The more influencer marketing grows, the more pressure brands face to measure its effectiveness.
And tracking the right influencer marketing metrics is key to decoding your creators’ business impact.
With data-backed influencer tracking, you can set yourself up to...
Of course, influencer campaign tracking is often a headache with so many metrics and moving pieces. While many brands struggle with incomplete influencer data, others are drowning in it.
Below we dig into the best influencer marketing metrics to track and which KPIs to prioritize.
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Brands are overwhelmed with so many performance metrics for their influencer campaigns today.
And pinpointing the most crucial metrics to track hinges on your influencer marketing goals.
Boosting brand awareness. Getting repurposeable content. Supporting sales. The list goes on!
Once you've nailed down your end-game, you can work backward to nail down your numbers. Below are eleven influencer marketing success metrics to help you measure your creators’ business impact:
iInfluencer engagement rate is the ratio of interactions your content receives compared to how many times it was viewed in total.
For TikTok videos and Instagram Reels, you can use this simplified formula to calculate influencer engagement rates across an entire video campaign:
(Total Video Interactions / Total Video Views Ă·) x 100 = % Engagement Rate
Let's say you run a TikTok micro-influencer campaign resulting in these influencer marketing metrics:
Now, let's crunch these numbers with our engagement rate formula above:
(44,250 Ă· 450,000) x 100 = 9.83% engagement rate
It's no surprise that engagement rate is the most common influencer success metric to track.
Because interactions indicate interest from your audience while a high volume of views means you're giving the algorithms what they want.
Interactions and views are also public-facing. That means they can be tracked easily, especially if you use an influencer marketing platform to crunch the numbers.
While some skeptics regard engagement rate as a "vanity metric," consider that the top goal of most influencer marketing campaigns is to increase brand awareness (based on our firsthand experience).
Most brands' mentality is "the more, the merrier" when it comes to engagement rate and rightfully so.
But on that note, remember that higher follower counts don't necessarily result in higher engagement (or even more views).
Time and time again, micro-influencers have proven themselves to be favored by social algorithms and likewise drive more meaningful engagement because of their authentic followings. Check out the creator's below's high engagement, for reference:
What’s considered a “good” engagement rate largely depends on your industry and the types of creators you partner with. That said, we've seen firsthand how micro-influencer campaigns can earn consistent engagement rates exceeding 10% (and higher among top-performing brands).
Influencer reach calculates the total number of unique people who've viewed and/or interacted with a piece of influencer content.
Engagement and reach go hand in hand. The more interactions you drive, the more reach you earn.
As an influencer metric, reach simply represents the individual eyes on your content. This serves as a simple and yet crucial indicator of whether you're building brand awareness.
Measuring reach on an individual level is easy enough. Just hop into your native social analytics.
However, calculating reach across a campaign requires more in-depth influencer reporting tools.
For example, a platform like Statusphere aggregates not only unique content views but also the total amount of social media followers reached on both TikTok and Instagram thanks to our API access.
Plays and loops are the cumulative number of views your influencers' video content receives during a campaign. This includes views across TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Brands rely on this metric to gauge the reach and engagement of their influencer content.
Plays and loops are examples of influencer metrics where both quality and quantity matter.
Because context matters, too. A high volume of views can't tell the full story of a campaign.
For example, a campaign that earns 1,000,000+ views but a ~1% engagement rate isn't exactly a success story. If anything, it's probably a sign of influencer fraud. On the flip side, 100,000 players and a 10% engagement rate from a niche, high-intent audience is far more valuable.
This metric simply refers to how many pieces of influencer-generated content your campaign produces over time.
For a typical influencer marketing campaign, this metric hinges on your budget and bandwidth.
Bigger budgets don't always result in more posts by default, though. This is especially true in the case of micro-influencer collaborations where you can get a high volume of creator posts with the same budget you might get a handful from "bigger" creators.
This matters if your brand is scaling repurposable influencer content for UGC ads. Since formats like Spark Ads see relatively fast performance decay, it's important for brands to rapidly cycle out ad creatives. That's why more and more brands are after rights-ready influencer content.
Earning more posts can also help brands see results beyond ads. For example, brands like recycle and repurpose their influencer posts and UGC for their organic feed.
Total posts are a key metric for tracking influencer seeding campaigns and product gifting.
For example, let's say you send out 40 influencer seeding kits and earn 25 total posts.
That's a 62.5% success rate. Not amazing but not bad!
Like most metrics on our list, determining how much influencer content you need depends on your goals. Earning a minimum of 10-20 rights-ready influencer posts per month means you get wider content variety for ads and fresh posts to fill your organic feed if needed.
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.