The influencer marketing industry is booming, and yet some businesses are reluctant to embrace this relatively new digital marketing method. The level of ambiguity regarding campaign results and the potential for influencer fraud is all it takes to scare away cautious business owners. Despite the overall success of the industry, many brands and business owners remain wary because they just don’t understand how to measure the success of an influencer campaign. However, the following KPIs can give you quantitative results and help you determine the overall success of your influencer marketing efforts.
Reach
One of the fundamental goals of influencer marketing is to reach a new audience and increase brand visibility. If you partner with an influencer who aligns well with your brand, you’re more likely to meet that goal. To determine if an influencer campaign successfully expanded your reach, you’ll need to track and review impression data for social posts, blog posts, and other content used during the campaign. This data can be found in the influencer’s website analytics and social media analytics.
Engagement
How an influencer’s posts perform is a great indication of campaign success. Tracking engagements on campaign posts allows you to determine whether the influencer’s audience is truly interested in your brand. Engagements include post likes, comments, post shares, reactions, clicks, and brand mentions. To get the engagement rate, you can use an analytics tool or measure the data manually by dividing the total number of engagements by the number of impressions. You should also calculate the cost per engagement to get a clear picture of your ROI and to plan for future campaign budgets.
Audience Growth
A broad reach and lots of engagement are strong indicators of a successful influencer campaign, but they don’t always translate into new followers for brand partners. The end goal of influencer marketing isn’t just to reach as many people as possible or even to make a couple of sales, it’s to grow your audience of raving fans. Those new followers are now a part of your brand’s community and you can engage with them, provide them with valuable content, and convert them into loyal customers. Tracking the new followers you gained during an influencer campaign is simple and it’s a great KPI to help you determine overall campaign success.
Conversions
Of course, the ultimate goal of influencer marketing is to increase sales. To determine if your influencer campaign successfully resulted in more sales, you’ll need to track and measure conversions. There are several ways to track conversions back to an influencer partner, including UTM tags, discount codes, and unique landing pages dedicate to that specific influencer. Measuring conversions allows you to better assess the influencer’s impact and how the campaign performed overall.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic may not seem as important of a KPI as conversions, but conversions can’t happen without website traffic. Getting referral traffic is crucial for the overall success of your brand. Tracking referral traffic not only reveals how many people visited your site as a result of the influencer campaign, but it also helps you determine the behavior of those website visitors. Referral traffic data can also be used later for retargeting ads. To determine how successful an influencer campaign was at bringing traffic to your website, use a tool like Google Analytics.
Pro Tip: Lots of referral traffic with very few conversions can indicate that your landing page needs an overhaul.
ROI
Many studies have shown that influencer marketing generates a better ROI than most traditional marketing methods. In fact, 89% of marketers found ROI from influencer marketing comparable to or better than other marketing channels, according to BigCommerce. However, that doesn’t mean every brand will get better ROI with influencer marketing. Tracking ROI allows you to determine what worked and what didn’t. If your influencer campaign resulted in a positive ROI, you can expect similar future campaigns to have similar success. If your campaign had negative results, you should take a closer look at other KPIs such as referral traffic, audience growth, etc. and make adjustments for future campaigns.
As brands continue to spend more money on influencer marketing, it’s crucial that they have an effective way to measure campaign success. Of course, campaign success will vary dependent upon your marketing goals. If your goal is to increase visibility, the most important KPI to track is reach. If your goal is to increase your revenue, you should look closely at conversions and ROI. By tracking KPIs, brands will have a better understanding of how to measure influencer marketing success as a whole and how to effectively achieve their marketing goals.
Agency 133 is a boutique agency specializing in the management of truly epic and unique talent, including social influencers. We facilitate meaningful collaborations between our clients and brand partners, develop comprehensive social media strategies, and leverage campaigns for maximum exposure.