as a result of your ad.

  • CPA (Cost Per Action) or Cost Per Conversion: How much you're spending on average for each conversion (Total Spend ÷ Conversions). This is one of the most important metrics for determining profitability.

  • CVR (Conversion Rate): The percentage of people who clicked your ad and then completed the desired action (Conversions ÷ Clicks). A strong CVR indicates that your ad creative and landing page work well together.

  • ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): The total revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising (Total Conversion Value ÷ Total Spend). A ROAS of 3, for example, means you're making $3 in revenue for every $1 you spend on ads.

Your Guide to the TikTok Ads Manager Dashboard

Knowing the metrics is half the battle, the other half is knowing where to find and organize them inside the Ads Manager. It can feel intimidating at first, but it's simpler than it looks.

Navigating Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Ads

Your account is structured in three tiers:

  1. Campaigns: The highest level, where you set your overall advertising objective (e.g., Conversions, Traffic, Video Views).

  2. Ad Groups: The middle level, where you define your target audiences, placements, bidding strategy, and budget. You can have multiple Ad Groups within a single Campaign to test different audiences.

  3. Ads: The most granular level, containing your actual video creatives and ad copy. You can have several creative variations running within one Ad Group.

Analysis should happen at all three levels to get a complete picture of what’s working.

Customizing Columns To Focus on What Matters

The default TikTok dashboard shows a lot of data, some of which you might not need. Use the "Custom Columns" feature to create a clean view that only shows the metrics relevant to your campaign goals.

How to set up a custom column view:

  1. From your Campaigns dashboard, look for the "Columns" dropdown button above your performance table. The default is likely "Standard."

  2. Click it and select "Custom Columns."

  3. A window will pop up. On the left, you can browse through all available metrics. Check the boxes for the metrics you care about (e.g., Spend, CTR, Conversions, CPA, ROAS).

  4. On the right, you can drag and drop your selected metrics to reorder them. It's often helpful to organize them by funnel stage (Awareness > Engagement > Conversion).

  5. Click "Save as" and give your custom view a name, like "Conversion Performance," so you can easily access it again from the Columns dropdown.

A Step-by-Step Framework for Your TikTok Ad Analysis

Ready to put it all together? Follow this framework to conduct a systematic review of your campaigns and uncover actionable insights.

Step 1: Start with Your Campaign Objective

The first question should always be: "What was this campaign designed to do?" How you judge success depends entirely on the objective you set at the campaign level.

  • If your goal was Brand Awareness, focus on CPM, Reach, and video view metrics. Are you reaching a large audience efficiently?

  • If it was a Traffic campaign, scrutinize your CPC and CTR. Are your ads generating cheap, high-quality clicks?

  • If your main goal was Conversions or Sales, your North Star metrics are CPA and ROAS. All other metrics simply explain why your CPA or ROAS are high or low.

Step 2: Review Performance at All Three Levels

Start broad and then drill down to find specific reasons for your results.

  • Campaign Level Analysis (The 30,000-Foot View): Look at the campaign as a whole. Is the total ROAS acceptable? Are you on track with your overall budget? This level tells you if your high-level strategy and objective are working.

  • Ad Group Level Analysis (Audience & Targeting Insights): Click into a campaign to view its ad groups. This is where you test audiences. Compare the performance across different ad groups to see which demographics, interests, or lookalike audiences are delivering the best results (e.g., lower CPA, higher ROAS).

  • Ad Level Analysis (The Creative Showdown): This is the most important part of TikTok analysis. Click into an ad group to see individual ads. Compare their performance side-by-side to understand which hooks, video styles, calls-to-action, text overlays, and sounds perform best.

Step 3: Diagnose Your Creative Performance

Your creative makes or breaks your campaign on TikTok. Use metrics to diagnose issues and identify winners.

  • The Problem: High Impressions but Low CTR. Your ad is being served, but it isn't stopping the scroll. This almost always means the first 1-3 seconds of your video (the hook) aren't strong enough.

    • The Solution: Test new hooks. Try starting with a question, a bold statement, user-generated content (UGC), or unboxing clips.

  • The Problem: High CTR but Low Conversions (Low CVR). People are interested enough to click, but they aren't taking action on your website. This points to a mismatch between your ad and your landing page.

    • The Solution: Ensure your landing page's offer, message, and visual identity match the ad. Does the landing page load quickly? Is a confusing pop-up getting in the way? Is the purchase process too complicated?

  • The Problem: High and Unprofitable CPA. You're getting conversions, but they cost too much. This could be due to a number of factors.

    • The Solution: Check your audience first. Is it too broad? Look at your creative. A low CTR could lead to a higher CPA. Revisit the VTR. If people aren’t watching enough of the video, they miss the value prop and the CTA. Kill the non-performing ads and shift budget to the ones with a lower CPA. Test for landing page and offer conversion rate. Poor on-site conversion is one of the highest drivers of ad inefficiency.

Step 4: Go Beyond TikTok's Dashboard

TikTok Ads Manager tells you what happened on TikTok, but it doesn't give you the full business picture. To truly understand performance, you need to combine it with data from your own website platform (like Shopify) or analytics tool (like Google Analytics).

Sometimes, TikTok may over- or under-report conversions due to tracking limitations. Always use your website's back-end as the source of truth for revenue and sales data. Analyzing your TikTok spend against your Shopify-reported revenue is the only way to get a completely accurate look at ROAS.

Common Analysis Pitfalls to Avoid

  • Judging Too Soon: Don't kill an ad group after just a day or two. TikTok's algorithm needs time to learn and optimize. Let your ads run for at least 3-5 days to gather enough data before making a decision.

  • Testing Too Many Things at Once: If you change the audience, creative, and bidding strategy all at the same time, you'll have no idea what caused the change in performance. Test one variable at a time (e.g., test different creatives against the same audience and settings).

  • Ignoring Audience Overlap: Be careful running multiple ad groups with similar interest targeting at the same time. You could end up bidding against yourself, driving up costs.

  • Forgetting About Qualitative Data: Read the comments on your ads! They are a goldmine of free, unfiltered feedback on your product, price, and creative. You might uncover an objection that’s preventing people from converting.

Final Thoughts

Analyzing TikTok ads becomes simple once you have a framework. It comes down to checking your key metrics against your goals, drilling down from the campaign to the ad level, and rigorously testing your audiences and creatives to find what works.

The biggest challenge is often piecing all the data together — comparing what TikTok says with sales numbers in Shopify, web traffic in Google Analytics, and lead data in your CRM. At Graphed, we solve this problem by connecting all your data sources into one place. You can instantly create a real-time marketing dashboard by simply asking, "Show me my blended ROAS across TikTok and Facebook Ads versus my total Shopify sales for last month," and get a clear, accurate answer in seconds.