27 min read
| April 4, 2025
When I was researching influencer marketing case studies for an article, I noticed that some agencies weren’t effectively showing campaign results. Some were reporting the results but failed to prove them with numbers. This seemed odd to me, and it got me wondering, “How will their clients know the impact of their campaigns?”
It could be because they didn’t get the results they expected. Or they didn’t know how to measure their campaigns. In either case, it made me realize that influencer agencies needed a more structured approach to influencer performance analysis. So I’ve put together a step-by-step guide for agencies to measure influencer performance more effectively. Check it out (I bet you’ll love the pro tip at the end).
Step 1: Align Your Analysis with Specific Client Goals
Start by defining the unique campaign goals that your client wants to achieve. This will guide the rest of your influencer performance analysis, as you can identify the metrics that align with those goals. For instance, brand awareness goals may focus on metrics like impressions, follower growth, brand mentions, and share of voice.
Don’t forget that influencer marketing campaign goals may vary for each client. So you’ll want to map out specific goals for every campaign.
It’s important for the goal to be specific and measurable. This means defining a numerical value and a deadline for achieving the goal. In other words, your goal can’t simply be to “generate sales.” Instead, you may define your goal as: “increase sales by 3x in 6 months.” That way, you’ll have an idea of what to measure success against.
Step 2: Narrow Down the Metrics that Matter
Based on the goal that you’ve defined, you can now lay out the key metrics that you want to track for your campaign. That way, you can focus on the KPIs that truly matter instead of tracking metrics that don’t really contribute to your overall goals. In addition to the metrics for your entire campaign, I suggest that you define influencer-specific metrics so you can analyze individual performance.
Let me break down some of the key influencer marketing metrics that you may want to measure according to common campaign goals.
Brand Awareness
This goal is about reaching more people and getting your target audience more familiar with the brand. You essentially want people to learn about your client’s brand and talk about it. As such, you may be tracking metrics like:
- Reach and impressions
- Follower growth
- Brand mentions
- Hashtag use
- User-generated content
- Share of voice
- Earned media value
I came across this interesting influencer marketing campaign that the Influencer Agency launched for Lee Kum Kee. The goal of the campaign was to position the brand’s sauces as essential ingredients for any dish. This involved generating brand awareness through local creators to reach a diverse audience across key European markets.
The agency measured campaign impact using metrics like views, engagements, product awareness, and intent to try the product.
Customer Engagement
Some brands work with influencers with the goal of fostering an engaging brand community. These campaigns focus on creating meaningful connections and driving customer engagement. Based on this, you’ll want to focus on metrics like:
- Total engagements
- Engagement rate
- Hashtag use
- User-generated content
I really love how the Goat Agency worked with Wayfair to engage audiences through live shopping features. The goal was to explore live commerce and engage the Wayfair community through engaging livestreams hosted by influencers, which will eventually influence them towards purchase decisions.
For this campaign, the agency focused on engagement metrics like video views, impressions, post engagements, and video plays. Livestream views and livestream engagements were also key for measuring campaign impact.
Sales
For some brands, the whole purpose of influencer marketing is to generate direct revenue. So the goal may be to drive sales directly through influencer content. As such, the following metrics are most relevant for this goal:
- Discount code use
- Conversion rate
- Total sales
Viral Nation is one of those agencies that’s capable of putting together campaigns that go…well, viral. So I’m not too surprised to find a viral campaign that the agency put together for e.l.f Cosmetics. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the brand’s collaboration with Mikayla Nogueira, they got the influencer to share a creative announcement of the product’s comeback.
With the main goal being to drive sales for the product, they focused on the number of units sold to measure campaign performance. According to the agency, the campaign resulted in 50k units sold out within just 10 hours. If that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is.
Step 3: Make Use of Unique Codes and Trackable Links
Influencer performance analysis can become challenging when you’re not properly attributing results to your campaign. For example, in addition to the traffic from influencer content, you may still be getting traffic from other marketing channels. If you’re not properly attributing that traffic to your influencers, you may have a hard time figuring out your actual campaign impact.
So you may not have a clear idea of your campaign ROI, making it difficult to understand the value of your investments.
It’s important to attribute results to the right sources so you can organize your campaign measurement. This involves assigning influencers with unique discount codes and trackable links so you can measure their performance. That way, you can properly attribute the traffic and sales they helped to generate. This will also make it easier to track your overall campaign impact.
Influencity´s Influencer Seeding program lets you create unique discount codes that you can share with influencers. I love how the dashboard lets you track the status and usage of these codes along with the total sales generated by each influencer.
Step 4: Invest in the Right Performance Tracking Tools
On that note, the right influencer tracking tools can significantly streamline your influencer performance analysis. You can find tools that let you manage your campaigns and track their overall performance in one place. Most tools come up with the capability to track metrics related to reach, impressions, and engagements.
