Research TikTok ads and videos in your category

The quality of TikTok research depends on the words you search with, so Kite starts by choosing them carefully. It uses the terms your buyers and competitors use for your product, not the broad name of your industry.

Say you sell a shared inbox for small support teams. Searching "customer support" on TikTok would return career advice, call-center humor, and hour-long courses. Kite would search terms like these instead:

• "shared inbox," which names the product
• "support inbox," which is how many buyers describe the problem
• the names of the two competitors your website compares itself with
• a format you might make, such as "day in the life support team," if you've said you want that kind of video

Kite proposes the list and explains each choice. You can add terms, remove them, or swap in the words your customers actually use. A short, specific list produces far better research than a long, vague one.

Kite searches paid TikTok ads and organic TikTok videos in the same pass, because on TikTok the two blur together. It uses TrendTrack, a research source built into Kite, to search TikTok's ads and organic videos by keyword. For an online store, Kite can also look at the TikTok ads and videos tied to that particular store, which is the most direct way to see what one ecommerce competitor runs.

When Kite is gathering material for a video, it also searches TikTok directly for short videos on your terms. For each one, it records the video's link, its caption, the creator, the number of views, and the length.

Kite can check the other places your competitors put video at the same time. It looks up a competitor's current Facebook and Instagram ads from its website address alone, and it searches Meta's ad library by keyword to see video ads across your category. Brands often run the same creative on TikTok and Instagram Reels, so this fills in the picture when a competitor's TikTok results are thin.

Before it reads anything, Kite filters the results. It keeps organic videos that are short-form and actually talk about your terms. It keeps ads that use your terms together in their headline, text, or brand name, rather than ads that mention one of your words in passing somewhere in a long description. Ads from competitors you named stay in whatever they say.

Kite ranks the results by the few signals that point to success, because view counts alone mislead. Ads and organic videos each have a different signal, and Kite reads them differently.

For ads, Kite looks at how long each one has run. An ad library doesn't show spend, clicks, or sales. It shows that an ad ran and for how long. An ad a brand has kept paying for over several months is one it values, so Kite ranks live ads by how long they've been running and leads with the longest-running ones. It reports them as ads that have run a long time, not as ads that convert, because that's all the library can show.

For organic videos, Kite compares each video with its creator's usual results. A video from a large account with a million views may just be a typical day for that account. A video with 200,000 views from a creator whose other videos average 5,000 is a breakout, and it tells you something about the idea itself. Kite compares each video's views with the same creator's other videos in the results, so the ideas that genuinely broke through rise to the top.

Kite also tells you how complete the research is. Keyword searches return a sample of whatever matched your words, not a count of everything a brand runs on TikTok. When a search comes back empty, Kite says so and explains the likely reason, rather than telling you that a competitor doesn't advertise there.

Once it has the strongest examples, Kite reads them and finds the patterns you can act on. It reads each caption, headline, and ad text, along with the transcript when one is available, and organizes what it finds in a few ways:

• Hooks. The opening line or moment that stops the scroll, such as a question, a surprising number, or a before-and-after.
• Promises. What each ad tells the viewer they'll get: a lower price, a faster result, proof from other customers, or a problem avoided. Kite names each group in the brands' own words and counts how many ads use it.
• Offers and claims. Every discount, trial length, guarantee, and number, quoted exactly as the ad states it.
• Formats. Talking to camera, a screen recording, a product demo, a skit, or a reaction to another video, along with the typical length.
• Landing pages. For the longest-running ads, Kite opens the page each ad sends people to and records its headline, its offer, and whether the page keeps the ad's promise.

Here's what that might look like for the shared inbox company. Among the ads and videos Kite found, the longest-running ads open with a support lead showing a messy personal inbox, and most of them promise "never miss a customer email again." The breakout organic videos are short screen recordings that show one feature in under twenty seconds. None of the competitors' ads mention price. That tells you which hook to test first, which format to start with, and where you could stand apart.

If you want to compare your category with your own advertising, Kite can look up your own ads alongside your competitors' and show you the promises they make that you don't, and the ones only you make.

Kite uses the research to make your first TikTok work, so the patterns become something you can post. What it makes depends on what you want next.

Video ideas. When Kite plans a short video for you, it searches TikTok and your competitors' video ads first and drafts several directions from what it finds. Each direction is built on a true detail about your company, and when one borrows from a video in the research, Kite says exactly what it borrows: the structure, the hook, or the format. It never borrows a creator's footage, brand, or lines. The videos Kite found sit beside the ideas on the video project, so you can watch the original before you choose. Once you pick a direction, Kite makes the video, vertical and fifteen to thirty-four seconds long unless you ask for something else.

TikTok ad text. Kite writes TikTok ad text in your brand's voice, using the hooks and promises that held up in the research. It checks every line against TikTok's limits and delivers the variations as a batch for your team to review. You then run them in your own TikTok Ads Manager account.

A swipe file. Kite can publish the research as a hosted page with the ads and videos it found, the patterns it saw, and the reasoning behind its suggestions. You can share the link with a designer, a freelancer, or the rest of your team.

TikTok changes quickly, so the research gets stale. You can ask Kite to run the same searches again every month and tell you what's new. Kite saves what it found in your team's knowledge base, so each new round can show which ads competitors stopped running and which ones they added.