Measuring consumer engagement on TikTok

TikTok is quickly becoming one of the largest and widely used social media platforms today. Boasting over one billion monthly users, TikTok is a platform for people to share videos and (more commonly) scroll through their ‘feed’ of videos, which has been uniquely curated based on data that the app collects.

Information such as the users’ gender, age, social-economic status and general beliefs all shape the way they interact with the app, and consequently deciphers which advertisements they will be shown every 12-15 videos along the feed.

Figure 1. Examples of advertisements seen on the Tiktok platform.

Given the magnitude of both the platform and its number of users, advertising on Tiktok certainly isn’t cheap. Pricing generally begins at $10/CPM (cost per 1000 impressions), and that comes after the costs of putting together the 6-60 second campaign.

However, given the structure of the platform is based on instant entertainment and an endless loop of videos catered to your personal interests, digital marketers must question whether a TikTok campaign will actually be able to engage their younger, Gen Z audience. Advertisements on this platform appear as a video within the feed, taking up the entire screen. whilst this may better capture the attention of users, it also makes it extremely easy to scroll straight past the video once its recognised as an advertisement.

As research by the MIT Sloan School of Management states, TikTok advertises must be able to correctly match their product to the video ad. Whilst many brands tend to exercise too much focus on product appearance, it is more often about the synchronisation between the product and the TikTok campaign that deciphers its success.

Figure 2. TikTok’s search function can make it fairly easy for users to find a specific video or audio amongst the billions that are there.

This principle is even more applicable for “products purchases that tend to be more impulsive, hedonic and lower-priced”, according to Harvard Business School assistant professor Jeremy Yang while he was a PhD student at MIT.

There are analytics features built into the app to allow businesses who advertise with TikTok to get a better understanding of their reach, audience and engagement through their campaigns. However, brands considering advertising with the platform must ensure they understand TikTok’s users and how they both may perceive and interact with their campaigns.