Influencer Marketing Reporting: How to Measure Success
Reporting is crucial to measuring influencer campaign performance and ROI. This post breaks down what goes into an influencer report and the metrics...
Overwhelmed with influencer marketing tracking? Narrow down your KPIs! Here are eleven easy-to-track influencer campaign metrics and tips to measure them.
This influencer marketing metric refers to the total number of creators who collaborated with your brand and created content during a campaign.
Although total creators and total posts might seem identical, they're two different metrics.
For example, a creator could create an Instagram Reel, static post and Story for one campaign. That's three posts from a single influencer.
Creators per campaign is a unique metric because it can vary wildly depending on your campaign setup. For product seeding or gifting, how many creators post is an unknown. The same applies when getting content from a platform that doesn't guarantee influencer posts.
On the flip side, brands using a micro-influencer platform like Statusphere can choose how many influencers they want to post before running a campaign. This means you have a better pulse on your influencer metrics and campaign expectations prior to kickoff.
Influencer sales refer to activities from creators that result in conversions or direct sales.
While brand awareness is the primary goal of most influencer marketing campaigns, increasing sell-through is often a strong secondary goal. Sales are oftentimes a welcome byproduct of running an influencer campaign.
The catch? Tracking sales from influencer marketing is notoriously difficult.
The impact of influencer content on conversion and click-through rates of ads is well-documented. However, not every touchpoint can be tracked so easily. Especially with ongoing changes to privacy policies and third-party cookies.
Still, positive influencer ROI should be tangible and not a big unknown.
By working through affiliate tools like TikTok Shop or ad channels like TikTok Spark Ads or IG Partnership ads, you get a more concrete understanding of how creators are moving the needle. Of course, frequent touchpoints with your target audience is ideal regardless of "hard" sales.
Content interactions are any type of engagement on your influencers' posts, including:
As noted earlier, interactions are among the most important influencer metrics to track.
The more interactions with your influencers' content, the more love it gets some the algorithm(s). This means more chances to trend and get picked up in relevant followers' feeds.
Defining the most important interactions is up for debate. That said, metrics such as comments, saves and shares tend to represent high-intent customers.
Viral products often receive a flood of "saves," serving as social bookmarks for future purchases. Comments likewise are a higher-effort interaction that can help you better understand your target audience and what they want from your brand or products.
All of these influencer marketing metrics are public-facing which is nice. Ideally, you can track them in an influencer platform that aggregates creators and content rather than tracking it all in a spreadsheet.
Hashtags use refers to how many times creators used a #hashtag during a campaign and/or how many posts/views were generated by that hashtag.
Tracking tags is a straightforward way to see how your influencer campaigns are performing alongside your attempts to drive more UGC. For example, an uptick in branded hashtags is a positive sign for the sake of awareness.
Hashtags are powerful for the sake of organizing and likewise tracking influencer content. Both Instagram and TikTok make it easy to see how many posts are tied to any given tag.
Traffic refers to amount of website or storefront traffic received from an influencer campaign (either during or after).
Traffic can bridge social media engagement with legitimate lead generation. Brands want to see new shoppers who flock to their sites as a result of an influencer campaign. We get it!
The reality? As an influencer metric, tracking traffic is equal parts simple and complicated.
Because the path from discovery to buying is anything but straightforward.
Conventional wisdom says only a small fraction of visitors make a beeline from influencer content to your storefront. Some will look at third-party review sites while others will check out other influencers or even make their purchases directly via apps like TikTok Shop.
Meanwhile, Google Analytics and Search Console will often dump social traffic into the "direct" bucket. This makes it difficult to understand exactly who's who when it comes to your social customers unless they've engaged with your social ads.
With traffic, we recommend making connections between on-site shopping behavior and the volume of influencer content you're producing. If you see an uptick in sales alongside your uptick in creators, don't assume it's a coincidence. As noted in our recent UGC ads panel, this has happened to many of our own brands firsthand.
Brand mentions refers to @mentions of your brand on social media alongside uses of product or brand-specific social media keywords.
This influencer metric is mostly related to brand awareness. Think about the frequency with which your brand pops up in search bars or in content about your industry. Increasing those mentions and keyword uses means that you're on the minds of your target audience.
And so anything that boosts your brand's visibility in social search is a win.
For starters, consider using social media keyword research to increase your chances of ranking.
Test out keyword phrases on platforms like Instagram or TikTok to see what you're ranking for and likewise how often you're being mentioned alongside your competitors. You can also look up which brands pop up in general product-related searches.
Time saved refers to the amount of hours saved during a specific influencer campaign period.
We'll bite: this is an influencer metric specific to Statusphere's platform!
But it's one of the most important ones to track.
That's because brands can pour countless hours into manual outreach, shipping products and managing creators without even realizing how much they're losing in productivity.
In some cases, the time saved represents a bigger financial impact than actual sales. This is especially true if you're pulling your team away from other time-sensitive marketing tasks. If your campaigns aren't actually resulting in content, you're ultimately burning through budget.
The more efficient your campaign management, the more time and budget you save as a result. For example, Statusphere's platform saves brands an average of 100 hours per month by automating and streamlining the tasks above.
Brands today are all about data-driven influencer marketing campaigns and rightfully so.
Despite popular belief, tracking influencer marketing based on hard numbers doesn't have to be a pipe dream. We help brands do it all the time!
The more metrics you track, the more you can understand the holistic impact of influencer marketing strategy on your business at large.
But more tracking translates to more manual legwork for busy teams.
That's where Statusphere's platform and micro-influencer reporting comes in. With our platforms, brands can track all of their influencer marketing KPIs and source content in real time in the same place. No bouncing between tools required!
This gives brands a constant pulse on the progress of their influencer campaigns. Rather than second-guess campaign performance or wrangle your influencer content, you can start tracking campaigns with confidence. Not to mention save countless hours in the process.
Want to learn more about how our platform works? Get in touch with one of our experts to learn how our software can help you track all your influencer marketing success metrics in one place.
This article was first published in February 2021. It was last updated August 16, 2024.
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