Measuring the success of influencer marketing campaigns remains a major challenge for marketers in 2019. Brands need to track and monitor the performance of their campaigns in order to calculate their ROI.
To measure influencer marketing campaign success, you need to first establish the parameters that you should track. This in itself is a challenging task as marketers are divided over what parameters they should track.
To help you measure your influencer marketing campaign results, we’ve put together this guide. Let’s take a look at some of the ways through which you can do so.
1. Calculate Your Campaign Reach
If your goal is to increase your brand reach through your influencer marketing campaigns, you should track your campaign reach. This can help you measure influencer marketing campaign results.
Here are a few metrics that you can track and monitor to evaluate your campaign’s reach.
Followers
The influencer’s follower count can give you an idea of the potential number of people who’ve seen your post. However, this isn’t a very reliable metric, as many of the followers may not be authentic followers.
Impressions
To get a better idea of your reach, you should take a look at the number of impressions that your sponsored post received. This number shows you how many times people have seen your post on social media.
Traffic
Traffic is a great metric to measure influencer marketing campaign success. You can monitor the number of visits to your website through the influencer’s link. This will, of course, be valid only in cases where the influencers have posted a link to your website. Through this, you can figure out how many people your influencers reached through their posts.
2. Determine Campaign Engagement
Engagement is one of the most important things that you need to track and monitor to measure influencer marketing campaign success. It’s crucial to not only measure the amount of engagement generated, but also evaluate the cost-per-engagement (CPE).
Improving engagement can help you increase awareness and build your brand’s loyalty. You can track this parameter to measure your campaign ROI.
Here are some of the metrics that you need to track to measure the engagement generated through your influencer marketing campaign:
Reactions
You must measure the reactions when you’re conducting an influencer marketing campaign on Facebook. Due to the changes in their algorithm, Facebook gives more weight to reactions now. Thus, it’s important to see the spread of the reactions to your sponsored post to get a better idea of the audience sentiment.
Likes
Likes can help you create buzz about your brand and products on social media. They can also help give social proof to other viewers and can thus improve your engagement even further. Likes can, however, be purchased on Instagram and are not the best indicators of engagement. You can count them, but with a grain of salt.
Clicks
Clicks show you how many times the influencer’s audience engaged with your sponsored post. While this helps you gauge the interest level of your target audience, it shouldn’t be considered as an absolute measure. It’s critical to take all of the other engagement metrics into account as well along with the number of clicks.
Shares
Shares help you determine how many people found the content helpful and interesting enough to share it with their friends and family. This gives you an idea of the quality of your content and it is a strong metric you can use to track and measure the performance of your influencer marketing campaign.
Brand Mentions
Brand mentions don’t come up as direct engagement on the sponsored post. However, they are a great indicator of how the influencer-created content is being discussed on social media. They can count as an important metric while calculating the ROI of your campaign.
Comments
When people find the influencer’s content interesting, they are likely to comment on it. The greater the number of comments, the better the engagement on the post. However, you should also check the quality of the comments to evaluate the performance of your influencer marketing campaign in a better way.
Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE)
The cost-per-engagement is the cost incurred for every engagement that your influencer marketing campaign has received. You can find this by combining all of the engagement metrics and dividing the campaign cost by their total.
This can show you how people are reacting to the content created about your brand and products/services. Your goal should be to lower this cost over time.
3. Use Specialized Tools
To measure influencer marketing campaign progress, you can also use some specialized tools like iFluenz. Using it, you can view the live statistics of your campaign and determine its effectiveness.
This tool lets you create your influencer marketing campaign and discover new influencers as well. All you need to do is set up your campaign. Then influencers will be able to see it and apply for it.
You can preview, deny, or negotiate proposals. And, you can discover the best-matching influencers and receive creative content from them.
It’s also possible to review the influencers once your campaign is live and you can choose to purchase just their content through the tool too. This way, you won’t have to go through the hassle of tracking the campaign all by yourself.
Yves Rocher, for example, used iFluenz to spread awareness about their latest product – Eco-Douche. They found influencers and partnered with them for their campaign.
The influencers created 9 posts and managed to get over 10K likes and comments. In addition, the campaign got an engagement rate of 7.1%, and the cost-per-engagement was just $0.06.
4. Calculate Revenue Generated
If your brand’s goal is to generate sales from your influencer marketing campaign, then it’s necessary to track the relevant metrics for that. A few parameters that you can track are:
Affiliate Sales
If you’ve partnered with influencers on an affiliate basis, you can track the sales generated through the affiliate links given to them. For every purchase that people make using their link, they’ll get a commission.
From the links, you’ll also get an idea of how many clicks were generated through your campaign. This can help you determine the performance of each influencer with whom you’ve partnered.
Promo Codes
Promo codes can work as great metrics for tracking the sales from your influencer marketing campaigns. By generating unique promo codes for each of your influencers, you can find out how many purchases were made using each code. This, in turn, can help you determine the effectiveness of your influencers and the ROI of your campaign.
Google Analytics
You can attach UTM parameters to your URLs and give them to your influencers. By tracking these UTM parameters in Google Analytics, you can figure out how many people visited your website via their social media posts. In addition, by setting up an “Event” in Google Analytics, you can find the number of purchases driven by each influencer and figure out your ROI.
5. Find Social Media Leads
While increasing your reach and getting more engagement may seem attractive, you need to also focus on driving sales. It’s essential to understand how many people are actually willing to purchase from you. For this reason, you must know which channels and influencers are generating the maximum number of leads.
Doing so allows you to put more effort into the places and people from which you’re likely to get better returns on your investment (ROI).
For example, if Facebook influencers are generating more leads using the same budget as Instagram influencers, it makes more sense to invest in Facebook marketing.
To measure influencer marketing campaign progress here, you can use Google Analytics. There, you can head to the “Acquisition” tab and tap on “Overview” to see the channels which are generating traffic.
The next step is to select “Social” to see which social media channels are bringing traffic to your website. This list will show you the channels which are generating the maximum traffic for your brand.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing has become an extremely popular method of marketing for brands. To measure influencer marketing campaign success, you need to first define your campaign goals.
If it’s reach that you want, you should check the influencer’s followers, the traffic to your website through the campaign, and the number of impressions.
If it’s engagement that you want, you should consider checking the reactions to your post and the number of likes. It’s also crucial to find the number of clicks, shares, and comments on the post. You should also check the comment quality to understand the ROI better. It also helps to check the brand mentions and CPE of the post.
For checking your revenue, you can find the number of sales through affiliate marketing, promo codes, and Google Analytics. Lastly, you should check the number of leads generated through various social media channels to understand the ROI of your campaign even better.
To simplify your efforts, you can use special tools to measure the ROI and success of your influencer marketing campaign success.
Are there other ways through which you measure influencer marketing campaign success? Let us know in the comments.
I like the way it is presented. Amazing. Ifluenz is really a unique name.