How To Measure the Success of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign in 2024?

As influencer marketing evolves from being an awareness and engagement tactic to a highly profitable channel, influencer marketing measurements must evolve too.

Will you sit on the sideline and continue to focus on awareness and engagement measurements? Or will you earn a seat at the table by building a scalable, profitable influencer marketing channel?

Brands with revenue as their influencer marketing goal are growing influencer marketing into their highest margin marketing channel.

Where you choose to sit will depend on the goals you set and the measurements you use. To grow an influencer marketing channel starts with the right measurements. You need measurements to show both your big picture impact as well as to track executional details to continually improve.

Learn how successful brands and agencies are proving impact with measurements that matter.

Why influencer marketing measurements matter

1. Predicting influencer fit

A profitable influencer marketing program starts with choosing influencers who can drive revenue (or your choice of goal) for your brand. By analyzing metrics such as influencer and audience demographics, engagement rates, followers, and conversions, you can start to understand which characteristics correlate–or not–with meaningful results for your brand.

2. Determining content and collaboration value

Evaluate each piece of content and collaborator and how it aligns with your goal. The right measurements help you decide who to continue collaborating with and what elements of content drive performance. Make sure your influencers know how you are measuring success so they can help you reach your goal!

3. Assessing campaign ROI

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your influencer marketing campaigns is essential to justify your influencer marketing spend and secure additional budget. By calculating the revenue generated from influencer-driven sales, content creation, and customer acquisition, you can demonstrate the tangible impact of your influencer partnerships. You can also focus on an efficiency measure like CPA and show that your influencer program acquires new customers more efficiently than other channels. This data-backed approach strengthens your case for continued or even increased investment in influencer marketing.

4. Improving marketing efficiency

By identifying top-performing influencers, segments, content formats, and social media platforms, you can allocate your resources more effectively. Every influencer activation is an opportunity for learning. This data-driven approach minimizes waste and ensures that your influencer marketing efforts are consistently aligned with your overall marketing objectives.

5. Making data-driven budget decisions

By analyzing the ROI of previous campaigns, you can make better decisions about which influencers and initiatives to prioritize. This strategic allocation of resources maximizes the impact of your budget and achieves the highest possible returns on your influencer marketing investments.

Individual influencer measurements

Influencer identification and analysis

Effective influencer discovery starts with criteria to help you choose influencers to drive results.

Before you shortlist influencers, how do you analyze their profile and past performance to ensure they align with your brand's goals and target audience?

For each brand, the criteria are different and based on learnings from your previous partnerships. Here are a few examples of talent analysis strategies.

For Lily Comba, who grew Seed Health's influencer program remarkably fast and profitably, some important criteria when identifying talent for Seed Health included:

• Influencer demographics such as age, gender, and location

• Influencer engagement rates (based on view-through rate) of at least 10% but preferably closer to 25%

• Audience as a community, instead not just followers

Micah Whitehead of Zero to 1, a performance marketing agency, describes their approach to identifying influencer talent for clients.

• Build influencer profiles using core demographics and go broad initially (e.g., wide range of follower counts, wide variety of niches) and evaluate what works for a particular brand.

• Downplay engagement rates because an influencer's conversion rate is not a function of engagement, but rather of how qualified and aligned the audience is with the content

• Test to find the subgroups and communities you might not think would be the top performers, and then scale those high-performing groups

Meredith Singer of Zero to 1 adds that social media metrics alone can be deceiving.

• Evaluating an influencer based on one social media account doesn't consider other important forms of distribution an influencer has.

• The influencer may be an expert with a small Instagram following, but they have a popular podcast, a newsletter, or even face-to-face clientele who rely heavily on the influencer's recommendations.

• The influencer's social media account may be just one of their distribution methods, and not even their most impactful one. Therefore, take a broad approach initially and test to find the signal to uncover those influencers who have their own media strategy.

Post-collaboration influencer performance

Once your influencer marketing campaign is live, it's time to examine the data and track the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your campaign.

• If awareness and engagement are important, impressions and reach will give you a clear picture of how many people have seen your content, while engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and saves will indicate how well the content resonates with the influencer's audience.

• If conversions are important, link clicks, AOV, and sales are relevant measures.

• For sales from affiliates, Darija Grobova, Public Relations Manager at Omnisend, suggests, "Make sure you provide the influencer with a unique promo code and/or a tracking link, so sales they inspire on your website or shop are tied back to them." By using unique tracking codes or links, you can attribute website traffic and sales directly to your influencer collaboration. In the example below, see how Nero.India included a custom code for their collaboration with Masoom Minawala.

Integrating sales data with e-commerce software

Imagine having a centralized dashboard where you can track the journey of a customer from the moment they engage with an influencer's post to the point of purchase on your website. This level of visibility allows you to attribute sales directly to specific influencer collaborations, giving you a clear understanding of which partnerships are driving the most revenue for your brand.

