How to Measure Influencer Marketing

Running an influencer marketing campaign without a plan to measure it is like shouting into the wind - you’re making noise, but you have no idea if anyone is actually listening. To properly track your success and justify the investment, you need a clear strategy built around the right metrics. This guide will walk you through exactly how to measure your influencer marketing efforts, from setting initial goals to calculating a clear and undeniable ROI.

Step 1: Define Your Goals and KPIs Before Anything Else

You can't measure success if you don't know what it looks like. Before you even reach out to an influencer, you need to define your campaign’s purpose. What do you really want to achieve? Every measurement flows from this single question. Once your goal is set, you can pick the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track your progress.

Here are common influencer marketing goals and the KPIs to match:

Goal: Boost Brand Awareness

This is all about getting your brand in front of a new, relevant audience. You want to expand your reach and become more recognizable within your industry. You’re not focused on sales here, just on building brand presence and making an impact in your space.

• Reach: The total number of unique people who saw the influencer’s content. This tells you how large the potential audience is.
• Impressions: The total number of times the content was displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked. One person could be responsible for multiple impressions.
• Brand Mentions: The volume of conversation about your brand across social media, earned in and around the launch of new products or new influencer campaigns. Are more people talking about you as a result of the influencer campaign launch?
• Share of Voice: A metric that compares your brand's social media mentions against those of your competitors. Share of Voice tells you what percentage of the conversation in your industry is about your brand.
• Website Referral Traffic: The amount of traffic coming to your website by way of the custom URL provided to your influencer.

Goal: Drive Engagement

A strong, engaged community is more valuable than a huge, passive one. For this campaign goal, you aim to spark conversation and interaction, showing that your brand resonates deeply with your target audience.

• Likes, Comments, Shares, and Saves: These are fundamental engagement metrics. Comments are typically valued more highly than likes because they require more effort. Shares are exceptionally valuable because a follower is using their social capital to endorse your products or services with their network, which also increases the content's reach.
• Engagement Rate: This gives you a clear sense of audience quality over mere size. It's usually calculated as: (Total Engagements ÷ Total Followers) x 100 A more accurate method when possible is: (Total Engagements ÷ Reach or Impressions) x 100
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of viewers who clicked the link in the influencer’s post or profile biography.

Goal: Generate Leads and Drive Sales

To continue growing, you eventually need to convert social media attention into customers. Lead and sales goals are laser-focused on one thing: directly turning followers into paying customers through targeted marketing efforts.

• Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who completed a desired action (e.g., signed up for a newsletter, downloaded an ebook, made a purchase) after clicking on an influencer's link.
• Discount and Promo Code Usage: Track how many times an influencer's unique promotional code was used at checkout. This is a direct line to sales driven by that specific influencer.
• Affiliate Sales: These are tracked using special links that credit influencers with a percentage of the total sales they drive, offering a clear view of their direct financial impact.
• Return on Ad Spend (RoAS): This measurement tells you the revenue generated for every dollar spent on an advertising campaign, providing a clear picture of its profitability.

Key Methods for Tracking Your Campaign

Now that you have your goals, it's time to set up tracking. Knowing what's working with your influencers is crucial. Here are the most important methods your team will want to start implementing immediately.

1. Use UTM Parameters and Custom Links

UTM parameters are a marketer's best friend for measuring influencer marketing success. They are small snippets of text added to a URL that allow you to track online traffic with precision. A UTM link tells you exactly where a click came from, which campaign it was a part of, and where that user landed on your website.

A typical UTM link looks like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=instagram&,utm_medium=social&,utm_campaign=summer_promo&,utm_term=influencer_name

A Breakdown of UTM Links:

1. Source: This tells you where the traffic came from, such as `instagram`, `facebook`, or a specific newsletter.
2. Medium: This explains the channel or type of traffic, like `social`, `cpc` (cost-per-click), or `email`.
3. Campaign: This is the name you give your campaign (e.g., `summer_promo`) to tie an influencer’s traffic back to a specific marketing initiative.
4. Term: Often used to identify specific keywords or, in this case, the individual influencer (`influencer_name`).

Once set up, Google Analytics will track these links, showing you detailed traffic and engagement data from each unique influencer. This allows you to accurately attribute performance and understand who drives the best results.

How to Set up a UTM Link:

Creating UTM links doesn't require any advanced technical skills. You can use Google's free Campaign URL Builder or a URL shortener tool like Bitly. Simply fill in the fields for your website URL, source, medium, and campaign to generate your trackable link.

2. Implement Affiliate Links and Promo Codes

While UTMs are great for tracking web traffic, affiliate links and unique promo codes are designed to directly measure sales. They provide a clear and simple way to attribute conversions to specific influencers.

• Affiliate Links: When you provide an influencer with a special URL, you’re giving them a unique link that tracks every sale originating from them. This lets you pay them a commission for each customer they send your way.
• Unique Promotional Codes: This is a straightforward strategy where each influencer receives a unique discount code (e.g., "INFLUENCER15") for their audience to use at checkout. You can easily track how many times each code is used to measure its direct contribution to sales.

3. Calculate Your Return on Investment (ROI)

Ultimately, a key measure of an influencer marketing campaign is its financial success. Calculating your Return on Investment (ROI) is crucial for justifying your budget and planning future strategies.

The ROI Formula:

Here is the formula to use:

ROI = [(Revenue Generated - Cost) / Cost] x 100

• Revenue Generated: This includes all income that can be directly traced back to the campaign, such as product sales from promo codes and affiliate link conversions.
• Cost of Investment: This includes influencer payments, agency fees, production costs, team salaries, and the cost of any free products provided.

What About Non-Financial ROI?

Not all value from an influencer campaign can be tracked through direct sales. Consider these "soft" metrics when assessing the overall impact of your campaign.

• Earned Media Value (EMV): This metric estimates the value of the organic reach and engagement your brand received from the campaign, compared to what it would have cost to achieve the same result with paid advertising.
• Audience Growth: Monitor the growth of your own social media following during and after the campaign. An increase in followers can often be attributed to your work with influencers.
• Brand Trust: Collaborating with respected influencers can enhance your brand's credibility. Their endorsement transfers trust from them to their audience, which is a valuable long-term asset.

Final Thoughts

Measuring influencer marketing is a crucial part of any successful social media strategy. By setting clear goals and KPIs, and by consistently tracking engagement metrics, conversions, and ROI, you can optimize your campaigns for greater success. Knowing your data empowers you to make smarter decisions and build more effective partnerships.

Many modern marketing teams feel frustrated with social media tools that weren't built for today's creative landscape. We built Postbase to simplify social media management with the features that actually matter. With our platform, you can schedule content across all channels, get key analytics to see what your audience wants, and manage all your conversations from a single inbox. This saves you time and removes the pain from your daily workflow so you can focus on building a stronger brand.