TikTok Audience Insights: The Key to Run Better Ads Campaign

TikTok Audience Insights

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Creating high-performing TikTok ads isn’t down to luck; it starts with truly understanding your audience. TikTok Audience Insights helps you do just that by providing clear demographic and behavioral data on your prospective buyers.

In this guide, we’ll break down what the tool can do and walk you through step-by-step instructions to help you sharpen your campaign targeting.

💡 Key Takeaways

  • TikTok Audience Insights provides 30-day aggregated demographic, interest, and behavioral data across the platform to help you plan targeted campaigns.
  • The tool breaks down user demographics, top interest categories, daily engagement metrics, hashtag interactions, and custom audience overlaps.
  • You can see both Reached Audience (those that actually watched your content) and Potential Audience (who might be interested in your content).
  • Utilizing audience data removes guesswork from campaign planning, allowing you to tailor creative messaging to user interests and optimize your budget for better ROI.

1. Introducing TikTok Audience Insights

TikTok Audience Insights is a feature in TikTok Ads Manager that provides aggregated demographic, interest, and behavioral information about users active in the last 30 days. It draws from all TikTok data — both organic and paid — rather than single campaign performance.

You can see who are watching your content – things like where they are, what they like, what gadgets they’re using, and how they’re using them. 

With Audience Insights, you can: 

  • Explore the big trends within the audience 
  • Get the information of your audience 
  • Plan a strategy that fits your target audience and reach to them 

This tool gives you the lowdown on all the users who’ve been active in the 30 days. Just so you know, it’s not all about the details of your campaigns. It’s more about the bigger picture – who’s hanging out on TikTok lately?

2. What you can do with TikTok Audience Insights 

With TikTok audience insights, there are a plethora of possibilities that you can explore for your businesses. However, here are some of the basic functions that you can utilize TikTok audience insights for: 

Gain knowledge about your target audience

Audience Insights is the secret weapon for figuring out who’s in your online store. If you are struggling with low-converting TikTok ads, the issue may lie in your targeting. Audience Insights shows you the potential customers’ information, like their ages, where they live, and what they’re into. This means you can plan your ads to speak right to them, showing off gear that’s perfect for their adventures

Discover ideas for more focused and innovative approaches

TikTok Audience Insights provides valuable data about your audience’s interests, behaviors, and demographics. This information can be leveraged to uncover new TikTok ads targeting options and craft creative strategies that deeply connect with your audience. For instance, you might discover that a significant portion of your fitness gear customers are also passionate about outdoor activities. Recognizing this overlap opens up an exciting avenue for your business to explore and develop in the future.

With Audience Insights, you get the scoop on the top 10 TikTok hashtags and interests that your crowd is all about. When you’re making a campaign or crafting ideas, you can use these hashtags or interests to make your stuff pop. Say you’re into fitness gear and your audience is all about outdoor adventures – you can use those top hashtags to catch their attention.

3. How to use TikTok Audience Insights tool

Yes, TikTok Audience Insights offers numerous valuable insights that can benefit your business. However, you can only get the benefit if you know how to utilize them correctly. If you’re still uncertain about the steps to use these TikTok tools, let us provide you with an overview of all the features it offers.

Step 1: Gain access to TikTok Audience Insights 

In your TikTok Ads Manager window, select TikTok’s Analytics. Then, choose Audience Insights

Gain access to TikTok Audience Insight

Inside Audience Insights, you will see 2 tabs: Potential Audience and Reached Audience:

  • Potential Audience: A sneak peek at the people who might be interested in your stuff before you even start your campaign on TikTok. It’s like checking out the crowd before the show begins. 
  • Reached Audience: A snapshot of the actual audience who ended up seeing your stuff after your campaign is done. 
Choose between 2 options TikTok Audience Insights

Step 2: Specify your audience by filter

Locations: Specify the countries/regions where your potential audience is based. Just a small note, is that you must always choose a location in the Filter Audience section. TikTok Audience Insights allows you to choose a maximum of 5 countries/regions for filtering.

Filter the location

Language: TikTok Audience Insights will automatically choose all available languages as the default setting if you don’t need to target an audience with a specific language. You can always change it based on your needs.

