Influencer marketing and social media management platform Later recently expanded its data arsenal with a $250 million acquisition of Mavely, adding 120,000 creators and direct sales attribution capabilities to solve creator marketing’s biggest challenge – proving ROI.

While marketers believe in creator partnerships, they struggle to justify growing investments without precise performance data. After surveying nearly 1,000 brand marketers and agency decision-makers across 17 industries, CreatorIQ recently revealed that 94% of organizations believe creator content drives more ROI than traditional digital advertising. Yet, measuring creator performance remains the top roadblock to success in 32% of cases.

“If you can’t measure ROAS, you have a very hard time fighting for budget, proving that the marketing tactics you’re using are effective, and ultimately growing that marketing strategy,” says Scott Sutton, CEO of Later, crystallizing the central challenge facing creator marketing today.

The combined Later-Mavely platform aims to change this by connecting every creator post to actual sales, much like early digital advertising evolved from impression counts to conversion tracking.

This convergence of massive data scale and precise attribution arrives as social commerce transforms from buzzword to reality, with platforms racing to add shopping features and creators becoming their own retail channels.

Later, which serves Fortune 500 brands such as ESPN and L’Oréal, believes this combination has cracked the code on creator marketing attribution by enabling marketers to plan, budget, forecast, and measure campaign results with unprecedented precision.

Marketing Attribution Through Stages

This challenge of measuring marketing impact isn’t new. “The evolution of advertising came from print, where you printed newspapers and magazines. There’s no attribution, and it’s tough; it’s surveys. When you got into TV, it was still really hard to attribute. Digital early days, not a lot of attribution,” Sutton explains, drawing parallels between creator marketing’s current growing pains and digital advertising’s stages.

The field has matured significantly since its inception. “Like many marketing channels, it was not well understood at the beginning. Early adopters just threw money at the space, and some found success, some didn’t. And it was a lot of celebrity endorsements and trial and error,” Scott Sutton explains. 

He continues, “I think now there’s much more refinement, and there’s a lot more data to understand what works and what doesn’t. There’s a lot more professionalism. Just this week at the Super Bowl, we’re working with some amazing creators, and I continue to be so impressed at their acumen for brand safety and how to present a brand and what they can and cannot say but still tell an amazing creative story that engages their audience.”

Strategic Integration with Mavely

To address these long-standing measurement challenges, Later began searching for solutions. “We actually reached out to a few different players in this space who manage link tracking and attribution in the affiliate space. And Mavely was one,” Sutton reveals. “The other thing that’s very attractive about Mavely is they have 120,000 creators who are driving $1.4 billion in run rate GMV across 1,400 brands who also leverage for branded campaigns.”

The integration began even before the acquisition. “We actually started to partner with them before we acquired them, and we actually integrated their technology into our platform to start seeing that benefit,” Sutton explains. “When we talked with customers, they were just so excited about this ability to track outcomes that we started to investigate what coming together would look like.” 

He adds, “We worked with their leadership. We also just found an amazing company with great leaders and a really great culture that we felt aligned well.”

Breaking Down the Attribution Challenge

With Mavely’s technology integrated into the platform, Later can now tackle the fundamental complexities of creator marketing measurement. 

“Let’s start with the most simplistic approach. I hire an influencer, and they make a post. If I don’t have API connections, I don’t have detailed statistics,” Sutton explains. “I’m having to track then the dollars I spent in a spreadsheet. I have to ask the influencer to self-report different types of statistics, then compile them, and all I get at the end of the day is CPM and CPE, and then I still have no tie back to ‘Did that drive any sales?’”

The more refined way to do that, Scott continues, is to work with a partner with API connections like Later or others to aggregate that data. “I still get CPM and CPE, but they do it for me,” he says. “The next evolution of that is then I can use attributable links and attribution then to track the post to a click to a sale and report directly back ROAS. And that’s what Later is the only one position to do really well at the moment.”

Later’s solution combines three massive datasets that Sutton emphasizes create unique value: “What I have is 300 million posts that have been posted through Later social, 3 million influencer activations with detailed statistics, 1.5 billion in sales with detailed stock-keeping unit (SKU) level tracking and attribution to be able to definitively drive the best outcome for a marketer that is simply different than any other agency or technology has.”

Measuring Impact and Optimizing Selection

Armed with this comprehensive data infrastructure, Later’s platform goes beyond traditional engagement metrics to measure multiple layers of campaign impact. 

“When I think about the stats that matter, it’s cost per thousand impressions, cost per engagement, and ultimately ROAS,” Sutton explains. “If your goal is broad awareness, you’re thinking about how many impressions you get. Cost per engagement is starting to get into whether they are interacting with your content. And then ROAS, are they buying something?”

This comprehensive measurement approach is transforming how brands select creators. “Without data, if you just go try to find fashion and beauty influencers but you don’t know who’s watching their content, you could be completely aiming your ad at the wrong people,” Sutton notes. “What’s interesting is we see some of the most effective advertising via influencers you would never imagine.”

He elaborates with a specific example: “If I’m trying to sell a product to 40-year-old men in America, I need to find an influencer who speaks to 40-year-old men in America. And it might not be that they are always talking about your particular product. But if their audience sees that product and there’s a compelling advertisement, that often works far better than finding, let’s say, a surfing influencer to talk about surfing.”

Later’s AI engine combines engagement metrics with sales data to optimize partnerships. “Leveraging 3 million influencer activations and our AI tools, we’re able to match brands with creators leveraging an entire host of data,” Sutton explains. “We employ AI tools to vet. Is there language, violence, nudity, firearms, political content? Have they mentioned other brands? Have they talked about your brand in the past to ensure there aren’t any embarrassing or alarming outcomes from working with that creator?”

The Future of Creator Marketing Measurement

As Later refines its attribution capabilities, the company sees an even bigger opportunity emerging at the intersection of content and commerce. “If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, he talks a lot about live commerce, live shopping, and commerce-through-social. I’m a huge believer that will continue to dominate,” Sutton predicts.

Drawing parallels to the Internet’s evolution, he explains: “When the Internet started, it was just an empty space, and what you saw was web pages, which is written content emerged. And then you started to see a proliferation of written and shared content. Then, you started to see imagery and richer video. With all that, display advertising started because there was so much inventory of attention that you could then market. And then what did you see next on the Internet? You saw commerce like crazy, and you’re starting to see it. Commerce is the future of social.”

The Mavely acquisition positions Later to lead this evolution. “We want to continue building an amazing company that serves marketers and creators, and we want to build the number one company in the creator economy that brings all the solutions together,” Sutton shares. “We’re hiring like crazy to continue on this mission, and I think you’ll continue to see an acceleration in our growth.”

Building Trust Through Transparency

Ultimately, Later’s focus on attribution reflects a broader mission to bring transparency to creator marketing. “What we want to do is have a one-stop shop where all you have to do is say, ‘Later, I would like to commission this content and see ROAS,’ and we can manage all the rest of it,” says Sutton.

He emphasizes the importance of community in achieving this mission: “Social media can be a challenging place, and I think we as brands and providers need to bring folks together, lift them up, help them be successful, and support them on what can be a very challenging and often very lonely journey.”

The goal isn’t just measuring success but enabling it. As Sutton concludes, “I think we can lift up creators, we can lift up marketers, do things better, and have better consumer experiences, and all of us can stand to win. Until the market is completely saturated and we can only fight against each other, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and we can all rise with the tide.”