Influencer marketing is a great way to get your product out in front of new audiences and bring new customers rolling in. But measuring the success of any influencer campaign isn’t as simple as just monitoring your metrics.
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That being said, measuring influencer marketing results is very important. It's in both your and your influencer's interests to properly track and attribute influencer campaign success.
Whatever the remuneration strategy you're going with (commission, flat rate, or anything in between), everyone involved will benefit from a solid and 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.
So, how can you track influencer marketing results for successful partnerships? Let’s take a look.
Influencer marketing involves using ‘influencers’ to help promote your brand.
An ‘influencer’ is someone with a significant following on relevant platforms and channels who can leverage their audience to the benefit of certain brands/industries.
For example, a beauty influencer may be someone with a strong following on Instagram and TikTok who is 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.
When done properly, influencer marketing campaigns, like lots of social media marketing strategies, can be incredibly successful, especially when you're working with a younger customer base. Gen Z have a high level of trust for their favorite influencers, and that trust frequently translates into conversion.
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 bring in higher quality leads. Influencers are uniquely placed to reach potential customers whose values and lifestyles align closely with what your brand is all about.
And that's before you even take basic reach into account.
Influencers, even micro-influencers, are often capable of spreading content a lot further than you can. That's not an insult – it's just the nature of the beast.
People feel a sense of social connection with influencers that it's hard for brands to replicate.
So, to get the best out of any social channel, it's often best for brands to work with the algorithms and hire influencers, rather than trying to bend the algorithms 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? Well, you have to be able to track ongoing performance. But how?
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:
You can't measure your success in anything if you don't know what success looks like in the first place.
So, before you even approach an influencer, work out what you want to achieve with your campaign and break this down into solid, 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, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
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Having solid, well-considered goals gives you a fighting chance of being able 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 that you can use for future campaigns.
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.
Most influencers (and/or their teams) will spend a lot of time measuring things like the engagement rate and reach of everything from minor social media posts to larger digital campaigns.
They will be well acquainted with Google Analytics and the analytics capabilities of every social media platform they use to optimize influencer strategies. And they should be able to share these insights with you.
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 various departments and time zones, particularly when dealing with influencers who have a global audience.
In the example profile pictured below, you can see that the influencer highlights the importance of analytics and states that 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 just have a preferred way to track specific campaigns.
For example, many influencers like to use affiliate links because they're a very easy way to track things like web traffic and conversions, and they can be directly, unequivocally attributed to the influencer themselves.
We'll go into some of these more specific ways of directly tracking influencer-related conversions in a moment. But for now, remember to discuss tracking and metric measurement carefully with your chosen influencers, and work with them to come up with a tracking solution that works for all parties.
There are plenty of ways to attribute conversions directly to a particular influencer, page, or campaign.
Enabling tracking pixels is one way, but with increased uptake in anti-tracking measures across the internet, these aren’t as reliable as they used to be.
Instead, try giving your influencers specific links which will attribute any resultant traffic straight back to the influencer. Or, customized promo codes which 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 by the promise of a discount, and the brand is able to use the code to directly track and properly attribute conversions to the influencer.
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 this helps in resolving disputes efficiently and maintaining accurate tracking of financial transactions from influencer campaigns.
Even with the most enticing and comprehensive trackable links, tracking pixels, promo codes etc, 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.
So, to close up these gaps in your knowledge, ask customers how they found you.
This is easy to do via a simple, one-click survey, like the one below. Ideally, this survey will pop up just after the customer checks out, but if there is a better point for it to appear in the customer's journey, that's ok too.
For example, a SaaS marketing agency might send this survey after the customer’s free trial has ended and they’ve upgraded to a full subscription rather than at initial sign-up.
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Of course, not everyone will fill out this survey, so there is bound to be some data that doesn't get directly attributed as it should. So, to sweep up the rest and make as good an estimate as you can of overall influencer content success, turn to your vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are the 'closeup' metrics that give an impression of how well a campaign is doing but don't necessarily correlate with direct conversions etc. 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 got is a good way to 'fill in the gaps' when it comes to 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:
Google Analytics can help a lot with vanity metrics, as can social media analytics on all the top social channels.
Tracking the results of influencer marketing programs shouldn't be a difficult task. Successful influencer partnerships will involve co-operative sharing of metrics and regular check-ins to catch up on progress.
The right goals will help you to set clear and 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.
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 accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA.