How to Measure the Success of an Influencer Campaign

Before you form an agreement with an influencer, it’s vital that you understand how to measure the success of an influencer campaign, and which KPIs will demonstrate whether or not the collaboration is a success. That way, you will know which objectives and parameters you need to establish before negotiating your first influencer contract.

To help you out, we have put together this short guide explaining which metrics you need to track in order to evaluate the performance of your campaigns. 

By tracking these metrics and using the data correctly, you can optimize your influencer campaigns and generate the results you need to effectively promote your brand. 

Why Is It So Important to Track the Performance Of Your Influencer Campaigns?

Before we discuss how to measure the success of an influencer campaign, let’s take a look at why tracking performance is so important. 

Campaign performance tracking is one of the most crucial elements of launching an influencer campaign. The right tools help you determine if you’re reaching the right audience, generating engagement, and hitting your performance objectives. Moreover, by tracking your campaigns over time, you can identify valuable insights into what content resonates best with your target audience, which influencers are generating the most impressive results (if you are collaborating with multiple influencers), and which strategies you need to adjust in order to improve campaign performance. 

Without access to all this data, you are playing a risky guessing game that can damage your brand and waste valuable time and money.

How To Measure the Success of Your Influencer Campaigns

With so many influencer tools on the market, it’s not always easy to understand which metrics you need to monitor in order to effectively evaluate the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns.

We’re here to break through all the noise and help you understand how to measure the success of an influencer campaign.

We are now going to discuss which essential performance KPIs you need to keep a close eye on when you launch a campaign. By tracking this data regularly with the right influencer tools, you can gain a better understanding of your impact and optimize your influencer marketing strategies. 

Monitor Your Reach & Awareness

The first metric in our list of how to measure the success of an influencer campaign relates to campaign reach and brand awareness.

For most brands that enter into an influencer collaboration, one of their biggest goals is raising brand awareness. This means that it is vital that you monitor the reach of your campaigns to find out how many people are actually seeing your influencer’s posts. 

To determine your campaign’s reach and awareness, you need to calculate how many people it has reached and how many potential customers have found out about you through your influencer. A good way to do this is by tracking impression data for published content. You can find some of this data by  searching through a social media platform’s analytics features, if you’ve launched a campaign through your own profile, or by asking your influencer to share their post insights. For example, on Instagram, business account users get access to in-app analytics through the platforms’s Instagram Insights feature.

You can also use Google Analytics to track visits to your website. However, in order to collect impression data for a campaign posted through an influencer’s profile then you need access to an API connection. The easiest way to do this is by using an external influencer tracking tool to access and automate the collection of all this data.

Calculate Your Engagement

Reaching the right audience is vital, but it’s a waste of time if people don’t actually interact with your campaigns. That’s why it’s so important to monitor your engagement level on a daily basis to see how it evolves. 

Engagement can take a number of forms. It usually consists of:

• Likes
• Reactions
• Shares
• Comments
• Clicks
• Votes
• Brand mentions

Once you collect all this data, you need to use it to calculate your engagement rate. 

You can do this in a couple of ways. Some people divide the number of interactions on a post by the number of overall impressions, others divide the number of interactions by their number of followers. The formula you use doesn’t matter so much. What’s most important is that you use the same method consistently so that you are able to identify any changes in engagement from one day to the next.

Keep Track of Your Conversion Rates

Finally, make sure you keep track of your conversion rates when you launch an influencer campaign. A ‘conversion’ is any action that you want a user to take on your site. This includes, signing up for a newsletter, downloading content, and, of course, making a purchase. By monitoring purchases, you can determine how much of an impact a campaign has had on what matters the most: sales and the growth of your business.

The easiest way to track your conversions is by monitoring your direct sales before, during, and after launching an influencer campaign. Look out for any notable changes. Have your sales rates gone up or down? Or have they remained steady? 

You can also use affiliate links, UTM parameters, promo codes, landing pages, and link-tracking tools to get a deeper understanding of where your conversions are coming from and if any traffic to your site can be directly attributed to your influencer campaigns. 

Hopefully, with these tips, you will now have a better understanding of how to measure the success of an influencer campaign and which KPIs you should be tracking on a regular basis in order to continuously boost the performance of your marketing efforts.