Choose the language of your audience

Demographics: This is where you can provide more specific information for your audience persona. It includes:

  • Age: You can choose from 5 options: 18 – 24, 25 – 34, 35 – 44, 45 – 55, and 55+.
  • Gender: There are 3 options for you to choose from: All, Male, and Female. “All” is the default option if you don’t need to select a specific gender for your audience.
Select the options for demographics

Interests & Behaviors: This category allows you to narrow down the potential audience based on their interaction preferences. With proper utilization, this section can provide valuable insights into the audience that aligns with your business tactics. It includes:

  • Ad interest categories: Determine your audience by observing interactions with specific ad categories.
  • Video interactions: Filter the audience who have interacted with specific videos.
  • Creator interactions: Identify the audience interacting with particular types of creators.
  • Hashtag interactions: Refine the audience who have watched videos containing specific hashtags.
Interest & behavior of audience

Devices: Lastly, TikTok Audience Insights allows you to specifically target the type of devices you want. You can choose the operating system, OS version, and device price.

Choose devices in TikTok Audience Insights

Step 3: Choose custom audience 

Custom audience is an option that helps you find insights about those who have already taken specific interacting actions with your business. However, in order to use this feature, you must have a custom audience with a size of 1000 people or more.

Select custom audience
Source: TikTok Business Help Center

To check this requirement, navigate to Tools > Audience Manager and review the size of your audience in the Availability column. You can choose from various types for your custom audience: Engagement, App Activity, Website Traffic, Lead Generation, and Business Account. Keep in mind that once you select Custom Audience, other filters will be disabled.

Step 4: Gain various insights through overview tabs 

Just like the name, the overview tabs within the Audience Insights will give the most general look at different insights. You can see that there are 4 tabs in total: 

Audience Overview tab: Obtain a swift, comprehensive overview of your audience

Audience overview tab

Engagement: Gain insights into the level of engagement and frequency of TikTok app usage among your audience.

Engagement tab

Interests tab: Acquire a more profound understanding of your audience’s areas of interest.

Interest tab

Audience overlap tab: Gauge the extent of overlap between your chosen TikTok Custom Audience benchmark group and up to four additional TikTok Custom Audience segments.

Audience overlap tab
Source: TikTok Business Help Center

Step 5: Evaluate post-campaign audience insight 

The Reach Audience tab is the right place for you to analyze the insights of your audience that have interacted with your ad campaign. You can use Filters to select the aspects you want to see, such as Placement, Targeting, and Buying Type.

Filter reach audience in TikTok Audience Insight

In the Campaign Name search box, choose the drop-down menu to search and select the campaign name/ID, ad group name/ID, or ad name/ID that you want to filter and view the insights.

Select the campaign

You can see on your right-hand side a box named “Total Cost”. Click there, and a dropdown of metrics will appear for you to choose from. Just select to view Impressions, Clicks (Destination), Conversions, CTR, CVR, CPC, and CPM.

Choose the right metric

Additionally, you can choose the time span to limit the data and make it easier to find the insights.

Filter the timeframe

4. Explore your audience and enhance your performance now!

Getting a comprehensive view of customer insights is extremely helpful in creating inspiring content that matches your potential customers and saves your resources. Using such insights in planning your TikTok ads can help you maximize results and find new ways to scale.

Want to launch and optimize your TikTok advertising campaign with smart business intelligence, no experience is required, explore NestAds – our TikTok ads analysis tool for Shopify. Simplify ads creation and management process and target the right audiences at the right time now!

FAQs: TikTok Audience Insights

How to see Audience Insights on TikTok​?

You can log into TikTok Ads Manager, hover over Analytics in the top navigation bar, and click Audience Insights.

What does reached audience mean on TikTok?

Reached audience measures the total number of unique TikTok users who have viewed your content at least once. Unlike total video views, repeat views by the same individual user are counted only once toward your reached audience total.

What is Audience Controls on TikTok?

Audience Controls is a creator feature that restricts your profile, specific videos, or LIVE streams to viewers aged 18 and older. It prevents users under 18 from seeing content with mature themes or adult humor while keeping your content compliant with platform safety guidelines.

Should I turn on Audience Control on TikTok?

You should turn on Audience Control if your videos feature mature, adult, or complex themes intended strictly for older audiences.

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