How to See Other People's TikTok Analytics
Thinking about what makes your competitors so successful on TikTok? It’s not just luck, it's a strategy you can uncover by looking at their analytics. This guide will show you how to look at publicly available data on any TikTok account and use specialized tools to understand what’s working for them - and how you can apply those lessons to your own content.
Why Should You Analyze Other TikTok Accounts?
Diving into another creator's or competitor’s TikTok performance isn’t about copying them. It’s about strategic research that gives you a serious advantage. Knowing their numbers helps you benchmark your own performance, spot emerging trends before they take off, and refine your content strategy to get better results.
Here’s why it's worth your time:
Find Content Inspiration: See which video formats, sounds, and topics resonate most with their audience - which is likely similar to your target audience. You can find inspiration for your own original take on what's proven to work.
Understand Your Niche: Analyzing top accounts helps you understand the unwritten rules of your niche. What length of video performs best? Do tutorials get more traction than behind-the-scenes content? This data takes the guesswork out of your planning.
Benchmark Your Performance: How does your engagement rate stack up against an account with a similar follower count? Benchmarking helps you set realistic goals and identify areas for improvement. Are your videos getting a similar number of comments and shares? If not, why might that be?
Vet Potential Influencers: If you're looking to partner with influencers, you need to look beyond their follower count. A high engagement rate and consistent video views suggest an active, loyal community. Digging into their analytics helps you find partners who can actually drive results, not just those with inflated numbers.
The Manual Method: Using TikTok's Public Data
You can gather a surprising amount of information just by looking at someone's profile and videos directly in the TikTok app. This manual approach is free and gives you a good foundational understanding of an account's performance in just a few minutes.
Step 1: Analyze the Profile Page
The first stop is their main profile page. Here, you'll find three key public metrics right at the top:
Following: The number of accounts they follow.
Followers: The number of people who follow them.
Likes: The total number of likes they've received across all of their videos.
While the total likes number is a "vanity metric" - a big number that feels good but doesn't tell the whole story - it does provide a quick snapshot of their overall popularity over time. Look at the follower-to-following ratio. A high follower count with a low following count often indicates a creator or brand, while accounts following thousands of people might be using "follow-for-follow" tactics to grow.
Don't forget to check their bio for a link. Where are they directing their traffic? Is it to a product page, a blog, or a Linktree? This tells you about their primary business goals on the platform.
Step 2: Examine Individual Video Performance
Now, scroll through their video grid. This is where you’ll find the most valuable data. Tap on any video to see its specific performance metrics, which are typically displayed in the bottom-left corner of the screen or along the right-hand side.
Views (or Plays): This is the total number of times the video has been seen. It's the most prominent metric on any video. Compare the views on their recent videos. Are they consistent, or do they have one or two viral hits and many duds? Consistency often hints at a sound content strategy.
Likes, Comments, and Shares: These metrics measure audience interaction. Lots of likes are good, but comments and shares are signs of a much more engaged audience. High share counts are particularly telling, as they indicate the content was valuable or entertaining enough for someone to pass it along.
Saves (Favorites): The bookmark icon shows how many users saved the video to watch later. This is a strong indicator that the content was perceived as highly valuable - think useful tutorials, recipes, or life hacks.
Step 3: Calculate the Engagement Rate
The engagement rate tells you what percentage of their followers are actively interacting with their content. It's one of the most important metrics for judging an account's health because it filters out the noise of follower counts and viral views. An account with 10,000 highly engaged followers is often more valuable than one with 100,000 passive ones.
There's no single official formula, but a common and reliable one is:
(Total Likes + Total Comments + Total Shares) / Total Views * 100 = Engagement Rate %
To get a good sense of an account's average engagement, calculate this for their last 5-10 videos (excluding any extreme viral outliers) and then average the results. A "good" engagement rate varies by niche, but generally speaking:
1-3% is average.
4-6% is good.
7%+ is considered high or viral.
Manually calculating this provides a solid, data-backed view of how well their content truly connects with their audience.
