Important Metrics to Track for Influencer Marketing

How effective is my influencer spend? How do I know if it’s working? How do we tie influencer spends to purchase and ROI? 

These are the questions any media lead or brand manager asks their influencer marketing partners. The answers? Always vary. 

For the most part, influencer marketing metrics have always been closer to out of home media (i.e. billboards) than performance marketing metrics. There are high level metrics with a dash of “trust me bro, it works” behind it. 

However, brands are demanding more data to back up decisions and to justify large influencer marketing budgets. Agencies need to be smarter, understand their options, and be able to sell this to their clients.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are more influencer marketing metrics data available than you might realize. The bad news, it’s not all from an automated source and it will require you to stick together a few solutions. 

Let’s examine the methods available to tracking influencer marketing metrics. 

Traditional Media Metrics

These are the most commonly referred to metrics when people think of influencer marketing metrics. They are tracked via platform APIs (like Slice’s reporting) or by manually collecting screenshots from influencers and compiling them into a PowerPoint (but what a hassle). 

CPM/Cost per Mille - The standard way to measure the cost per thousand followers.

Total Engagements - The combined number of likes, shares, comments or other engagements on content. 

Engagement Rate - The percentage of engagement divided by the total number of followers. 

Reach - How many people your content reached. This is typically measured by total followers. 

Views - How many people watched a video. 

Cost Per Reach - Total reach divided by the cost of the content. 

Cost Per Engagement - Total Engagements divided by the cost of the content. 

Cost Per View - Total Views divided by the cost of the content. 

Cost Per Impression - Total impressions divided by the cost of the content. 

UTM Tags and Promo Codes

Everyone would prefer that the customer journey and path to purchase was linear and easily attributable. But that’s not how people live. We’re complicated and our attention is constantly being diverted. I might hear about a brand on a podcast or YouTube video but not buy something for a month. So a direct link won’t necessarily be the best option. Enter referral UTM tags and promo codes. 

These two go hand-in-hand with influencer marketing. Every single host-read ad ends with a personalized URL and a promo code.

“Visit Slice.id/Jesse and use the promo code “Jesse10” for 10% off your first purchase.” 

This will give you a few benefits. First, you can easily track which influencers and content creators have audiences that are demonstrating purchase intent. While they might not buy something right away, by taking the extra step, going to a browser, and typing in the URL, they are entering the consideration phase. They have enough interest and value the creator’s opinion enough to get more information. This is valuable for brands. It increases touch points, gives you an opportunity to collect PII data, or retarget them. Plus you can see which creators are converting. 

A purchase code takes it a step further. You can see who actually is buying from your creators and enables you to attribute purchases to a creator. Now, this is not a perfect system. I have certainly purchased items from creator recommendations and forgotten the promo code. But it will definitely help you understand who converts and the ROI of your influencer marketing spends. 

Brand Lift Surveys

Brand lift surveys are conducted by advertising platforms, like YouTube, Instagram, and programmatic media. What these surveys do is track multiple questions, depending on your survey, to track things like brand recall or purchase intent. 

How it works is that the chosen platform will conduct a survey before your ads start. Then, after a given time period (like two weeks), they’ll ask the people exposed to your ads the same questions and see if there was improvement. 

This is another way to track effectiveness and value of the ads, without direct purchase attribution. If people can recall your brand, then you’re more likely to be top of mind in the future when it comes time to consider or buy the product you are selling. 

Post Purchase Surveys

For large FMCG brands, who do not own their sales channels, this could be more difficult (but not impossible). But for brands that run a lot of ecommerce on their own site, they have the ability to deliver a post-purchase survey as a pop up (sometimes it’s in the sales process, but this could also decrease conversion rates if you add an extra step at purchase). It’s a very simple survey that asks the customer, where did they hear about them before purchase. Options like influencers, social media, podcasts, SEO, Word of Mouth are common options. Again, not an exact science, but it can help you track where purchases are being triggered from. 

Influencer marketing metrics and analytics are not an exact science. It requires you to be creative and stitch together multiple options to see how well your influencer marketing budget is working. 

Slice is a creator management solution for agencies, talent managers, and content creators. As part of our suite, we offer verified reporting. While we can’t help you with all your analytics right now, we can help you with the traditional media metrics for influencers and content creators. In the future we’ll build more integrations so we can streamline your reporting even more. 

Sign up for a free trial or contact us at hello@slice.id for a demo or more information.

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash