What metrics would you chose for TikTok Live?

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What metrics would you chose for TikTok Live?

Asked at Google over a year ago

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Asked at

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Joe_riley · Answer 1 · 2022-07-01T17:53:04+0000

Context

First off, let's briefly establish a common understanding of just what Tiktok Live is and why users use it. Instead of posting pre-recorded videos, TikTok Live let's creators live stream themselves in real time to their followers. Followers are then able to interact with the creator by commenting, liking, etc.

In order to better understand the big picture, I think it's important to examine this feature in the context of its company and their mission statement. TikTok's mission statement is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok Live helps further this mission statement by giving content creators another way to create joyous content and connect with their followers in a more direct and meaningful way.

Users

We touched upon it above, but I think it is worth explicitly stating that there are two distinct user groups for TikTok Live:

Creators - These are the content creators who will be livestreaming
Followers - These are the users who are probably following the individual content creator and watching their livestream. (caveat: It is possible to discover and watch live streams without explicitly following that creator)

Metrics

There are an innumerable number of metrics we could use to monitor the performance of TikTok live, so in order to provide structure and stay organized I like to group metrics by the different steps of the user lifecycle:

Awareness:

# of Product notification views
# of Live Panel views in the discover tab

Activation

Creators: # of creators who have live streamed at least once
Followers: # of followers who have viewed at least 1 live stream

Adoption:

Creators: # of creators who have live streamed at least 2x in the past month

Followers: # of followers who have viewed at least 2 live streams in the past week

Engagement:

Average number of viewers per livestream
Creators
- Average time spent livestreaming per creator over the past month
- Average live stream duration
- Average number of live streams per creator over the past month
Followers
- Average time spent viewing a livestream
- Average number of livestreams viewed over the past week
- Average number of livestream interactions (like, comment, share, follow) per livestream
- % of followers who view a stream that also interact with it
- # of followers who spent at least 5 minutes watching a livestream in the past week

Retention:

Creators: % of creators who livestreamed at least twice last month who also livestreamed twice this month
Followers: % of followers who spent at least 5 minutes watching a livestreams last week who also spent 5 minutes watching livestreams this week

Monetization:

# of sponsored livestreams over the past week
Average CTR to sponsor profile

Referrals:

total # of livestream shares
Average # of shares per livestream

Prioritization

I think we've done a good job of brainstorming a variety of metrics that serve different needs in terms of monitoring the overall health of TikTok Live. If we were forced to prioritize a few select metrics I would suggest we focus on the engagement metrics. Engagement is the best indicator of whether or not users are getting value out of the product.

In terms of our engagement metrics I would focus on the following:

Average time spent livestreaming per creator over the past month
- This gives us a good sense of whether or not creators find this valuable. It takes more effort to livestream instead of uploading a recorded video so we want to know whether or not the lift in engagement for the creator is worth the effort
- There needs to be a steady supply of livestreams for users to watch so this also measures whether or not there is enough content out there
Average time spent viewing a livestream over the past week
- This lets us know whether or not followers find these livestreams compelling enough to make part of their weekly content consumption
% of followers who view a stream that also interact with it
- To view a stream is engagement but a very low effort form of it, interactions will let us measure how engaged these followers are on a deeper level

Downsides

No metric or set of metrics is perfect so I think it's worth spending a few moments calling out any potential downsides with what we've listed above:

All of our metrics are fairly high level. They don't give us much in terms of granular insight into what types of content performs best in livestreams or which followers are most engaged.
We're kind of examining the feature in a vacuum where as in reality it is part of a much larger platform. We need to keep an eye on how TikTok Live impacts the TikTok platform overall. For example, if users spend more time watching livestreams will the number of recorded video views decrease?
We focused heavily on creators and followers, but the other large part of the TikTok ecosystem we didnt give much attention to is advertisers. Can advertisers create their own TikTok live and promote it? Can they sponsor the livestreams of creators?

Summary

TikTok Live aims to help creators connect with their followers in a more authentic way in real time. To assess whether or not we are accomplishing that goal we will prioritize monitoring engagement on both the creator and follower side via the metrics listed above.

vparam · Answer 2 · 2024-05-30T18:42:31+0000

Feature description & clarifying questions
- TikTok live is a feature that connects creators to their followers
- do we talk about both market side metrics as Tiktok product manager or from just creator perspective the metrics that would be interesting for creators - let us assume the product manager role
- Do we want to focus on technical or business metrics - Let us focus on business
Goal - We will focus on the business metrics for Tiktok live feature and what metrics I will choose as a Live Product Manager
user journey
- A creator create a live session for their followers by clicking on add post button and clicking on go live
- the creator can host meetings, share gifts
- allow followes to watch the live video
- chat and react with the creator and community who have joined the live content
user behaviours
- number of live sessions by creators would
  - impact the engagement in the platform
  - the creator might acquire new followers which could also turn out to be tiktok as a platform and live feature acquiring new users
- Hosting meetings and sharing gifts could facilitate virtual parties that allows increasing the engagement of the creator and platform
- chat and react would increase the engagement and refferal mechnisim of the feature
Impact of metrics to user behavior
- Live session - Aquistions - this has high impact when the features is known to the creator and followers as it will enable creator getting more followers and allow stickiness to the feature
- Hosting meeting & sharing gifts - the virtual live party would allow creators and followers to be on the platform for longer duration of time, hence resulting in higher engagement witht he platform
- Chat and react - Allows both creators and followers to return to future live events and also could enable refferal of the live feature for followers to engage and become creators
Most suitable metrics a Product manager of TikTok Live
- Aquisition and engagement
  - Aquisition - As a product manager I want more folks on either side of creator and follower market to not just become aware of the feature but starting to use the feature
  - engagement
    - the frequency of creators creating the live session means that platform is maximized as virtual live performance than traditional platforms. the more they create it allows increasing the engagement to the platform
    - duration of the live session would also increase the engagement of the platform, resulting in extended stickiness of the product.
The most impactful metric I would choose
- Engagement metrics - that allows me to measure the frequency and duration that the creators and followers are engaged to the platform
  - total live events
  - total participants in the live events
  - average duration of the live events
  - average duration between the live events
  - Live events DAU and MAU

SPD_2017 · Answer 3 · 2022-06-28T00:01:56+0000

Product description: TikTok is a social sharing app that enables users to upload and share short videos upto 60 seconds length. TikTok users view videos that match their profile interests and Tiktok's algorithm provides recommendations on next videos to watch.

Goals:

Tiktok wants to increase the time user spend on their App uploading the content, live sharing, sharing uploaded content, like, comment on other user's content.

Tiktok's monetization strategy is based on in-app purchases, commission from the creators and ads in the form of Tiktok business accounts, challenges.

Which shows the user engagement on platform drives the monetization aspect of their business.

Users journey:

Creator User- creates content, uploads and shares content with followers, deletes content from Tiktok. Live broadcast to followers,
Viewer User - Searches content by topics of interest, followes creators, unfollows creators, views videos, views live videos, likes/comments/shares videos.

Framework:

Adoption /Acquisition : There are millions of users active on Tiktok platform today, the feature became so popular that there are other social media platforms following the same path where YouTube launched YT shorts, IG launched reels to capture the market share. Hence, adoption and acquisition are not an issue for Tiktok.
Retention: With other social media backed up by successful products in other domains breaking into short video sharing and recommendations, I feel it is important for Tiktok to keep check of the user churn and understand how good they are at user retention.
Engagement: As I talked earlier in the goals, the user engagement on Tiktok platform drives monetization as they are closely coupled due to the monetization strategy utilizing user engagement aspect of the App, I want to focus on the engagement as important metric. How much time does a user spend on Tiktok daily? How do they interact/engage with the platform is important to know the success of the business.
Monetization: Tiktok obiviously wants to monetize the platform hence they have recommendations based on user preferences and user activity on Tiktok for in-app purchaes, they infact have developed a virtual currency "Tiktok coins" that users can buy with real money and gift to creators, creators then pay commission to Tiktok. It is important to know health of these Tiktok coin transactions to understand whether monetization strategy needs improvement.

Tradeoffs:

Focusing on the two primary goals of user engagement and monetization sounds good as a metric however, I feel I have not consider the content quality for the engagement section.

Increasing creator engagement will not alway mean quality content so I think there is need to further segment user base on categories based on account age, having an algorithm in place that will provide accurate data to derive engagement for quality content only.

Summarize:

Primary metrics:

I would focus on creator and user engagement with the following metrics-

-% growth in user interactions such as likes, comments over time (D/W/M/Quarterly/YoY)

-% growth in creator content uploads by account age

-% growth in Tiktok coins transactions over time (D/W/M/Quarterly/YoY)

Secondary metrics:

-% growth in followers over time (D/W/M/Quarterly/YoY)

-% growth in gifted coins over time (D/W/M/Quarterly/YoY)

-% growth in views for each category videos, live videos

Moonshot:

- Track content quality, creator segments based on popularity, account age and determine % growth based on this data

Prayansh Ratan · Answer 4 · 2022-06-05T11:40:27+0000

I have a few follow-up questions that I would like to ask -

Which metrics do we track - the Product metrics or the Technical/UX metrics as well? - Both of them
What is the end goal of it? Do we want to track the engagement? The reason I say that is because TikTok already has millions of DAU and at this point Engagement should be the focus for this rather than Acquisition - Yes, the Engagement metrics
Do you want to include metrics for users as well or just for TikTok’s team? Example - TikTok’s DAU is not publicly available to users but users’ number of followers is - Include both

Before jumping into the answer I want to start with describing what TikTok is - TikTok is a short video sharing app where users can share 60 sec videos, like and share and comment on those videos. Once they have viewed a video they can scroll up to load the next one. TikTok’s AI recommendations suggest videos that they might like. TikTok has gained huge popularity amongst millennials and companies like YouTube and Instagram have also followed its footsteps and created Shorts and Reel respectively. Users can also go live just like Instagram and Facebook and share with their followers.

So coming to metrics -

There are two types of metrics -

Engagement Metrics
Technical Metrics

Engagement Metrics - These are the metrics that are used to track the engagement on the live metrics feature for users. These are the following metrics that I would track -

Daily Active Users/Weekly Active Users/Monthly Active Users
Average number of videos watched daily/weekly/monthly
Average view time daily/weekly/monthly
Average number of videos watched per user per day/per week/per month
Average number of comments per video per day/month/weekly
Average number of reactions per videos
Total hours of live content created per day/month/year
Live video retention graph
Average number of shares per video
Total video views per video - organic
Total video views video - paid/sponsored/promoted
Total video views video - autoplayed
Total video views video - unique
Profile visits from live videos
Average follower count delta from live videos
Average number of shares on videos
Average revenue creators generated from live videos per month
Total and Average number of abandoned sessions per user - exited live videos
Total number of users who abandoned the session per video - exited live videos

Technical Metrics - These are the metrics that give us insights into TikTok’s tech, its stability and scalability. These are the following tech metrics that I would track to measure if it’s helpful for users -

Average buffer time weekly/monthly
Total app crashes as a result of playing live videos
Average battery consumption for live videos
Average internet data consumption for live videos
Total app glitches like hang, no video, no sound during live videos