15 Jun How to Measure the Success of your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Measuring the success of your influencer campaign is a crucial step within the influencer marketing process. Without the ability to track how your campaign went, it’s impossible to gauge the impact of your campaign against other efforts in your marketing mix.

When looking at what to measure, it is important to focus on what defines success within your campaign – or in other words, what are you trying to achieve by running the campaign. Some popular influencer marketing goals are:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Click-throughs & leads
• Sales 
• Content generation

In this article, we will walk you through our favourite ways to track and measure each of these goals.

AWARENESS

Awareness is often labeled as an “airy-fairy” term when it comes to measuring success. But if we drill down into the specifics, it is much more measurable than some may think. With influencers, awareness can be tracked and tailored to specific demographics and targets markets, rather than just general “eyeballs” like with other marketing strategies.

Some of our favourite ways to track awareness via influencer marketing are: 

Reach: The reach of your influencer campaign shows how many people have seen the post/s created by the influencer/s. With social media analytics, we can drill deeper into these numbers by discovering where these people are, what age, what gender, and what their interests are. 

Impressions: Impressions refer to the number of times people have seen the post/s created by the influencer/s. This is generally higher than the reach as some people view the content more than once. 

Audience Growth: This refers to how many new followers a brand has received throughout the campaign. Tracking the follower growth from when the first post goes live, to when the last post is uploaded, is a great way to track the success of your campaign in terms of online community growth and awareness. 

ENGAGEMENT

While awareness is important in showing how many people were reached by the campaign, engagement gives us more insight into how the content was received. Generally speaking, the more engagement on the post, the better. 

The engagement rate gives you an idea of the percentage of the influencer’s audience who interacted with your sponsored post. Interaction (or the total number of engagements) refers to the number of comments, likes, saves, forwards and any other interactions a post receives. 

We can calculate the engagement rate as follows: 

[Total number of engagement/total reach or total followers] x 100

On Instagram, the average engagement rate on followers is around 2%. On TikTok, the average engagement rate is much higher and sits at around 20%. Facebook and Twitter are much lower with average engagement rates under 0.1%

CLICK-THROUGH RATE

Once we’ve figured out how many people have seen the branded content (awareness) and we have uncovered how they responded to the content (engagement), it’s time to check if there were any further actions from the posts. 

Measuring the click-through rate is a great way to track if the influencer posts have caused further any actions such as visits to a specific product page, campaign landing page, or an enquiry form. 

In order to track the click-through rate, you will need to ask the influencers to use tracking links on their post so you can measure traffic, engagement, and, ideally, conversions on your website. 

Sharing links on Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and blogs is straight forward. Influencers can embed links directly into their caption and descriptions. 

Sharing links on Instagram and TikTok is a little bit more challenging. The best way is to have the influencer share a link in their bio. On Instagram, influencers can also share a link in their Instagram story via the “swipe up” function. 

Without direct access to a website’s Google Analytics, the best way to track click-throughs is with a Bitly tracking link. With a Bitly link, we can measure how many clicks a campaign has generated, as well as how many clicks each individual influencer link received. 

Once we have the total number of clicks a post has generated, we can determine the click-through-rate via the following formula:

[Total number of clicks/reach]  x 100

Through the click-through rate, we can also find the cost-per-click. This helps you find the cost incurred for every click. The lower the cost-per-click, the better.

Cost per click = cost of the campaign/total number of clicks

SALES

Often the sales and monetary value that an influencer campaign generates are one of the favourite things to track. After all, sales are the holy grail when it comes to marketing success. 

Using a unique discount code is a great way to measure direct sales from your campaign if you’re selling online. Discounts can be in the form of a percentage off, a figure off, or free shipping. 

If you sell offline, or you don’t have access to the website’s Google Analytics, you can look at the sales correlation throughout the campaign period. If you saw a spike in sales or an increase in foot-traffic or bookings after a specific post, you can likely attribute it to that influencer (provided there weren’t other marketing campaigns going at the same time). 

CONTENT GENERATION

Content generation is another important metric to track for your influencer marketing efforts. Sometimes when an influencer posts content related to your brand online, their social media followers want to follow suit and may end up creating content around the same topic. The free media (i.e. earned media) generated by this content is a fantastic way to increase your brand authority and trust in the online world. 

What are some other ways you track your influencer marketing campaign? Tell us in the comments below!