Influencer marketing is a great way to get your product in front of new audiences and bring in new customers. But measuring the success of any influencer campaign isn’t as simple as just monitoring your metrics.
In this article:
- 5 Ways to Track the Success of Influencer Marketing Campaigns
- Pick your goals carefully
- Work closely with your influencers to find tracking strategies that work for everyone
- Use trackable tools, like trackable links and influencer-specific discount codes
- Ask new customers how they found you
- Don't neglect the vanity metrics
That said, measuring influencer marketing results is essential. It's in both your and your influencer's interests to properly track and attribute influencer campaign success.
Whatever remuneration strategy you choose (commission, flat rate, or anything in between), everyone involved will benefit from a solid, reliable tracking strategy.
The influencer gets to have their work (and their reputation) properly recognized, and you get a proper understanding of how your campaign worked.
How can you track influencer marketing results for successful partnerships? Let’s take a look.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves using ‘influencers’ to help promote your brand.
For example, a beauty influencer may be someone with a strong following on Instagram and TikTok, known for their makeup skills.
Beauty brands could hire these influencers to showcase their makeup skills with their own products, thus exposing their products to a wide audience that both has an interest in cosmetics and trusts the influencer to promote stuff they’ll like.
What Are the Benefits of Influencer Marketing?
When executed properly, influencer marketing campaigns, like many social media marketing strategies, can be highly successful, especially when targeting a younger customer base. Gen Z has a high level of trust in their favorite influencers, and that trust often translates into conversions.
According to The Digital Marketing Institute, influencer marketing campaigns can bring in up to $5.78 in ROI for every dollar spent.
Some surveyed brands even reported as much as $18 influencer marketing ROI. That's an astonishingly high figure.
But it's not just about general ROI.
A good influencer marketing strategy can also generate higher-quality leads. Influencers are uniquely positioned to reach potential customers whose values and lifestyles align closely with your brand.
And that's before you even take basic reach into account.
People feel a sense of social connection with influencers that it's hard for brands to replicate.
To get the most out of any social channel, brands should work with the algorithms and hire influencers, rather than trying to bend them to their will.
So, whether you hire an influencer for B2B inbound marketing or for a widespread B2C social media campaign, the impact of influencer marketing could be huge for you. But influencer marketing success isn't guaranteed for any brand, even if your influencers have high follower counts.
How will you know whether or not your influencer campaigns are working out well for you? You need to be able to track ongoing performance. But how?
5 Ways to Track the Success of Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Given that influencers aren't as directly connected to (for example) your social channels and marketing analytics as other aspects of your marketing, tracking the success of influencer campaigns can be a bit harder to track. But not impossible.
Here are some of the best ways to track influencer marketing results for successful partnerships:
1. Pick your goals carefully
You can't measure your success in anything if you don't know what success looks like in the first place.
Before you approach an influencer, define what you want to achieve with your campaign and break it down into clear, specific goals.
Do you want to increase your reach? Raise brand recognition? Bring in more revenue? Boost your web traffic? Whatever would be a 'good' result for your campaign, make a note of it and try to align it to a specific metric.
'SMART' can be a useful framework when setting your campaign goals. Make sure that your goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
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Having solid, well-considered goals gives you a better chance to clearly and cleanly track ongoing progress and eventual success.
The way you work towards your goals and how those goals work out for both your brand and your influencers can also give valuable insights into what works and what doesn't, which you can use for future campaigns.
2. Work closely with your influencers to find tracking strategies that work for everyone
Before diving into tracking strategies, it's essential to find key influencers who align well with your brand's values and goals. You're not the only one running a business in this scenario. Your chosen influencer is, too.
And they will also be aware of the importance of tracking success.
They will be well-versed in Google Analytics and the analytics capabilities of each social media platform they use to optimize influencer strategies.
In addition to leveraging these analytics, ensure your marketing team employs robust staff scheduling practices to improve the management and efficiency of your influencer campaigns.
This can help coordinate efforts across departments and time zones, particularly when working with influencers with global audiences.
In the example profile below, the influencer emphasizes the importance of analytics and states she is happy to share her metrics with clients.
Look for this kind of thing in influencer profiles and, if your potential influencers don't explicitly state that they will share their own metrics with you, ask them how much (and how) they'd be willing to contribute to your tracking.
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If your chosen influencer seems cagey about sharing their analytics with you, don't assume that they have malicious intent. They may simply prefer a specific way to track campaigns.
