5 Useful Metrics to Measure the Impact of Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns

How do you measure the impact of your influencer marketing campaigns? If the answer is that you don’t, or you don’t do it very well or very consistently, read on.

Keeping tabs on campaign performance is a must, even if you don’t usually have a head for data. It’s the only way that you can make clearheaded decisions about what’s working, what to do more of and what needs to change to steer you closer to meeting your marketing objectives and overall business goals.

There’s something else, too. It’s not enough to know that you got so many thousand impressions (although having a handle on how many people are seeing your influencer’s content is important). You need to know that the right people are seeing the content and, it would also be helpful to know what they did next. Like, did they click on a link, or leave a comment?

Knowing who’s seen your content, how important those people are to your brand overall and what they did next helps you to build a bigger picture of your campaign successes. It also makes it easier to pinpoint any areas for improvement, so you deliver even better results next time.

Here are a few useful metrics to keep in mind the next time you want to understand how well your influencer campaigns are performing:

Metric #1: Reach

Let’s start right at the very beginning. Reach is the number of people who saw your piece of content. If you’re preparing a report for your boss or, want to see how your campaign is going so you can justify adding a bit more budget, this is the absolute, simplest piece of data you’ll want to know. This is a basic advertising principal. For the X amount you’ve spent, how many people have seen your content?

If your piece of content and chosen influencer is very niche, this figure might be small. If you’re working with an influencer who has a larger or even viral following, then that number may run into the tends of thousands. A note of caution here, reach is useful to know but it isn’t the be all and end all and can’t be used on its own as a measure of campaign success.

Let’s say you’re selling a dog collar. But it’s only for dogs named Rover. On the surface it may sound wonderful if two million people saw that post but, if only 1% of those people own a dog named Rover, the other 99% of people become irrelevant. That’s why Reach is good to know but can’t be used in isolation as a way to measure the impact of your campaign.

Metric #2: Engagement

Engagement is a measure of interaction with your content. It tells you how many people were captivated enough by your influencer post to take an action, such as like, share, leave a reaction, post a comment or save that post.

This is another foundational statistic because it helps you to decide if your content is grabbing the attention of the audience and leading them to take a desirable action that brings them closer to your brand. Tracking levels of engagement over time is also useful, as you’ll then be able to see if you’re becoming more impactful and creating content that is harder to ignore or scroll past, or are losing the interest of your audience.

Engagement levels should also be considered in line with your chosen influencer’s audience size. Very large audiences will tend to have smaller engagement rates, while micro influencers should typically generate a higher level of engagement.

Metric #3: Traffic

Measuring how much traffic you receive your website receives from your influencer campaigns is intrinsic to understanding whether posts have been a success or not. Your influencer post will typically include a call to action, to send the social traffic

from the network through to your own brand assets, such as a dedicated landing page or specific product or service page.

Keeping track of how much traffic is generated is useful for calculating your return on influencer spending. Traffic landing on your page is a valuable, useful outcome from any paid influencer activity as it opens the doors to highly profitable retargeting initiatives and can result in tangible conversions (subscribing to a newsletter, making a telephone call, completing a form or making a purchase).

Metric #4: Revenue

Depending on what your influencer campaign goals are, revenue will likely be a foremost consideration. Being able to tie a specific influencer campaign to an uptick in revenue not only shows that your campaign has worked, but it also allows you to achieve business (rather than purely marketing) goals and objectives.

You can track revenue from paid social activity easily through Google Analytics 4. Keep in mind that revenue won’t be a direct output for all influencer campaigns and sponsored posts, especially if your goals are more brand awareness related when creating content and briefing your chosen influencer or micro influencer.

Keeping tabs on revenue generated because of influencer partnerships also means you can be sure you aren’t overspending on influencers versus the volume of sales they’re generating for your business.

Metric #5: Brand Sentiment

Brand sentiment is a measure of how people feel about your brand. You can get a sense of this by tracking comments on influencer posts. Do they seem overwhelmingly positive? If so, your content has hit the mark.

However, too many negative mentions mean brand sentiment is poor, suggesting audiences aren’t reacting well to the content being shared. This is a very important measure of success for any marketing campaign because the last thing you want is to create additional campaigns which generate negative thoughts about your product or brand. Proactively monitoring comments and measuring whether they’re mainly positive or mainly negative gives you the chance to amplify what works and rethink your approach if it isn’t resonating with the audience in the way you’d hoped it might.