Strategy
Influencer Marketing Campaign: How Do You Measure the Success Of It
How do you measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign? Find out how to evaluate if you are meeting your campaign goals.
How Do You Measure the Success of an Influencer Marketing Campaign?
After you hire an influencer to help you market your brand, your job isn’t done. Once they make their post or video, you will need to track its effectiveness. Doing so is the key to making sure that you are spending your money wisely and maximizing your ROI.
To measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign, you must first identify your goals. Then, you can track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for insights into how effectively you are meeting those goals. With those insights, you will be able to make adjustments to future campaigns for more cost-effective and powerful results. Below, we go over some of the top metrics to evaluate.
1. Views and engagements on the influencer’s post
An easy starting point is to keep an eye on the post the influencer made. Monitor how many views, reactions, and comments it receives.
Naturally, the higher these numbers are, the better (unless the post backfires, and the reactions you are getting are negative, of course).
2. Types of engagements
While any sort of positive engagement at all is good, comments, in particular, are valuable. A user who types a comment is putting in significantly more time than one who simply picks a reaction. Where there is time and effort, there may be genuine interest.
You are going to want to scroll through the comments and read them if you can as well. Comments vary in quality and intent.
There is a huge difference between comments that are one or two words and those that contain full, thoughtful sentences, or even questions.
In fact, the quality of the comments can matter as much as the quantity—or perhaps even more in some scenarios in measuring the success of your influencer marketing campaign.
One paragraph-long comment with questions from a commenter who is highly interested in purchasing your product is potentially a stronger marker of success than half a dozen two-word comments from commenters displaying only mild, passing interest.
3. Traffic to your site or social media pages
The next thing you can track to measure influencer marketing campaign success is how much referring traffic you receive from the endorsements or mentions.
Several ways you can analyze this data include:
- Look at the traffic data you are tracking with Google Analytics or other services. If you see a major jump right after the influencer’s post, that probably means the post brought you the traffic.
- Have the influencer use a special tracking URL. That way, you will know exactly which traffic came from the link.
- Give the influencer a coupon code to share with their followers. Anyone who uses it to make a purchase was sent by the influencer (at least initially).
4. Views and engagements on your posts
Chances are good you will notice not just a spike in website hits, but also in interactions with your own social media posts following an influencer’s post. Check to see if your reactions and comments have ticked up. In particular, do you have more people asking questions about your products and services, or even making comments directly about the campaign?
5. Other mentions on social media
One of the reasons to use social media in your campaigns is its viral nature. The impact of your influencer campaigns starts with the influencer’s post, but it does not end there.
As more and more people see the post, they will not only engage with reactions and comments, but also with shares.
Eventually, that means that other people are going to start talking about the post on their own profiles.
If you attach a hashtag to your campaign, that is arguably the easiest way to track all of these widespread mentions.
All you have to do is conduct a search for that hashtag. Whatever comes up originated from the influencer campaign.
6. Sales
Finally, one more metric you can consider is direct sales of your products or services.
As with website traffic, coupon codes and tracking links associated with the campaign can help you figure out which sales the influencer helped generate.
If the campaign you run generates sales you can measure, that is spectacular. But here’s the thing—you should not consider a campaign like this a failure if sales are low.
You are in the process of broadening your reach. People who just found out about you from the influencer’s endorsement probably will not purchase immediately. Right now, they are just getting to know you. They may end up buying later.
Take a Multi-Pronged Approach to Measuring the Success of Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Now you know how you can assess the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns. Rather than relying on just one metric, you should look at a combination of engagements, traffic, mentions and sales. Use tracking URLs, coupon codes and hashtags to gather the most precise data to analyze.
Over time as you run multiple campaigns, you will be able to use your data to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You will then be able to spend your budget on the most effective influencers and messaging going forward. As you fine-tune your campaigns, you can look forward to maximizing your ROI.
