Influencer Analytics | Measurement & KPIs for Influencer Marketing
With billions of people active on social media and countless marketing dollars devoted to influencer marketing initiatives, brands are reinventing their practices with influencers at the helm.
But for brands to prove ROI, they’ll need to define how to measure their influencer marketing initiatives. That’s why we’re sharing a few tips on how to track influencer marketing analytics and KPIs.
Why Are Influencer Marketing Metrics Important?
Tracking and measuring your influencer marketing campaigns is important because concepts like influencer marketing, which are still relatively fresh, need to prove their efficacy to continue.
What is one of the most important parts of running any campaign?
Simple: proving that it’s successful.
Collecting both qualitative and quantitative analytics on your influencer marketing campaigns will help paint a clear picture of your campaign’s viability. And when it comes time to present your progress in an influencer marketing report, you’ll have all the data you need to show why influencer marketing is a vital part of your marketing mix.
But the first step in measuring your campaign? Setting a series of goals.
Goal-setting is an important step because it allows brands to think of each goal as a concrete benchmark to plan for and reach. Breaking down goals into smaller pieces is a method that makes larger initiatives easier to act on and reach.
When considering the goals of your influencer marketing campaign, consider these ideas:
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- How much traffic do I want to bring in? How much should be organic vs. paid?
- What level of brand awareness do I want to achieve?
- Do I want to reach a new audience demographic, and if so, what is it?
- Do I want to increase sales on a specific product or increase sales overall?
Asking yourself these questions will help you determine which KPIs to focus on. In the following section, we’ll dive into our top 9 influencer marketing KPIs and ways to improve them.
9 KPIs To Improve Influencer Marketing Measurement
When measuring your influencer marketing campaigns, there are several KPIs that will benefit you. Combine these metrics for a clear understanding of your campaigns’ progress, success, and where to improve.
1. Engagement
What is it? Engagement is one of the most vital KPIs in measuring influencer marketing success. This is the metric that measures how many people are paying attention to your campaigns. It measures a combination of elements including comments, shares, clicks, and interactions.
Why it’s important: Because engagement gives the clearest picture of your campaign’s viability and influence, we recommend prioritizing this as the primary KPI to measure, depending on your goals.
2. Follower Growth Rate & Authenticity
What is it? Your follower growth rate measures how your branded social media accounts are gaining or losing followers compared to previous months. Partnering with influencers, who can create calls to action (CTAs) to follow your brand channels, are an organic way to improve this rate.
You calculate this number by dividing the number of followers you gained by the number of followers you started with, times 100%. So, for example, if your Instagram page started with 1,000 and now you have 10,000, your growth rate would be 900%.
Authenticity is the quality of these followers. Your authenticity would be negatively impacted if your accounts gained a high number of bot followers or purchased followers.
Why it’s important: Follower growth rate and authenticity help you to determine how your social media account growth is going. It also helps you evaluate which influencers are best to work with. If growth has slowed over time, or authentic followers have decreased, this presents an opportunity to dive deeper into why this may be.
Additionally, when evaluating potential influencer partners, their follower growth rate is a good metric to consider when determining their efficacy. The more influencers you work with who have strong presences and followings, the bigger boost your brand will receive in follower growth rate and authenticity.
3. Cost Per Engagement (CPE)
What is it? Cost per engagement is a metric that calculates your total influencer marketing campaign budget and divides it by the number of followers taking action on your campaign’s posts. This metric calculates the average price spent on each engagement.
Why it’s important: Reporting on your CPE can highlight the creator content that users and followers are engaging with the most. This can help you determine where to allocate more marketing dollars and which influencer-generated content (IGC) would be viable to repurpose elsewhere. CPE provides a realistic benchmark for brands to measure future influencer collaborations.
4. Brand Mentions
What is it? Brand mentions occur when someone references a company, brand, or service online. It’s not just an @ mention on Twitter – brand mentions are calculated from the number of times a brand’s name appears in a rating or review, a blog post, social media post, news article, and more.
Why it’s important: Brand mentions impact a company’s online reputation – not all mentions are good! The context for each mention is key. If the sentiment related to your brand mentions is negative, influencers can help boost this by creating positive, authentic sponsored content.
5. Audience Information
What is it? To better reach your target audience, segmenting them into different groups or personas based on interests, hobbies, and preferences can make it easier to track their activity. Furthermore, it also allows you to develop personalized messaging and forge a deeper connection.
Why it’s important: Knowing your target audience is an important element of a successful influencer marketing campaign. But by digging deeper into your audience’s preferences, you’ll be able to collect even more data on their patterns and online habits to further position your influencer marketing campaigns where they’ll see them. We recommend evaluating potential creator partners by the audience they reach and how they align with your targets.