Go Deeper with Third-Party TikTok Analytics Tools
While manual analysis is a great start, third-party tools can save you time and provide deeper insights you can't find on the app. These platforms specialize in aggregating public data and presenting it in easy-to-read dashboards, showing trends over time and offering more advanced metrics.
What These Tools Can Do
Most of these tools work by scraping TikTok’s publicly available data and enriching it. Instead of just seeing today's follower count, you can see how it grew over the past year. Here’s what you can typically find:
Follower Growth Metrics: Track follower counts daily, weekly, or monthly to see if their growth is consistent or the result of a single viral video.
Engagement Rate Over Time: Get automatically calculated engagement rates for any period, saving you from manual calculations.
Top Performing Videos: Instantly identify which videos went viral and analyze their hashtags, sounds, and content formats.
Hashtag Analysis: See which hashtags a creator uses most frequently and which ones are associated with their top-performing posts.
Estimated Performance: Some tools provide estimates on a video's potential reach and impact.
Popular Tools for Competitor TikTok Analysis
There are many tools on the market, ranging from free basic versions to premium platforms with robust features. Here are a few reliable options:
1. HypeAuditor
Primarily known as an influencer marketing platform, HypeAuditor provides in-depth analytics on any TikTok account. It's particularly useful for vetting influencers, offering an Audience Quality Score (AQS) that estimates the percentage of real followers versus suspicious accounts. You can analyze audience demographics (age, gender, location estimates) and see an influencer's engagement rate compared to similar creators.
2. Pentos
Pentos is designed for monitoring and analyzing TikTok performance. You can use it to track profiles, hashtags, or sounds. For competitor analysis, you can create reports that compare your account's performance against others, measuring metrics like follower growth, engagement, and song usage over time. It helps you see not just a snapshot, but a story of their growth.
3. Infludata
Infludata is another popular choice that lets you search and analyze millions of TikTok profiles. It's great for discovering top-performing content within a specific country or category. You can see lists of the most-viewed videos, track follower leaderboards, and access detailed reports on any public profile - including mentions, a video performance summary, and frequently used hashtags.
What Should You Look For? Putting It All Together
You’ve gathered the data, now it’s time to turn it into actionable insights. Look for patterns in their strategy that you can adapt for your own content. Focus on these key areas:
High-Performing Videos
Filter their videos to find the ones with the most views, likes, or comments. What do these posts have in common?
Format: Are they tutorials, challenges, duets, behind-the-scenes glimpses, or comedy skits?
Sounds & Music: What trending sounds or music did they use?
Topics: What subjects garnered the most interest?
Hooks: How did they start the first 3 seconds of the video to grab attention?
Don't copy their content. Instead, analyze why it worked. Was it educational? Relatable? Shocking? Funny? Figure out the underlying principle and apply it to your own ideas.
Content and Posting Strategy
Look at their overall grid for broader patterns.
Posting Frequency: Are they posting multiple times a day, once a day, or a few times a week? Consistency is key on TikTok, so see what rhythm seems to be working for them.
Content Pillars: Do they stick to 2-3 core themes or "pillars"? For example, a personal finance creator might post about budgeting tips, investing ideas, and debt payoff stories. Identifying their pillars can help you define or refine your own.
Audience Interaction: How do they engage with their comments? Do they reply to questions? Do they "pin" top comments? A highly engaged creator builds a stronger community, which often translates to higher overall engagement.
Final Thoughts
Looking into other people's TikTok analytics is a powerful way to accelerate your own growth. By combining the free, manual methods of checking profiles and videos with the deeper data from third-party tools, you can move past guesswork and create a content strategy based on what's already proven to succeed in your niche.
While analyzing individual platforms like TikTok gives you valuable insights, the real growth comes from understanding your entire customer journey. Connecting the dots between your TikTok Ads, website visitors from Google Analytics, and final sales in Shopify can be a huge manual headache. To make that process simple, we built Graphed. You can connect all your marketing and sales platforms, then use simple English to ask for the dashboards you need - like, "show me how much revenue our latest TikTok campaign generated." It lets you see the full picture in seconds, so you can focus on making smarter decisions instead of spending hours wrangling spreadsheets.