Supercharge Ads on TikTok with 1st Party Tracking Data

Intelligent, performance-based digital marketing is more important for eCommerce storefronts now than ever. A successful digital marketing campaign is a simple and effective way to draw attention to your business.

If you manage a Shopify storefront—TikTok may be one of the most effective platforms for marketing your business. Data from a 2022 Bazaarvoice survey indicates that 20.6% (1/5) of TikTok shoppers say they buy goods from TikTok “all the time”. That’s more than any other social media platform.

So if you’re not already marketing your business on TikTok, you should be!

But how do you ensure that your marketing is performing optimally? Well, it’s no secret that data and analytics are critical to your business's digital marketing success. But the real secret to success is tracking the right data—first-party data.

What is First-Party Data?

As changes in privacy policies limit access to second or third-party data, first-party data has begun making its way into the spotlight. On TikTok specifically, first-party data is becoming increasingly essential to marketers.

First-party data is your direct line of data between your audience and your business. Tracking this data can arguably give you the most insightful and accurate information. This is the data collected directly from any customers or audiences that visit, purchase, or even interact with your business. But again: You cannot just send the collected data back via a script or “pixel”. If you only do that, a lot of essential information gets stripped out.

Using First-Party Data with TikTok Ads

Leveraging first-party data in your TikTok advertising strategy can open new doors for your business and help you level up your ads. But how can you use this first-party data to supercharge your TikTok ads?

First-party data gives you accurate information on the audience that interacts with your content or business. This information includes location, demographics (age, gender, etc,), (purchasing) behaviors, and engagement. Engagement will reveal your audience’s interests. Knowing what kinds of content and businesses your audience interacts with will give you a better sense of their purchasing behavior and interests as well.

Having access to all of this first-party data will allow you to see what kind of person is interacting with your business. From here, you can target your TikTok ads to reach lookalike audiences (audiences similar to your existing customers).

According to data collected by the Winterberry group in 2020, experts predict that first-party data will prove to be most useful in predictive modeling/segmentation. Simply put, this first-party data can be used to identify customers who have a high likelihood of purchasing something based on their past purchasing behaviors.

Accessing first-party data will also allow you to see how your TikTok advertisements are performing. This data gives you direct insight into how your audience interacts you’re your business/content. From here you will have a better idea of how to optimize your marketing campaign to achieve the most success.

The bottom line is that leveraging first-party data allows you to better target your TikTok advertisements as well as optimize your ads for better conversions, reduce CAC, and increase reach. And with first-party data being that direct line of information between you and your audience, you can be sure that you have the most accurate information on your audience or customer.

Accessing First-Party Data on TikTok

Advertising on TikTok is no doubt something that most Shopify merchants should be testing in their marketing mix. To create a TikTok advertising campaign, all a merchant has to do is go through the TikTok For Business Ads Manager. TikTok For Business Ads Manager allows businesses to create original, shareable content that is displayed to audiences as an in-feed video commercial. These advertisements can be targeted and tracked via TikTok analytics.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations to the app’s analytics platform. When accessing your analytics via TikTok Analytics, you’ll be able to view three analytic categories:

Overview – This shows you your account’s follower growth, video views, profile views, likes, comments, and shares over the last 7, 28, or 60 days.

Content - This category gives you information on total views, total likes, comments, shares, average watch time, percentage of viewers who watched the entire video, traffic source type (where viewers found your videos), and audience territories.

Followers - This includes information such as your audience's location, the times of day or week when they are most active on TikTok, and the change in follower growth over the previous period.

Notice anything about the data provided by TikTok Analytics?

If you answered that there seems to be a lack of first-party data, you would be correct. Unfortunately, using TikTok Analytics on its own won’t give you very much information in terms of first-party data.

When spending money on TikTok advertising, you want to get as much information and data as possible. That way you don’t end up throwing money down the drain on advertisements.

First-party data analytics by Trackify or other similar apps will give you exactly the information you need to track the success of your marketing campaigns, determine audience buying behaviors, target your ads with more precision, and just see more overall success with your TikTok advertisements.

The good news is that there are ways to access first-party data outside of TikTok’s analytics suite to complement the data needed to take your marketing campaigns to more efficient levels. Using an analytics tracking platform built on Shopify that gives you access to first-party data will help your see better success with your TikTok ad campaigns.

To take your Shopify marketing to the next level, try out Trackify free for 14-Days.

‍