How to Check Influencer Analytics

Choosing the right influencer isn't just about their follower count, a huge number means nothing if their audience doesn't actually care about what they post. The real measure of a successful partnership lies in authentic engagement and a genuine connection with an audience that aligns with your brand. This guide will walk you through exactly how to analyze an influencer's performance, helping you spot red flags, vet potential partners, and invest your marketing budget with confidence.

Why You Can't Rely on an Influencer's Media Kit Alone

Often, the first thing an influencer will send you is a media kit or "headsheet." This is essentially a resume that highlights their best work, follower count, and a few cherry-picked performance metrics. While a professional media kit is a good sign, relying on it entirely is a common mistake for a few reasons:

• The Numbers Can Be Inflated: Screenshots are incredibly easy to manipulate. Someone could use a browser's "inspect element" tool to change a '1' to a '9' in about five seconds.
• They Only Show the Highlights: Influencers are marketers, and they'll naturally show you their most viral Reel or a post that performed exceptionally well. This doesn't represent their typical day-to-day performance. You need to know the average, not just the outlier.
• They Focus on Vanity Metrics: A big follower number looks impressive, but it doesn't tell you anything about audience quality or engagement. A creator with 10,000 highly engaged followers in your niche is far more valuable than one with 100,000 passive or fake followers.

Think of a media kit as a starting point, not the finish line. Your job is to independently verify a creator's analytics to get the full, unvarnished picture of their influence.

The Essential Metrics That Actually Matter

Instead of getting fixated on follower count, it's time to shift your focus to the analytics that truly reveal an influencer's effectiveness. Here are the core metrics you should always check.

Engagement Rate: The Real Test of Community Health

Engagement rate tells you what percentage of an influencer’s audience actively interacts with their content through likes, comments, shares, and saves. It’s the single most important metric for gauging audience loyalty and connection. A low engagement rate often signals a passive audience or a high number of fake followers.

How to Calculate It

There are a few ways to calculate engagement rate, but here’s a common and simple formula for an individual post:

((Total Likes + Total Comments) / Follower Count) * 100 = Engagement Rate %

For video content like Reels or TikToks, you might also include shares and saves, as these are strong indicators of audience interest.

What's a "Good" Engagement Rate?

This is the tricky part - there's no universal "good" benchmark. It varies widely by platform, niche, and follower size. However, here are some general guidelines for Instagram:

• Less than 1%: Generally considered low.
• 1% to 3%: A solid and average range for many accounts.
• 3% to 6%: Very high and indicative of a strong community.
• Above 6%: Exceptional performance, often seen in smaller "micro-influencer" accounts with dedicated followings.

Remember, an influencer with 1 million followers will naturally have a lower engagement rate than an influencer with 10,000. Look for consistency across a creator's recent content rather than fixating on a single number.

Audience Demographics: Are They Reaching Your People?

This is non-negotiable. It doesn't matter if an influencer has a 10% engagement rate if their followers are in a completely different country or age group than your target customer. You need to confirm that their audience matches yours.

Request explicit data on:

• Location: Top countries and cities. If you’re a local business in Austin, Texas, a creator whose audience is primarily in Los Angeles and New York won't provide much value.
• Age Range: Knowing the primary age brackets of their followers helps you confirm if you’re reaching Gen Z, millennials, or another target demographic.
• Gender: A simple percentage split.

These analytics are only visible to the creator on the backend of their account. A legitimate influencer should have no problem providing a screenshot or a screen recording of this data.

Impressions and Reach: Understanding Content Visibility

These two metrics are often confused but tell different stories about who is seeing the content.

• Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen a piece of content.
• Impressions: The total number of times a piece of content has been displayed, whether it was clicked or not.

Impressions will almost always be higher than reach because a single person might see the same post multiple times (in their feed, on an Explore page, or if a friend shares it with them). For Instagram Stories, you should look at the average number of story views. This is a very pure indicator of how many of the influencer’s most dedicated followers actively watch their daily content.

Follower Growth Rate: Looking for The Right Trends

A healthy, growing account is a sign of a creator who is consistently producing content that resonates. Sudden, massive spikes in followers can sometimes be a red flag for purchased followers. Legitimate follower growth usually looks like a steady, upward trend over time.

