A TikTok search research tool is quietly helping brands find content and product gaps.
It’s called Creator Search Insights, and TikTok released it a few years ago to help creators come up with content ideas.
Basically, Creator Search Insights flags for you highly-searched terms that generated few clicks—since there was so little content (or so few products) to serve the need.
Think of Creator Search Insights as TikTok’s version of Google Trends. It’s next-level market research.
You can see all of the high-intent queries that people are searching, and you can identify which are significantly underserved by existing content.
By making content along these lines, or by pulling those terms into your ad copy or product details page, you can significantly improve your brand’s reach on TikTok.
TikTok Search Insights as an idea engine
We wrote a guide to TikTok Shop earlier this year. It’s a fast-growing marketplace that’s an essential discovery engine for your brand.
Younger shoppers in particular first discover products on TikTok, then buy them on other marketplaces.
The hard part for many brands, of course, is finding their place on TikTok. Just posting a couple times each month isn’t going to cut it.
To win on TikTok, you need to be constantly creating content.
And that means finding pockets of unmet need on the platform.
Used right, Creator Search Insights can be your idea-generation engine.
One clear use case of Creator Search Insights is around content. You can use it to identify keywords relevant to your product where a strong product-focused video can generate conversions.
Build a strong list of TikTok keywords to target. Locate these keywords, use them for your videos, or slip them into your other TikTok content.
You can pepper these keywords into your ad copy, or into the product detail page of your TikTok Shop listings.
Attaching keywords is easier than ever: just last month, TikTok rolled out a new option to tag your content and products with your own keywords.
The new “Manage search keywords” tool lets brands and creators upload specific keywords they want to target for all of their content and products.
So, once you identify under-served keywords, you can target them with a click of a button.
What about product-specific search insights?
If you’re a brand that sells on TikTok Shop, you can also access a specific version of Search Insights that’s focused on product searches.
As Paul Harvey recently outlined, brands can use TikTok’s Search Insights to quickly pull up a list of product-specific searches that generated few (or no) orders.
Create a list of under-served keywords, and then sort it by the highest number of searches, so you surface the best opportunities first.
These can be incredibly strong leads. Some experts have found search terms netting as many as 10k searches per month with zero conversions.
If a term like this is relevant to your product, it’s a goldmine. Add it to your product or your content, and you might suddenly get a ton of new visibility.
Search Insights makes keyword-mining like this easy: within this TikTok dashboard, you can hit “Add Product” and map those high-converting keywords back to your product.
Ready to maximize your use of TikTok Shop?
Intentwise pipelines and joins together your TikTok ads and retail data, letting you see a comprehensive view of your TikTok performance in the same place where you manage your other channels.
Get access to a suite of TikTok performance dashboards, so you can see which products need a visibility boost from Search Insights. Schedule a call with us today to learn more.
