You need the TikTok connection when you want to track in gas how your TikTok profile is growing and how individual videos are doing. Until the connection exists, the TikTok section in the application stays empty.
With TikTok the connection is shorter than with the other networks. You do not pick a profile from a list: one login links exactly the profile you are signed in with on TikTok. One TikTok profile therefore equals one connection in gas. If you want to track two profiles, you go through the whole procedure twice, each time under a different TikTok account.
Before you start
- Have the login details ready for the TikTok account whose profile you want to track. You enter the password on the TikTok page, gas never sees it or stores it.
- A regular TikTok account is enough. TikTok does not require a business or creator account for this connection, the only condition is that the profile already has some videos on it. It does, however, pass on only the public videos of the profile, so videos set to private or friends only will not reach gas, and a profile switched to private mode will send none at all.
- Check which account you are currently signed in with on TikTok in your browser. During the connection TikTok does not ask you to choose a profile, it links the account it finds you signed in with.
- A customer account is the company or destination whose data you follow in gas. If you work in several customer accounts, you need the Administrator or User role in the one you are assigning the profile to. The Viewer role only views data and cannot change connections. Only an Administrator may remove a profile from a customer account.
A service connection belongs to the user account of whoever signed in, whereas the connected profile belongs to the customer account. That is why it happens that you see no TikTok in Settings → Connected services even though the data is in the application: somebody else on the team linked the profile. You will find the full picture in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts in the Who links the account column, where the e-mail of the connection owner is shown as a link. So agree on a new connection with the customer account administrator in advance. They can see what is connected, who connected it and what state it is in, so they will tell you whether a new connection is needed at all. The article Who linked the account covers this in detail.
Procedure
- Open Settings and go to the Connected services section.
- In the left column with the list of platforms, click Tiktok accounts. On a phone there is a drop-down list instead of the column, where you select the same item. An overview of the TikTok profiles you have linked opens.
- Click the Add TikTok profile button. As long as you have no profile linked, a card with the message "You have no linked Tiktok profile." is shown instead of the table and the button is inside that card.
- gas redirects you to the TikTok pages. Sign in with the account whose profile you want to track, or confirm the account you are already signed in with.
- TikTok asks whether you allow the application access to the basic profile details, to its statistics (numbers of followers, likes and videos) and to the list of your videos. Confirm the access. Without confirmation no connection is created and TikTok returns you with the message "You cancelled the account linking. Try again and complete the access approval."
- TikTok returns you to gas. For a moment you see the message Processing, then the Tiktok accounts list opens with a new row carrying the name of your profile. The connection is done.
What happens next
The linked profile stays in the Tiktok accounts list and you work with it like this:
- Renaming. The Name column holds the profile name taken from TikTok. Click the edit icon in the row, overwrite the name and save it with the confirm icon. The new name applies only inside gas, nothing changes on TikTok.
- Assignment to customer accounts. If you have access to several customer accounts, the table has an extra Customers column and an icon in the row for changing it. The Customer account assignment dialog opens, where you move accounts from the Accounts to select list to the Assigned accounts list and save your choice with the Confirm selection button. This is how you decide in which customer accounts the profile data appears.
- Filtering by destination. This switch concerns destination management companies. When it is on, gas counts only videos tagged with the hashtags of the destination or of your campaigns. Company profiles leave it off.
Data starts downloading on its own, you do not start anything else. The download runs roughly once an hour, so you will usually see the first numbers within a few hours of connecting. You will find them in the left menu in the TikTok section, which has the pages Overview, Followers, Likes, Views and Videos.
From TikTok, gas tracks:
- for the profile, the number of followers, likes, video views and the number of published videos,
- for individual videos, views, likes, comments, shares and video length.
The scope is narrower than for Facebook and Instagram, because of what TikTok itself releases. The interface gas takes the numbers from offers only profile details and details of its public videos. It contains no audience demographics (age, gender, country) at all. TikTok does not pass those numbers out, it shows them only in its own analytics directly in the TikTok application. So this is not something gas would be leaving out. For the same reason TikTok ad accounts cannot be linked in gas, the TikTok section covers only the profile and its videos.
On top of that, TikTok always sends only the current state, not history. For the profile you get today's number of followers, likes and videos, for a video the total number of views, likes, comments and shares since publication. Neither of those numbers is broken down by day. gas therefore calculates the daily development from the difference between individual measurements, and it only starts filling up from the moment of connecting. Older videos will appear in the list with their total counts, but their day-by-day history cannot be filled in retroactively. The practical consequence is simple: the sooner you link the profile, the longer the time series you will have.
How long the connection lasts. The permission you grant on TikTok is not permanent. TikTok issues gas short-term access valid for 24 hours, plus a permission with which gas renews it by itself, valid for one year. You do not have to look after the renewal, it runs in the background. You need to sign in again once that one-year validity runs out, or sooner if the access ends some other way: you remove gas from the applications you granted access to in your TikTok settings, TikTok blocks or deletes the account, or the age listed for the account changes. In all these cases gas warns you with a Paused label and a notification, see below.
You can verify that everything is in order in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts. The profile has its own row under the TikTok network there and the Who links the account column shows the e-mail of the person the connection belongs to.
Common problems: connecting and signing in
A different profile was linked than I wanted
Which profile gets linked is determined by the account you are signed in with on TikTok. Go to TikTok, sign out or switch to the right account and start the connection again with the Add TikTok profile button. Remove the profile linked by mistake using the procedure below.
I want to link a second profile
Repeat the procedure, but switch the account on TikTok before the sign-in step. Each sign-in adds exactly one profile.
gas says the OAuth state does not match
The full message reads "The OAuth state does not match. You probably switched to a different browser or device." The connection started in one browser and ended in another, which happens for example after opening a link in a different application. Click Try again and carry out the whole connection in one browser on one device.
I cancelled the access approval on TikTok
You will see the message "You cancelled the account linking. Try again and complete the access approval." Click Try again and confirm the access on the next pass.
Common problems: interrupted data and profile ownership
The profile shows Paused and a yellow bar Connection paused
It means the connection has stopped working. gas states the reason: you disconnected the application in your TikTok settings, TikTok blocked the account, the account age changed or a TikTok administrator cancelled the connection. Click Reconnect and sign in again with the same account. You have 14 days to restore it, the exact date is also in the notification. If you restore the connection within that period, the data is kept. Once it passes, gas deletes the related data.
The profile shows Missing permission
The connection itself works, but gas has lost the permission to track this particular profile. The row also shows the date from which the data is missing. Use the Reconnect button and confirm access to the profile and to the video list again when signing in.
Data stopped arriving and the profile was linked by a colleague who no longer works here
This is the most common cause of suddenly missing data. As soon as your colleague's TikTok account is deleted or their access to the profile is taken away, the connection stops working, even though you still see the profile in the application. Do not delete the profile, you would lose the data collected so far.
- A colleague who does have access to the profile on TikTok takes the connection over.
- They open Settings → Connected services → Tiktok accounts and click Add TikTok profile.
- They sign in under that profile. The connection passes to them and the profile keeps its history and its assignment to customer accounts.
For networks where the profile is chosen from a list (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads, Google Analytics), gas offers to take ownership of the profile in a dialog with the message "Profile ... was linked by user ... You can take ownership of it and thereby change its settings and availability for customer accounts." No such dialog appears for TikTok, the takeover happens through the sign-in itself.
I see no TikTok in Connected services, yet the data is in the application
The connection belongs to whoever signed in, and you see only your own. Look in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts, the Who links the account column shows the e-mail of the colleague the connection belongs to. As long as data keeps arriving, there is nothing to do and you should not create a second connection for the same profile.
The Who links the account column says Nobody
The row is also highlighted as an error. The profile has no live connection, so no data comes into it. Somebody with access to the profile on TikTok has to link it again, using the procedure in this article.
Another team member wants to link the same profile
With TikTok the connection always passes to whoever signed in last, and it disappears from the original owner's Tiktok accounts list. Neither the data nor the settings are lost, but agree on this change with the customer account administrator in advance so they know about the ownership transfer.
Common problems: assignment, removal and missing data
I cannot assign the profile to a customer account
In the Customer account assignment dialog the reason is shown next to the unavailable account: Limit reached (the number of profiles for this network in your plan is used up), No permission (you do not have the required role in the account), Feature not in plan or Invalid license (expired subscription). The solution is in the hands of the customer account administrator: upgrading the plan, changing your role or renewing the subscription.
I want to remove a profile
- In the profile row, click the bin icon labelled Delete profile and confirm your choice with the Delete button. The profile data is removed from gas, nothing is deleted on TikTok's servers.
- If the profile is used by a scheduled report, the Unlink TikTok account? dialog also opens, listing the reports and offering the option Remove unlinked profiles from these reports as well.
- After confirming, you get the message "The profile has been scheduled for deletion." in the application.
You can link the profile again at any time, using the same procedure as the first time.
The data has not appeared even after a longer wait
Check three things: that you are switched to the right customer account, that the profile is assigned to this customer account (the Customers column, or Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts), and that the period selected on the page is one that already contains some data. If you still see nothing, write to us through the contact form.