For example, let's say you collaborate with an influencer on Instagram to promote your latest product line. By providing the influencer with a unique discount code and tracking link, you can monitor how many of their followers click through and make a purchase using the special code.

Moreover, integrating your sales data with your e-commerce software lets you identify trends and patterns in customer behavior. You can understand which products are most popular among your influencer's audience, what time of day they are most likely to make a purchase, and how long they spend browsing your website before completing a transaction.

Calculating CPM, CPE, and CPC for individual influencer insights

Cost Per Mille (CPM)

CPM = (Total Cost of Campaign / Number of Impressions) * 1,000

Example: If you paid an influencer $500 for a sponsored post that reached 100,000 impressions, calculate the CPM like this: ($500 / 100,000) * 1,000 = $5 CPM

Cost Per Engagement (CPE)

CPE = Total Cost of Campaign / Total Engagements

Engagements include likes, comments, shares, and other interactions.

Example: If the same sponsored post received a total of 5,000 engagements, your CPE would be: $500 / 5,000 = $0.10 CPE

Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC = Total Cost of Campaign / Number of Clicks

Example: If the sponsored post included a link to your website and generated 1,000 clicks, your CPC would be: $500 / 1,000 = $0.50 CPC

Imagine you're a skincare brand collaborating with two influencers for a new product launch. Influencer A has a larger following and charges $1,000 for a sponsored post, while Influencer B has a smaller but highly engaged audience and charges $500.

Influencer A's post reaches 200,000 impressions, receives 8,000 engagements, and drives 2,000 clicks to your website. Using the formulas above, you calculate:

• CPM: ($1,000 / 200,000) * 1,000 = $5 CPM

• CPE: $1,000 / 8,000 = $0.125 CPE

• CPC: $1,000 / 2,000 = $0.50 CPC

Influencer B's post reaches 50,000 impressions, receives 5,000 engagements, and drives 1,500 clicks to your website. You calculate:

• CPM: ($500 / 50,000) * 1,000 = $10 CPM

• CPE: $500 / 5,000 = $0.10 CPE

• CPC: $500 / 1,500 = $0.33 CPC

By comparing these metrics, you discover that although Influencer A has a lower CPM due to a larger reach, Influencer B offers a better CPE and CPC. This suggests that Influencer B's audience is more engaged and likely to take action, making them a potentially more valuable partner for your brand.

Tracking individual influencer data with UTMs and Google Analytics

By implementing the UTM tracking system, you can attribute website traffic, conversions, and other valuable metrics to individual influencer collaborations, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your campaigns for success.

First, let's discuss how to set up UTM parameters for your influencer campaigns. UTM parameters are extra bits of text added to the end of a URL that helps track the source, medium, and campaign associated with a particular link. When creating a unique link for each influencer, be sure to include the following UTM parameters:

• utm_source: The influencer's name or handle
• utm_medium: The platform (e.g., Instagram, YouTube, blog)
• utm_campaign: The specific campaign or product promotion

For example, if you're working with an influencer named "FashionQueen" on an Instagram campaign promoting your new summer collection, your UTM-tagged link might look like this: www.yourwebsite.com/summer-collection?utmsource=FashionQueen&utmmedium=Instagram&utm_campaign=SummerLaunch

Once you've set up UTM-tagged links for each influencer, you can track their performance in Google Analytics. Navigate to the "Acquisition" section, click on "Campaigns," and then "All Campaigns." Here, you'll see a breakdown of your influencer campaigns, including metrics such as sessions, bounce rate, average session duration, and conversions.

Campaign-level measurements

1. Combining individual influencer measurements

To assess the overall performance of your influencer marketing campaign, you need to aggregate data from multiple influencers. You need to look at the relevant KPIs for your campaign, (e.g., reach, engagement, conversions, number of content assets created, sales, etc.) from each influencer and consolidate them into a comprehensive report.

2. Aligning measurements with campaign goals and accessible data

Before launching your influencer marketing campaign, clearly define your objectives and ensure that you have access to the necessary data for measuring success. Whether your goal is to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, produce content, or boost sales, ensure you have the appropriate tracking mechanisms in place.

3. Tracking challenges for different campaign types

Each type of influencer marketing campaign comes with its own set of tracking considerations. Here's how to handle the challenges for various campaign types:

• Paid influencer campaigns

For paid campaigns, you have the advantage of setting clear expectations and deliverables in a contract with influencers. Make sure to provide them with unique tracking links or discount codes to attribute sales and conversions directly to their efforts.

• Gifting, seeding, and influencer events

When working with influencers through gifting, seeding, or events, tracking is more challenging. MightyScout excels in handling these situations by leveraging advanced analytics to gather valuable data and insights.