Ask a potential partner for a screenshot of a 30-day or 90-day follower growth chart from their native analytics. Steady growth is what you want to see, not overnight jumps followed by steep drop-offs.

How to Actually Get and Verify This Data

Now that you know what to look for, here are three methods for gathering and checking this information, ranging from direct outreach to using paid tools.

Method 1: Asking Influencers Directly (The Right Way)

The most straightforward method is to simply ask. Professional creators who are confident in their performance will gladly share this information. The key is to be specific and professional in your request.

Sample Outreach Message

Instead of just saying "send us your stats," try a clear and courteous approach like this:

Hi [Influencer Name],

My name is [Your Name] from [Your Company]. We're big fans of your content, especially [mention a specific post you liked]. We are currently looking for creators to partner with for our upcoming [Campaign Name] and think you could be a great fit.

In our initial vetting process, we ask for a couple of performance metrics. Would you be open to sharing a few up-to-date screenshots from your native analytics showing the following?:

• Audience demographics (Top countries/cities, age range)
• Average post reach &, average story views from the last 14-30 days
• The engagement rate of your 3-5 most recent feed posts

To help us move quickly, a brief screen recording walking through these sections would be fantastic. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best,
[Your Name]

Notice the request for a screen recording. This is the gold standard for verifying data, as it proves the analytics are coming directly from their live account and not from a doctored screenshot.

Method 2: Using Third-Party Analytics Tools

If you're managing a larger influencer program, investing in a third-party tool can save you an immense amount of time and provide a more objective layer of analysis. These platforms pull data directly via APIs or use advanced algorithms to estimate performance.

• Tools for Fake Follower and Engagement Audits (e.g., HypeAuditor): These platforms are incredibly powerful for vetting influencers. They can analyze an account to provide an "Audience Quality Score," detect fake followers or bot-driven engagement, and give you in-depth reports a creator can't easily provide. This is a great way to verify the information you receive directly.
• Simple Trend Monitoring (e.g., Social Blade): While not as detailed, a free tool like Social Blade can be useful for looking at high-level follower growth trends over many months or years. It’s a quick-and-easy way to spot big, suspicious jumps in followers.

Method 3: Doing a Manual "Gut Check" Audit

Even without tools or direct access to a creator's analytics, you can learn a lot by doing a bit of manual detective work. This is a great way to quickly prescreen potential partners before reaching out.

Scan the Comments Section

The comment section is where you’ll find the clearest evidence of an authentic community. Look for:

Red Flags: 🚩

• Overly generic comments like "Great post!" "Love this!" or a string of simple emojis from unverified accounts.
• Comments that are completely irrelevant to the photo or caption.
• The same handful of accounts commenting on every single post (this could be a sign of an "engagement pod," where creators agree to artificially boost each other's posts).

Green Flags: ✅

• Comments that feature genuine questions about what’s in the post.
• Followers tagging their friends.
• Actual conversations happening between the influencer and their audience.

If an influencer with 50,000 followers only gets five comments, and all of them are one-word answers, you're likely looking at an unengaged or partially fake audience.

Look at Content Quality and Consistency

Finally, move past the numbers and qualitatively assess the influencer's brand. Are they committed to their niche? Is their content high-quality? Do they post consistently? An amazing analytics profile means nothing if the influencer's vibe, values, and visual style don’t align with your brand. The best partnerships feel authentic because they are authentic.

Final Thoughts

Checking influencer analytics is more than just a background check, it's a strategic process for making informed marketing decisions. By moving past simple follower counts and digging into engagement rates, audience demographics, and performance trends, you can partner with creators who actually connect with the right audience for your brand and deliver measurable results.

As you build a program with several awesome content creators in your corner, reporting becomes more important and time-consuming. At Postbase, we built our analytics dashboard to give you a clear, centralized view of what's working across all your social platforms. You can easily track your native campaign posts' performances or see which content pillars resonate and create reports that share that data clearly with your team - you'll never have to manually take screenshots again.