When it comes to influencer marketing, there is a lot of talk about return on investment. It’s marketers’ job to make sure their brand gets its money’s worth. How do you know if your influencer marketing campaign is delivering the most bang for your buck? You measure influencer marketing KPIs.
One way to measure and analyze influencer marketing is to look at key performance indicators, aka KPIs. As Investopedia puts it, KPIs are a “set of quantifiable measures that a company uses to gauge its performance over time.”
You’ll find KPIs in use in every corner of the marketing world. Here’s how to put them to good use for your next influencer marketing campaign.
What Are Influencer Marketing KPIs?
KPIs vary. KPIs for one company are often completely different from those by another. Influencer marketing KPIs connect brands to their specific goals.
You can break influencer marketing KPIs into several categories. They’re based on what you are trying to measure and what you hope to get from your campaign. Those categories include:
Traffic KPIs
One common goal of an influencer marketing campaign is to increase traffic to a brand’s website. Traffic KPIs include new visitors, website visitors for a particular period, and time spent on site. With traffic KPIs, you see how many people are being directed to your site by a particular influencer. And you also how much they value the content on the site (for example, if they leave quickly, they’re likely not finding what they need/want).
Social Media KPIs
Another popular influencer marketing goal is to increase a brand’s social media following. KPIs that help you determine if your influencer campaign is driving people towards your social media pages include tracking the number of new followers and the number of views and likes your social pages receive over a specific period.
Engagement KPIs
Engagement KPIs are similar to social media KPIs. Instead of showing you new followers, though, they show you how much engagement specific influencer posts received. For example, you can track how many likes an influencer’s post got or how many comments it received. Another engagement KPI worth paying attention to is the number of shares a single post received.
Conversion KPIs
Conversion KPIs show you how many people end up taking action or making a purchase as a result of an influencer campaign. One way to track conversion KPIs is to give each influencer you work with a custom link or code to share with their followers. You can then look at the amount of traffic that comes through that link and how much of that traffic ends up making a purchase. WIth a custom code, you can track the number of purchases made that redeem the code at checkout.
Why Measure Influencer Marketing KPIs?
Why should you care about KPIs? Well, for starters, they let you know what’s going on with your influencer marketing campaign and whether your campaigns are on track to achieve their goals or not. As the Strategic CFO puts it, what gets measured gets managed. If you’re not paying attention to various KPIs, you have no way of knowing what’s going on with your influencer marketing or whether there are areas where you can improve or make changes.
When you pay attention to KPIs, you know when it’s time to adjust course or try something different. Alternatively, KPIs let you see what’s working and what your brand should continue to do.
Examples of Influencer Marketing KPIs
Daniel Wellington
The Daniel Wellington watch company is known for using influencer marketing to grow its brand. One of the ways the brand was able to track the effectiveness of its influencers was by giving influencer promo codes to share with their followers (such as this one). The promo codes allow the brand to see how many people end up buying based on a post from an influencer.
Fashion Nova
Fashion Nova is another brand that can attribute its sharp rise in popularity to influencer marketing. The brand claims it grew by 600 percent in 2017 thanks to its network of around 3,000 influencers. One of the KPIs the brand used was to track the number of Instagram followers it had. In early 2017, the brand had six million Instagram followers, as reported by Vice. By July of 2018, it had more than 12 million followers.
Choosing the Right Influencer Marketing KPIs to Track
Which KPIs should you pay attention to? It all boils down to your goals. Concerned about website traffic? Want to increase your new website visitors? Then zero in on how many visitors come to your site by influencers.
If your main goal is to boost sales, then you’ll want to pay attention to the number of purchases made that result from an influencer’s post. Handing out special promo codes or tracking URLs will allow you to measure that KPI.
How to Work Influencer Marketing KPIs Into Your Overall Strategy
The first step to working influencer marketing KPIs into your strategy is to determine which KPIs you want to focus on. To do that, you need to know your goals. Do you want to increase website traffic, get more social media followers, or increase sales?
After setting a goal and choosing the KPIs that connect with that goal, the next step is to find a way to track and measure your KPI. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to measure website traffic, use influencer marketing software to measure engagement rates and return on investment, or track your KPIs by hand (such as by totalling up the number of times a specific promo code is redeemed).
In many ways, if you don’t know what you’re measuring or tracking, you have no way of knowing where your influencer campaigns are going or if they are performing the way you’d hoped. Working KPIs into your strategy might seem complicated, but in the long run doing so will save you time and headache.
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