TikTok Creative Center: how to use Top Ads and Trends in 2026

If you've used the Creative Center before, three things are different:

• It moved. The Creative Center now sits under TikTok One's Creative Suite at ads.tiktok.com/creative/creativeCenter. Old bookmarks redirect, though the Top Ads dashboard itself still loads from the older address.
• Trends is slimmer. Logged out, the Trends menu now lists Hashtag, Video and Creator (marked "coming soon"). The old Songs and Keyword Insights pages redirected elsewhere when we checked. They may still exist for logged-in accounts, but don't build a workflow around them without checking.
• The creative tools are now Symphony. TikTok's generative AI tools sit under Symphony Creative Studio, Symphony Automation and the Symphony API.

Most guides you'll find still describe the old layout, so if a menu item they mention is missing, this is why.

Top Ads is the part most marketers come for: a dashboard of high-performing auction ads you can filter, sort and study.

1. Log in first

Logged out, the dashboard shows only a few ads — TikTok's help centre says five; we saw three — and a prompt to log in. A free TikTok for Business account opens the full dashboard and lets you save ads to collections.

2. Filter to your market

According to TikTok's help centre, you can search by product or keyword and filter by:

• Region — the country the ads ran in. It defaults to the United States.
• Industry — the closest match to your category.
• Campaign objective — such as traffic or conversions. Filter to the objective you'll actually run; an awareness ad and a conversion ad are built differently.
• Likes and time frame — it defaulted to the last 30 days when we checked.
• Ad language and ad format — desktop only.

3. Sort by the metric that matches your goal

You can sort by reach, click-through rate, 2-second view rate or 6-second view rate, and on desktop also by conversion rate and likes. Pick deliberately:

• Testing hooks? Sort by 2-second view rate — it tells you which openings stop the scroll.
• Testing the body of the ad? 6-second view rate shows what holds attention past the hook.
• Selling something? Conversion rate or CTR are closer to what you care about than likes.

4. Read the ad card

Each ad shows its likes, a CTR percentile band such as "Top 23%" (a percentile rank, not the CTR itself) and a budget level such as "High". Together they tell you whether an ad earned its reach with engagement or bought it with spend.

5. Open "See analytics"

This is the most useful view in the whole Creative Center. It shows background information on the ad and a second-by-second graph of relative performance, so you can see the exact moment viewers engaged or dropped off. Watch the ad with the graph beside it: where it rises is the bit worth borrowing.

6. Save what's useful

The star button adds an ad to your favourites, and you can group favourites into collections under your profile. The link button copies a shareable link for your team.

Trends shows what's rising on TikTok by country, which is useful for organic content and for ads that should feel native to the feed.

• Hashtag ranks trending hashtags with their category, post count, view count and a trend line, over the last 7 days by default, with a "See analytics" link on each.
• Video shows trending TikTok videos for the same period.
• Creator is listed as "coming soon".

Two cautions. A trending hashtag is only useful if it fits your audience — chasing one that doesn't makes an ad feel forced. And by the time a trend tops the chart, the best moment to join it may have passed; watch the rising ones lower down.

The Creative Tools section points to TikTok's Symphony suite: Symphony Creative Studio for generating TikTok-ready ads with AI, Symphony Automation for refreshing creative assets during delivery, and the Symphony API for building those tools into your own workflow. The Influencer marketing link goes to TikTok One, TikTok's creator marketplace.

These are production tools rather than research tools, so they're worth knowing about but sit outside what most people search the Creative Center for.

• Every ad. Top Ads only includes ads advertisers have authorised. The dashboard itself notes that it may not reflect all top-performing auction ads. You can't count on finding a specific competitor there.
• Spend or results. You see a budget level and percentile bands, not spend, conversions, CPA or ROAS.
• Exact metrics. CTR is shown as a percentile band, and the analytics graph is relative, not absolute.
• Why it worked for that brand. A high-performing ad for a brand with a strong offer and a big following may not transfer to yours.
• How it would do on your account. Only testing tells you that.

That's the key difference from Meta's Ad Library, which shows every active ad from any advertiser. TikTok's equivalent of that is a separate tool — see below.

1. Filter tight: your region, your industry, the objective you'll run, the last 30 days.
2. Sort by 2-second view rate and note the first line and first shot of the top 10 ads. Group them by hook type — problem statement, demonstration, transformation, reaction, question.
3. Open "See analytics" on the strongest three and note where attention peaks.
4. Re-sort by conversion rate to see which structures sell, not just entertain.
5. Brief three tests: one hook type you've never tried, one structure borrowed from a top converter, one native-feeling format.
6. Judge them on your own data, not on how the inspiration performed.

For a taxonomy of hooks with verbatim examples, see our DTC video ad hooks guide.

They are easy to mix up, and they answer different questions:

The Creative Center tells you what works for other advertisers who chose to share it. Your own account tells you what works for you — and that's the data that should decide your next test.

GoMarble connects TikTok Ads alongside Meta, Google and your store, so you can see how your TikTok campaigns perform next to the rest of your ad spend and ask questions about it in plain English — in GoMarble, or in Claude and ChatGPT through the TikTok MCP connection.