How do I get the views, likes and shares of a TikTok video from its link?

An agency runs a creator campaign: 50 creators post, and each one sends back a link. The client wants a daily table of plays, likes and shares per video until the campaign ends. Creators do not share their analytics, and opening 50 links every morning is nobody's job. One call per link does it.

Link in, numbers out

TikTok video detail takes either url or id. Full links (tiktok.com/@user/video/…), photo posts (/photo/…) and the short links the app's share button makes (vm.tiktok.com, vt.tiktok.com) all work. What TikTok shows maps to these fields:

On TikTok	Field
Plays	metrics.views
Likes	metrics.likes
Comments	metrics.comments
Shares	metrics.shares
Saves	metrics.favorites

The response also carries the caption, hashtags, published_at, the author's handle and, with view=full, the video length and music under ext.

What tracking costs

Job	Calls	Cost
One video	1	$0.002
50 videos, once	50	$0.10
50 videos, daily for 30 days	1,500	$3.00

A daily snapshot script

Put the links in links.txt, one per line, and run this once a day. Each run appends a dated row per video to stats.csv.

import csv, datetime, os, requests

URL = "https://api.okdata.online/v1/tiktok/videos/get"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['OKDATA_API_KEY']}"}
today = datetime.date.today().isoformat()

with open("links.txt") as f, open("stats.csv", "a", newline="") as out:
    w = csv.writer(out)
    for link in filter(None, (l.strip() for l in f)):
        body = requests.get(URL, headers=H, params={"url": link}, timeout=60).json()
        if body["code"] != "ok":
            print(link, body["code"], body["message"])  # failed calls are not charged
            continue
        v = body["data"]["item"]
        m = v["metrics"]
        w.writerow([today, v["id"], link, m["views"], m["likes"], m["comments"], m["shares"], m["favorites"]])

Things that trip people up

• Each call is a snapshot. Growth curves come from storing the daily rows yourself.
• If TikTok hides the play count, metrics.views is null and meta.unavailable says so. Reposts are never available.
• The author's follower count is empty inside a video. Get it from TikTok account profile.
• A deleted or private video returns not_found, which costs nothing. Keep video IDs as text in spreadsheets; at 19 digits, Excel rounds them.

When something else is better

For videos on your own account, TikTok Studio's analytics are free and add watch time and audience data that public numbers lack. If creators agree to connect their accounts to your tool, TikTok's Display API gives you their stats with consent. For ten links checked once, opening them by hand is fine. For a standing watch on rivals, see competitor monitoring.