6. Impressions, Clicks, & Click-Through Rates (CTR)
What are they: Impressions, clicks, and click-through rates are an increasing scale of action among online engagement metrics that drive toward intent among your target audience.
Impressions are the number of times a user sees an advertisement or piece of sponsored content. With impressions, no action is taken.
A click, which is a form of engagement, occurs when – you guessed it – a user clicks on an ad.
The click-through rate, or CTR, is calculated by taking the number of impressions (the total number of users who saw your ad or content) and dividing it by the number of clicks (the total number of users who engaged with the ad).
For example, if your ad had 8,000 impressions and 40 clicks, your CTR would be 0.5%.
Why they’re important: Impressions, clicks, and CTRs are a great way to measure engagement because it is a strong indicator of which pieces of content are resonating best with your audience. This will help you determine the types of content that perform best in a particular avenue.
7. Traffic & Pageviews
What is it: traffic and pageviews refer to the number of users on your site at any given time. They may not necessarily be actively making a purchase, but they are navigating in some capacity.
Traffic refers to the number of users on your site at any given time. Google remembers individual users and will note if they visit your site more than once.
Pageviews refer to each time a user navigates to a new page on your site. Many pageviews conducted by one single user add up to a single visit to your site, otherwise known as a session.
Why it’s important: Measuring the amount of traffic on your website is a strong indicator of how your advertising efforts are paying off. When you incorporate trackable elements into your influencer marketing efforts (more on that later), you’ll be able to better attribute web traffic to specific campaigns.
8. Shares
What is it? A social post’s shares indicate how many times a user has shared your content on a social media platform. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more social platforms give users the ability to share content to their pages.
Why it’s important: The more a post is shared, the greater visibility the post gets. Post sharing is a great metric to collect because it is an accurate gauge of content that interests and resonates with your audience. That’s why a lot of businesses focus on social share as a way to capture measurement.
9. Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
What is it? Cost per thousand (CPM), or cost per mille (which means “thousand” in Latin), is a payment option or measure of effectiveness where a brand pays a static price for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives.
Why it’s important: Even though impressions don’t equate to action, visibility is an important part of measuring the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign. Adding CPM into your budget will help you account for spreading awareness, interest, and visibility while explaining for lack of action taken by users.
From a more granular influencer marketing perspective, CPM measures the effectiveness of the creators you work with and enables you to set a benchmark for future campaigns for which you can analyze progress and success.
Pro-tip: According to the marketing rule of 7, prospective buyers typically need to hear a company’s message 7 times before they take action.
Tracking Influencer Marketing Metrics
Why is tracking your influencer marketing campaigns so important?
Tracking your campaigns helps you collect accurate metrics that you can then report on to show your campaign’s effectiveness. In a world where initiatives that fail to prove their worth are quickly discarded, it is important to show that the dollars spent on your campaign are yielding strong results.
But if you’re just getting started in influencer marketing and have a lot to prove, don’t let this scare you. Tracking your metrics also helps you determine where to make adjustments for future successes – and this can also help you determine holes in your broader marketing strategy. Here are a few ways to track your influencer marketing metrics:
Use Custom URLs
Platforms like Mavrck allow brands to create custom URLs, which help you monitor website traffic coming from specific social media posts or creators. This allows brands to better attribute clicks, sessions, and conversions to your influencer marketing campaign. It also helps you to see which creators are driving the most clicks and conversions overall.
Assign Discount Codes
Similar to custom URLs, discount codes have the bonus of providing an incentive to the influencer sharing the code as well as the audience. Discount codes typically have a strong engagement rate and are trackable through various platforms.
Use A Platform Like Mavrck To Track Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Mavrck’s reporting functionalities allow your brand to track its influencer marketing campaigns and collect powerful insights on campaigns. Our analytics platform lets brands measure the full life cycle of influencer activation, including impressions, engagements, clicks, and conversions.
Learn more about how our robust influencer marketing measurement tools can help you level up your campaigns.
Conclusion: How Can Brands Measure Influencer Marketing?
Engagement, follower growth rate, traffic, shares, CPE, and more are just one of many KPIs that you’ll want to measure when analyzing your influencer marketing program’s success. In addition, you’ll also want to make sure that your KPIs are supporting larger goals so that you can showcase the efficacy of running these programs in support of your brand’s product and sales goals.
One of the best things about running your influencer marketing campaign through Mavrck is that our platform provides robust reporting options to help you measure your KPIs and deliver accurate, efficient analytics on your initiatives.
Not only can you save time by automating the end-to-end management of campaigns, but you’ll be able to prove ROI with easy reporting options. It’s just one of many reasons over 5,000 global enterprise brands trust Mavrck to help them run influencer marketing campaigns that work.
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