How to Measure Influencer Marketing Campaigns

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Influencer Marketing Measurement | How to Measure for Success

As a marketing professional working closely on your brand’s influencer programs, you already know that identifying your initiatives’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help you achieve stronger campaign results over time.

Influencer marketing is measured by taking several factors into account. To maximize your campaign’s return on investment (ROI), you’ll want to focus on measurements surrounding brand, sales, and channel lift. You’ll also want to consider savings related to time, media costs, content production, and software usage.

But above all, make sure to identify your campaign objective from the get-go. Without naming a goal, you won’t be able to accurately contextualize your measurements and successes.

What is Influencer Marketing Measurement?

Influencer marketing measurement is the way in which marketers measure their influencer campaign’s performance. It’s important to demonstrate to your team and leadership how your campaigns have succeeded and contributed toward pre-determined business objectives.

There are a series of metrics that help marketers prove the effectiveness of their influencer marketing campaigns. Measurement is necessary for marketers to receive continued buy-in from decision-makers, along with the budget to continue running their programs.

Influencer marketing measurement relies on metrics such as engagement, follower growth rate, cost per engagement (CPE), brand mentions, audience information, impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTRs), website traffic, and page views. We also recommend measuring the trust coefficient, described to the left.

Combined, many of these metrics allow marketers to calculate earned media value (EMV). While we see EMV as an outdated method of reporting, some marketers still prefer to utilize this.

With such a variety of metrics to track and record, it may be confusing to determine your next steps. Therefore, crafting a measurement plan is the next thing on your to-do list.

How to Create an Influencer Marketing Measurement Plan

To create an effective plan to measure your influencer marketing programs, first think through the sales funnel and how consumers experience the following at each stage: attention, interest, desire, and action.

Get Attention from Your Customers

The first step in crafting your influencer marketing measurement plan is to track the ways you’ve attracted attention from your potential customers. What channels have you used to turn heads?

For this stage, you want to focus on getting your consumers to be curious about your product or service and ask: What is it? With this in mind, make sure to have lots of information available for customers to easily reach that conclusion.

It’s the top of our proverbial funnel because often, many consumers will ask the question – but not everyone will act on their curiosity.

Are New Consumers Interested In Your Product?

After getting your customer’s attention, the next stage of the funnel is generating interest. They will ask, “I wonder if this product or service is for me?”

They may spend time perusing your website, reading reviews, checking out your social media, and consuming other forms of content to determine if they need your brand in their lives.

The metrics most closely associated with interest include pageviews, website traffic, social media impressions, and views. You can also look at new social media followers.

Do They Want Your Product?

After exploring their interest in your brand, consumers move onto stage three: desire. As in, they have decided that they want your product or service in their lives.

Yes, they’ve determined that they like what you’re offering, but oftentimes this is the point where some consumers will drop off. Perhaps this drop-off is due to the availability or cost deterring them from making a purchase.

That said, some metrics associated with this stage are more action-driven. If someone is liking, commenting, or sharing your social media content, there’s a good chance they are interested in purchasing or have already purchased from your brand.

Take Action!

The fourth and most exciting part of the sales funnel is action. Conversion occurs when a consumer has purchased a product or service from your brand.

While action is the end goal, it takes a lot of planning and execution to get to this step. In fact, consumers need an average of seven to eight touchpoints before they make a purchase decision.

That’s a lot of time spent in the attention, interest, and desire stages of the funnel before even reaching action. Because the process can be lengthy, we recommend recording metrics from the previous stages as part of your overall reporting. It paints a clearer picture of the buyer’s journey and the story behind the time it takes to reach the actionable purchasing phase.

How to Track Influencer Marketing

While measuring influencer marketing and its associated sales data differs per brand, there are a few key methods to monitor how influencers impact your overall funnel and sales goals. One method is to include a custom URL, UTM code, or personal discount code in your creative brief.

This is a valuable practice because it allows marketers to attribute sales and other metrics to specific content creators. When brands can pinpoint the creators who are getting the best engagement and driving the most conversions, there’s an opportunity to reactivate these partners on a regular basis, even within an ambassador program.

Personal Discount Codes for Influencers

An easy way to track influencer performance is by creating unique codes for each creator to share in their content. If you’ve ever seen a sponsored ad where the influencer includes something like “Use code MyName20 to get 20% off!” then you’re already familiar with the gist of how discount codes work.

This is beneficial because not only do the consumers get rewarded for purchasing through this influencer-generated content, but the creator gets all the credit – and the brand still makes a sale.

Use UTM Tags for Tracking

UTM tags are similar to discount codes in that brands give specific links to creators to include in their sponsored content. The main difference is that instead of asking creators to share a discount code (like “MyName20”) in their caption or bio, the UTM tags are built into other elements of the campaign.

One method of using UTM tags is by creating trackable URLs that link to your brand’s website. By using UTM tag builder software, marketers can supply creators with a custom website URL to add to their content. On social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram, the creator would configure the call-to-action on their post, usually visible as a “Tap To Shop” link, to direct users to this custom URL that typically points to a specific product page.

Like personal discount codes, marketers can then track that custom URL and see how many people clicked on it. That metric can be attributed to individual influencers.

Outside of tracking the specific creator within the URL via a UTM tag, there are a number of other traffic-related details you can track with tags, such as the campaign medium or name.

In practice, a UTM tag would look something like: http://mavrck.co/influencer-marketing-measurement?utm_campaign=blog_post &utm_medium=social&utm_source=tiktok.

Here’s what this link describes:

http://mavrck.co/influencer-marketing-measurement: your page’s base URL.
?: tells your analytics platform that UTM tags are included in the URL.
utm_campaign=blog_post: The parameter describing which campaign your site visitor engaged with (in this example, a blog post campaign).
&: tells your platform that another UTM element is in the URL
utm_medium=social: The parameter describing the channel your site visitor came from (in this example, social).
utm_source=tiktok: The parameter describing the website your site visitor came from (in this example, TikTok).

Use An Affiliate Service to Track the Metrics

To organize and track these metrics, we recommend finding a reputable affiliate service to help you collect your data. Luckily, Mavrck provides affiliate tracking services.

How Do You Measure The Success Of An Influencer Marketing Campaign?

In summary, there are many different ways to measure your influencer marketing campaign’s success, depending on your overall objectives. The measurements you focus on will depend on how your campaign has progressed through the sales funnel and whether you’ve reached attention, interest, desire, or action.

While we recommend a series of metrics that you can easily track and report on, the main takeaway we want you to remember is that all marketing needs that brands have are different. What works for one brand may not be relevant for another. That said, you’ll want to make sure you consider either custom URLs, UTM codes, promo codes, or a mix of each.

Before you dive into reporting, make sure you’ve clearly identified several goals and key objectives you want to achieve through influencer initiatives. Doing this before launching any campaigns will help ensure a smooth, organized path to campaign reporting.

Rosefield Watches identified the metrics that it wanted to capture prior to the campaign launch. It also nailed down end goals right away.

Its global influencer marketing initiatives resulted in a 700% increase in monthly impressions, averaging over 10 million more impressions per month than before. Additionally, Rosefield grew its monthly influencer referral traffic by 113% and had two times higher engagement rates directly from that referral traffic.

With careful planning and consideration, you can be like Rosefield. A thoughtful strategy will help any brand activate influencers, launch a successful campaign, and report back with great results!

What Tools Can I Use To Measure My Influencer Marketing Campaign

To learn more about influencer marketing metrics and designing a cohesive report, check out these helpful guides: