Video tracking — measure sponsored TikTok and Instagram videos over time

What it is

Discovery tells you who to hire; tracking tells you whether it worked. Once a deliverable goes live you register its URL (POST /api/videos/track) with a label — own for your placements, competitor for theirs — and an optional cadence_hours. KOLens accepts full URLs, vt.tiktok.com short links, even pasted share-sheet text, and resolves them to the video.

What you get per video

• Metric time-series: views, likes, comments, shares at every snapshot, with 7d/30d deltas and growth velocity (views per hour).
• Content context: caption, hashtags, music, publish date.
• Comment intelligence: sentiment breakdown (positive / neutral / negative) and top comments — purchase intent lives in the comments, not the like count.
• Author audience approximation from the creator's KOLens profile, so reach quality is judged in context.

Read it on the Tracking page in the app, or GET /api/videos/{video_id}/tracking on the API. All tracked videos are listed grouped by label at GET /api/videos/tracked.

How to track a campaign

1. The minute the creator's video goes live, paste its URL into Tracking with label own. Starting at t0 captures the crucial first-48-hours curve.
2. Add the creator's 2–3 recent organic videos as benchmarks — a sponsored video should at least match the account's organic baseline.
3. Track the competitor's placement in the same niche with label competitor.
4. After 7 days, open the comparison (GET /api/videos/compare?video_ids=a,b,c, 2–6 videos): the scoreboard shows the per-metric leader — views, engagement rate, views/hour, net sentiment.
5. Stop tracking (DELETE /api/videos/{video_id}/track) once the campaign report is done; historical snapshots are kept.

Typical scenarios

• Deliverable verification: a TikTok Shop seller tracks every affiliate video; creators whose videos beat their organic baseline get reordered, the rest don't.
• Agency reporting: weekly client reports read straight from tracking curves — no screenshots from creators required.
• Competitive benchmark: track a rival brand's placements to learn which creator tiers and formats actually move in your category.

Advanced usage

• Early viral detection: growth velocity (views/hour) at hour 24 predicts final reach far better than raw views — re-invest in boosting while the video is still climbing.
• Trending alerts: videos from watchlisted creators can trigger trending_video alerts automatically (see Watchlist & alerts) — tracking then gives you the curve behind the alert.
• Agent workflows: via MCP, track_video / get_video_tracking / compare_videos let Claude assemble a campaign report from one prompt.