How to Measure Influencer Marketing Success

Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for any brand, but you must know how to measure its success. While reviewing metrics is usually reserved for the end of the campaign, it’s something you should discuss during the planning phase. Before reaching out to influencers, identify the campaign’s purpose, goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure influencer marketing success.

Which KPIs should you watch? Before setting an influencer marketing strategy, review the common influencer marketing KPIs to watch — and KPIs you can access with the help of an influencer marketing platform or a team of experts.

Common influencer marketing KPIs to watch

Brand awareness

Influencer content drives brand awareness, but it’s not always easy to track. How do you measure the number of people who became “aware” of your brand during the campaign? Some KPIs can help you measure brand awareness, which are:

Followers: Number of followers you gained during the campaign’s time frame.
Impressions: Number of people who saw the influencer’s post in their feed.
Campaign hashtags: Number of posts with your campaign hashtag.
Video views: The number of times a campaign video was viewed.
Brand mentions: The number of times a brand is mentioned on social media in a given period.

Conversions

Planning and executing influencer marketing campaigns takes time, money, and resources, so you need conversion metrics. A solid grasp of ROI calculation is crucial for evaluating the campaign’s effectiveness. It is essential to determine the number of conversions directly resulting from the campaign’s impact.

To track conversions, most marketing teams pay attention to the following:

Trackable links: A personalized link for each influencer to track interactions and sales.
Promo codes: A unique code for each influencer to track interactions and sales.

Marketers can create personalized links or unique promo codes for each influencer to provide data clarity on the backend of a campaign. When an influencer shares their link, the traffic is tracked via tools like Google Analytics. As a result, a brand can track the source of each conversion.

Influencer marketing software can help too. With IZEA Flex, for example, you can use the Associations feature, which gives marketers the power to “associate” contacts or social media handles with sales. Through the help of a Shopify or Google Analytics integration, your influencer dashboard can show you influencer-specific conversions, sales, and influencer marketing ROI.

KPIs that we can track

As a brand, you can plan campaigns, find influencers, manage deliverables, and track metrics, but it takes time. And, you’ll likely work with a hodgepodge of tools, spreadsheets, and dashboards to get it done.

If influencer marketing is a consistent tool for your brand, our influencer marketing solutions can ease your workload. With influencer discovery tools, templated contracts, communication features, AI tools, and, perhaps most importantly, a detailed, centralized analytics dashboard, your brand can leverage social media influencer marketing with ease with IZEA Flex. You can also leverage the expertise of our Managed Services team to handle your campaigns if your brand or agency lacks the bandwidth.

Here’s a closer look at the KPIs we can track:

Retail sales lift

To gauge a campaign’s success, you need to look at your sales stats. You’re looking for a jump in sales, but again, this number can be hard to quantify.

By comparing sales in markets exposed to influencer organic content and paid media to three small excluded markets (dark markets) that act as controls, IZEA and our partners can determine the actual sales lift.

Foot traffic

Wouldn’t it be great to know how many people saw influencer-generated content and came into your store? Our Managed Services team can do that with the help of our solutions partners.

E-commerce sales tracking and attribution

IZEA can provide our Managed Services clients with data about sales generated from a campaign. With our partner tools, social media customers who see a sponsored post with the Click2Cart feature can add up to six products to a cart in a single click.

With this feature enabled, you can see stats like the number of products added to a cart — and more.

The benefits of influencer marketing are vast, but you should be able to quantify them with accurate data. Our influencer marketing solutions can help.