Engagement Patterns in TikTok: An Analysis of Short Video Ads

Short videos have become one of the dominant formats of social media content. Such short videos are often boosted by advertising to increase their reach and visibility. We investigate user churn (i.e., drop or loss of consumers during the video viewing) of short video ads on TikTok. Data from the TikTok Ads account of an e-commerce company was analyzed using logistic regression to examine how gender, age groups, and video duration affect users' video viewing behaviors. The findings indicate that (1) most customers leave the ads within the first quarter of the video; (2) males and females exhibit similar viewing behaviors, but (3) age groups vary by their viewing behaviors. Somewhat surprisingly, we discovered that (4) there is no significant correlation between user churn and ads performance metrics (i.e., cost-per-mille, cost-per-click, and click-through rate).