For example, many influencers use affiliate links because they're a straightforward way to track web traffic and conversions, and they can be directly and unequivocally attributed to the influencer.
We'll go into more specific ways to directly track influencer-related conversions in a moment. For now, carefully discuss tracking and metrics with your chosen influencers, and work with them to develop a solution that works for all parties.
3. Use trackable tools, like trackable links and influencer-specific discount codes
There are many ways to attribute conversions directly to a specific influencer, page, or campaign.
Enabling tracking pixels is one approach, but with increased adoption of anti-tracking measures across the internet, they aren’t as reliable as they once were.
Instead, give your influencers specific links that will attribute any resulting traffic directly to them. Or, customized promo codes that will log the influencer as the source of each conversion that uses that code.
Here is an example of an influencer using a code.
Customers are encouraged to use the code in exchange for a discount, and the brand can use the code to directly track and attribute conversions to the influencer.
Source: Instagram
Codes are useful for platforms like Instagram, which make it harder to embed obvious links in posts. On platforms like Facebook, trackable links are more popular. Here's an example:
Source: Facebook
In addition, implementing robust chargeback management strategies is essential, as it helps resolve disputes efficiently and maintain accurate tracking of financial transactions from influencer campaigns.
4. Ask new customers how they found you
Even with the most enticing, comprehensive, trackable links, tracking pixels, promo codes, and similar tools, some customers will still slip through the net and convert in ways that can't be attributed to a particular campaign or even to a particular social platform.
To close these knowledge gaps, ask customers how they found you.
For example, a SaaS marketing agency might send this survey after the customer’s free trial ends and they’ve upgraded to a full subscription, rather than at initial sign-up.
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Of course, not everyone will complete this survey, so some data will not be directly attributed as it should be.
To wrap up and make the best estimate of overall influencer content success, turn to your vanity metrics.
5. Don't neglect the vanity metrics
Vanity metrics are the 'closeup' metrics that give an impression of how well a campaign is performing, but they don't necessarily correlate with direct conversions.
They're called 'vanity metrics' because they're great at making a campaign look good, but they can't always be linked to solid results.
In this case, however, it's worth checking vanity metrics because understanding how far influencer posts have reached and how much engagement they've received is a good way to 'fill in the gaps' in influencer performance.
There are even automatized influencer tracking tools that can help you speed up this process.
As a general rule, if the vanity metrics are high for any influencer content, the actual conversion rate for that content/campaign is likely to be higher than what you've been able to track directly.
Vanity metrics include:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Follower gain
- General engagement (likes, shares, comments)
Google Analytics can help with vanity metrics, as can social media analytics on all the top social channels.
Track Influencer Marketing Results and Develop Successful Influencer Partnerships that Will Grow Your Business
Tracking the results of influencer marketing programs shouldn't be difficult. Successful influencer partnerships will involve the cooperative sharing of metrics and regular check-ins to monitor progress.
The right goals will help you set clear, measurable influencer KPIs, and the right tracking tools will make conversion attribution easy.
By carefully and closely tracking influencer marketing results, you’ll get a clear picture of what (and who!) your target customers like. This will help both you and your influencer partners to produce even more successful campaigns in the future.
FAQ
1. What are the most important metrics to track in influencer marketing?
Start with metrics tied to your goal: clicks and conversions for sales, leads for signups, and reach/engagement for awareness. For ROI-focused campaigns, prioritize trackable link clicks, attributed purchases, cost per acquisition (CPA), and revenue per influencer.
2. How do I attribute sales to a specific influencer?
Use influencer-specific tracking methods: unique UTM links, affiliate links, and discount codes. Pair them with landing pages dedicated to each influencer when possible, so you can clearly connect traffic and conversions to that partnership.
3. What if customers don’t use the link or discount code?
Add a quick post-purchase survey question, such as “How did you hear about us?”, and include influencer names as options. This helps capture “dark” conversions that happen through direct visits, word-of-mouth, or saved posts.
4. Are “vanity metrics” like likes and reach still useful?
Yes—vanity metrics help you gauge content resonance and fill gaps when direct attribution is incomplete. High reach, saves, comments, and shares often signal strong message-market fit and can explain lifts in branded search, traffic, or conversions that don’t track cleanly.
5. How often should I review influencer performance and report results?
For short campaigns, check performance daily or every few days to catch issues early. For longer partnerships, do weekly check-ins and a final wrap report that compares results to goals, highlights top content, and outlines improvements for the next collaboration.
Author Bio
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown rapidly from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across the US, APAC and EMEA.
