TikTok Creative Center Top Ads and Trends: how to use them for ad research

What TikTok Creative Center is in 2026

TikTok's help page About Creative Center (last updated July 2026) calls it a free, public home for creative resources. It lists four parts: Inspiration, which holds Top Ads; Trends, which shows trending hashtags; Creative Tools, which are TikTok's AI video tools; and a Personal Profile with My Collections for saved Top Ads, ad authorization management and a material library.

The product has changed since most guides about it were written. When we checked on October 18, 2026, the Creative Center pages carried the title TikTok One Creative Suite. The old Keyword Insights and Top Products tool URLs redirected to the Creative Center home page. TikTok's Keyword Insights and Top Products help articles redirected to About Creative Center, which no longer names either tool. If a guide tells you to open Inspiration and pick Keyword Insights, you will not find it. This post covers what is there now.

How to use Top Ads

The Top Ads page describes itself as high-performing auction ads on TikTok. TikTok's help page How to use the Top Ads Dashboard (last updated May 2025) gives the steps:

1. 01

   Go to Creative Center and click Log in at the top right. Without a login, TikTok says you see only five ads.

2. 02

   Open Inspiration and choose Top Ads.

3. 03

   Search for a product or keyword, or filter by region, industry, campaign objective, likes and time frame. On desktop you can also filter by ad language and ad format.

4. 04

   Sort by reach, click-through rate, 2-second view rate or 6-second view rate. Desktop adds conversion rate and likes.

5. 05

   Click See Analytics on an ad to see its background details and a graph of relative performance, second by second.

6. 06

   Save the ads you want to study to My Collections in your profile.

Which Top Ads metrics to trust

Top Ads shows relative performance, not the advertiser's real numbers. Ad cards on the live page show likes, a label such as Top 23% CTR, and a budget label such as High budget. You learn that an ad did well against others in its filter, not what it cost or earned. Two things follow from that.

First, read the metric that matches your goal. If you test openings, sort by 2-second or 6-second view rate; those measure the hook, the same idea as Meta's hook rate. If you want clicks, sort by CTR. Reach mostly tells you who spent the most. A high-budget ad with huge reach and an average CTR is a spend story, not a creative lesson.

Second, use the second-by-second graph. TikTok says the analytics help you find the most successful engagement moment in the video. Note where the line rises and drops. A drop at second 2 means the hook lost people; a rise at a product reveal means the reveal worked. That timing is the most useful thing in the tool.

When you run your own tests, put your 2-second and 6-second views into our hook rate calculator to check whether a gap between two openings is real or noise.

How to use Trends

TikTok's How to use Trends page (last updated July 2026) covers hashtags: log in, click Trends, search or filter by industry or time frame, then click See Analytics on a hashtag to see its trendline, related videos, audience insights, regional popularity and related hashtags. Older Creative Center versions also had trending songs, creators and videos. TikTok's current help page and About page mention only hashtags, and the old song and creator links now land on the Trends page.

Use Trends to choose a topic, not to copy a format. A rising hashtag in your industry tells you what people are watching this week. The related videos show how creators shoot it. Read those videos for the angle and the first line, then write your own version. Our UGC hooks library helps turn a trend angle into an opening line.

Keep sound rules in mind. A trending sound in organic videos is not cleared for ads; our TikTok ad specs post covers the Commercial Music Library and the rest of the ad specs, so it is not repeated here.

What happened to Keyword Insights and Top Products

Keyword Insights used to list words and phrases from TikTok ads with metrics such as CTR, impressions and clicks, according to a NetInfluencer guide from April 2023. Top Products showed which products appeared most in ads. Both were useful for writing ad copy and picking products.

As of October 18, 2026, both tool URLs redirect to the Creative Center home, and TikTok's help center has folded their articles into About Creative Center. We could not confirm whether TikTok moved the features into another TikTok One product, so we do not describe a replacement. For keyword and copy ideas today, read the on-screen text and first lines of the top ads in your filter instead. For a second source of competitor creative, see our guide to Meta Ad Library search.

Turning Top Ads research into a brief

A list of saved ads is not a plan. This is the workflow we suggest:

1. 01

   Filter to your region, industry and objective, and a recent time frame. Save 10 to 20 ads to a collection.

2. 02

   For each ad, write down the first line, the format (talking head, demo, unboxing, before and after), the length and the moment where the analytics graph peaks.

3. 03

   Group the ads by format and opening. Pick the two or three patterns that repeat most among ads with high view rates.

4. 04

   Write one brief per pattern in the UGC brief template: the angle, the opening line, the proof, the offer and the call to action. Do not copy the ad; copy the structure.

5. 05

   Draft the scripts with the UGC script template, with two or three openings per brief so the test has something to compare.

6. 06

   Run the test, then compare openings with your own 2-second and 6-second view rates, not the Creative Center labels.

From brief to video

Our creator brief example shows a finished brief. FireplaceUGC can turn the brief into 9:16 MP4 takes with AI actors: Ad Remake rebuilds a structure you studied with your own product and script, and App Demo suits mobile apps. Never present an AI actor as a real customer, and follow the AI ad disclosure rules.