For brands just starting to dip their toes into influencer marketing campaigns, it’s vital to understand how to measure success. After all, finding the perfect content creator and planning an influencer marketing strategy is only part of the job. Whether you’re looking to understand hashtag KPIs, audience growth, or what low CTR could mean, read on to discover the how and why of tracking influencer marketing KPIs.
Why tracking influencer marketing KPIs is so important
As with any marketing campaign, your team needs to know what they’re doing right and where there’s room for growth. Analytics provides you with lessons that can save you time and money and answer questions that can impact your future influencer marketing strategies, including:
- Should we continue our relationship with this influencer?
- Did our campaign have a positive impact on our target audience?
- What was our return on investment?
- Would other forms of marketing be more effective in terms of time, money and response?
- Did we reach our goals for this influencer marketing campaign?
- What adjustments should we make to our influencer marketing strategy?
Many analysis tools are available through social media platforms, but savvy brands know it’s worth investing in a cross-channel influencer marketing platform.
Offering end-to-end influencer marketing solutions for everything from social listening and campaign management to content amplification and analytics, these tools can provide a one-stop hub for everything you need before, during, and after your influencer marketing campaigns.
Influencer marketing KPIs to track
Brand awareness
Getting your company’s or brand’s name out into the world isn’t enough in an interconnected world saturated with media. The concept of brand awareness goes beyond name recognition to measure if consumers are familiar with your logo, images or distinctive qualities of your products and services.
For the sake of influencer marketing analytics, you can measure brand awareness through three indicators:
Audience growth
Before and after your campaign, visit your influencer’s profile to count the number of “mutual” followers. The difference will reflect the number of followers you gained from your partnership.
Reach and impressions
Review your analytics to see the number of impressions — when a single user views your post — you earned during your campaign. For the total number of unique users who have seen your post, check the “reach” analytics.
Hashtag and brand name mentions
Choose an influencer marketing tool that will provide your brand with real-time tracking for mentions of both your brand name and hashtag during the campaign. Both are good indications that your campaign is effective.
Social engagement
One step beyond reach, social engagement tells you how many likes, comments and shares your campaign received. If your reach or impressions are high but your social engagement is low, it’s likely a sign that your campaign’s content didn’t necessarily resonate with your target audience.
Click-through rate
Abbreviated as CTR, your click-through rate tells you how many times a prospect clicked on a particular link. If you plan to use multiple influencers on a campaign, assign each person a custom link to track individual performance.
Low CTRs can give you insight into the strength of your content, your call-to-action, and your ability to speak to that influencer’s target audience. It could also be an indication that your link got buried among the text or design of the content.
Referral traffic
Similar to click-through rates, referral traffic offers a measurement of the number of people who have landed on your website, blog, e-commerce store, or landing page from other referring sources. In the case of an influencer marketing campaign, it’s possible that some people got the idea to visit one of your sites without directly clicking on the link provided.
Conversions
If we’re being honest, making a sale is the ultimate goal for most brands. And while not everyone who sees content is going to buy something immediately, an influencer marketing campaign can be a valuable tool in your long-game strategy.
While your KPIs should definitely include sales, don’t rank it as the epitome of success for your short game. Instead, think of the many ways that influencer marketing campaigns can provide a number of valuable immediate actions that may eventually lead to a sale.
These actions could include downloading apps, white papers, and case studies, watching tutorials or unboxing videos, requesting free samples, signing up for a newsletter, or reading reviews, among others.
If your brand’s products or services are a match for the influencer’s audience, you’re halfway there. Focus on giving prospects great content and actionable steps to learn more. Measure your results and look for insights into what (and how) to improve on your next campaign. If you think of KPIs as clues, your team will be that much closer to solving the mystery of how to reach your brand’s goals.
IZEA’s Flex platform allows you to track all of these KPIs and more. Learn more about getting started at izea.com/flex/.