• Tracking stories reliably

Instagram and Facebook stories have become popular formats for influencer collaborations, but their short lifespan makes tracking tricky. MightyScout offers reliable solutions for tracking Stories, ensuring that you can measure the impact of these campaigns and make informed decisions based on the data.

• Using UTMs for campaign tracking

Implement UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters in your campaign tracking links to accurately attribute traffic and conversions to specific influencers and campaigns.

Social media platform measurements

As an influencer marketer, you know that social media platforms are not one-size-fits-all. Each platform has its unique audience, engagement patterns, and content formats, which means that an influencer's performance can vary significantly from one platform to another.

Compare metrics on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook to identify which platform(s) yield the best results for your campaigns. This information allows you to refine your influencer marketing strategy and focus your budget and resources more effectively.

Kiah Zellner-Smith, Multimedia Marketing Manager at IES Abroad, a study abroad program for college students, uses both Instagram and TikTok to promote the brand. She shared that TikTok drives the most interest and applications for the college-aged students she targets. Therefore, TikTok is where the brand focuses.

Comparing influencer marketing to other marketing channels and tactics

It’s 2024 and the pressure on the marketing team to contribute to the organization’s revenue is higher than ever. As a marketing leader, you'll have to decide whether to increase, decrease, or maintain your investment in influencer marketing compared to other strategies in your portfolio.

It's not easy for a marketer to compare the ROI of influencer marketing to other channels in the marketing mix.

Whalar, an influencer marketing agency, hired Nielsen Market Research to analyze 20 creator campaigns within the CPG/personal care space. The study showed the creator campaigns had 2.4 times more ROI compared to digital video, TV, and social campaigns without creators.

In the absence of a team of statisticians, here are some ways to compare influencer marketing to other marketing channels:

• Evaluate the long-term performance of influencer marketing against other strategies. Consider factors such as the authenticity and trust the influencer marketing fosters with your target audience, the creative content influencers generate, and the access they provide to niche communities.

• Compare the ROI of influencer marketing to other strategies like paid advertising, content marketing, and email campaigns. Analyze key metrics such as customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, and lifetime value to determine which channels deliver the most significant returns. If influencer marketing consistently outperforms other tactics in driving revenue and growth, it may warrant a larger share of your budget.

Ultimately, the decision to allocate more, less, or the same budget to influencer marketing should align with your overarching business objectives and marketing goals.

In this process, you will need to track some important metrics which are:

New vs. returning customers

Analyze the new-to-returning customer ratio for each marketing strategy. A high new customer ratio indicates effective audience expansion, while a strong returning customer base suggests successful loyalty generation.

Number of orders and average order value (AOV)

Track each marketing strategy's total orders and average order value (AOV). Higher order numbers and larger AOVs show a tactic's effectiveness in driving sales volume and substantial purchases.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Calculate each marketing strategy's customer lifetime value (LTV), which estimates a customer's total revenue contribution. Strategies for acquiring high-LTV customers are valuable for long-term growth and profitability.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Determine each marketing strategy's customer acquisition cost (CAC) by dividing total spending by new customers acquired. Lower CAC indicates cost-effective new customer acquisition, while higher CAC may require optimizing spend or targeting.

Conversion rates

Monitor each marketing strategy's conversion rates, which measure the percentage of people taking desired actions. Higher conversion rates indicate a strategy's effectiveness in guiding customers through the sales funnel and encouraging brand engagement.

Margins

Assess each marketing strategy's profit margins, which represent the difference between revenue earned and costs incurred. Focus your budget on strategies with higher margins that still achieve your marketing objectives.

ROAS

Assess the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for each paid marketing strategy, such as influencer collaborations. ROAS calculates revenue per dollar spent on ads, with higher values indicating strong returns and efficient budget usage.

Repeat customers

Measure repeat purchase rates from customers acquired via each marketing approach. High repeat customer rates signify a strategy that attracts new buyers and nurtures long-term engagement, fostering sustainable growth and brand loyalty.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Calculate the cost of acquiring a new customer, lead, or trial to compare channels, decide where to invest more budget, and optimize campaigns. This metric is used in combination with others like AOV, LTV, ROAS and conversion rate for context.

Wrapping up

With measurements, from influencer identification through performance, you can understand and optimize the drivers of success for your influencer marketing campaigns. Understanding these numbers helps you to improve execution, allocate budgets effectively, advocate for more budget, and maximize returns.

And if you need a new helping hand with tracking measurements for your campaigns, MightyScout is here to help you. With MightyScout's advanced tools, you can seamlessly consolidate influencer data, attribute sales accurately, and gain a holistic view of your influencer marketing efforts. Leverage our platform to make data-based decisions, increase your brand's reach, and unlock the full potential of influencer marketing. Schedule a call today.