For agencies, however, you need tools that go beyond the basics. Since you’ll be working with multiple clients with varying needs, you need tools that are capable of tracking every possible influencer metric.
In other words, look for tools that come with robust influencer analytics. Besides the above vanity metrics, you should be able to track brand mentions, hashtags, earned media value, and sales all in one place. Additionally, cost-related metrics like CPE and CPM make it easy to compare your campaign results against your spending. So you can better calculate influencer marketing ROI.
In addition to your overall campaign metrics, you should be able to track influencer-specific metrics. This will make it easier to analyze individual performance and identify your most profitable influencers. As such, you can easily fine-tune your campaigns or plan future campaigns around influencers who deliver the best results.
Influencity’s analytics capabilities offer all of these and more. The influencer tracking and management tool automatically collects all your campaign performance data to streamline your analysis. It lets you track platform-specific performance splits so you can see your most profitable platforms.
You can even create audience discount codes that influencers can share with their followers. This makes it easy to attribute sales to individual influencers and see where to maximize your investment.
Step 5: Compare Individual Influencer Metrics
No influencer performance analysis is complete without comparing individual influencer metrics against each other. Some influencers may generate a much bigger impact for your client than others, even though they may have a smaller reach. This means that they’re closely aligned with the brand, ensuring the ideal influencer-brand partnership.
If you’ve invested in the right influencer tracking tool as indicated in the previous step, this should be pretty straightforward. You’ll have access to a list of influencers activated for your campaign in your analytics dashboard. From here, you can easily view the performance metrics of each influencer.
Depending on the platform, you may even be able to sort the results in descending order, making it easier to identify your top-performing influencers.
Focus on the metrics that are relevant to your campaign goals and compare influencers against each other based on those numbers. Make sure to look at multiple metrics across different platforms to assess an influencer’s overall performance. For instance, an influencer may have a lower engagement rate on one platform but deliver better earned media value than on another platform.
Alternatively, they may have a more limited reach, but if they still deliver results with a low CPM, they could be perfect for clients on a limited budget. Consider these unique factors to identify which influencers deliver the most value and are best aligned for each client. This will help you fine-tune campaigns and even simplify the influencer discovery process for the client’s future campaigns.
Step 6: Refine Your Campaigns with Top-Performing Influencers
As I mentioned above, you can use your influencer performance analysis to identify your best influencers and fine-tune your campaigns accordingly.
This step essentially involves weeding out influencers who aren’t generating the desired results. Look for influencers who aren’t driving enough engagements or sales, depending on your campaign goal. Although they may be excellent creators, they may not necessarily be a good fit for that specific client.
This is an important step because if you keep spending money on low-impact influencers, your campaign ROI will suffer. Meanwhile, your top-performing influencers will help you generate more value for your clients.
Keep in mind that you should also consider cost, especially for clients on a limited budget. Make sure that your best influencers are also those with a lower cost in comparison to the results they generate. Influencity’s influencer tracking tool lets you measure individual influencer cost along with CPE, CPM, and CPR. So you can effectively see which influencers are generating the most value, considering their rate.
Once you’ve identified your most valuable influencers, I suggest adding them to a list to better manage their profiles. Influencity lets you create lists for specific campaigns and clients. This makes it really easy to create a pre-saved list of top influencers for each client. That way, you can easily work with these influencers again for another campaign.
Pro Tip: Estimate Influencer Impact BEFORE Recruitment
Now that I’ve laid out these six essential steps, you’re all set to carry out influencer performance analysis more strategically. But before all of these steps, before you even start recruiting influencers, there’s one step that can significantly maximize your campaign outcome.
This step involves analyzing influencer profiles to estimate their performance and, ultimately, the value they can bring to your campaign.
With platforms like Influencity offering estimation features, you can analyze an influencer’s potential performance even before they start working for you. This means you go through an influencer performance analysis during the campaign planning stage.
The AI-powered analytics tool lets you create a campaign and add influencers to estimate the outcome. It analyzes the profile metrics of different influencers added to the campaign and then forecasts performance metrics and campaign spending accordingly.
You can then add or remove influencers from your estimate and find the ideal set of influencers to generate the most impactful results. I recommend experimenting with different influencer combinations to see how you can get the most value out of your campaign.
This helps you make data-driven decisions to improve your influencer selection. You can select influencers not just based on their profile metrics but based on their forecasted impact on a given campaign.
In other words, you can focus on influencers who are most likely to perform well and generate the most value for your clients. These estimates serve value beyond influencer selection. The campaign estimation tool even provides a platform-wise breakdown of forecasts. So you can see which platforms will be most impactful and focus your efforts accordingly.
This streamlines your campaign planning process, allowing you to fine-tune your campaign well before it even launches.
Maximize Campaign Outcome with Influencer Performance Analysis
When you’re running an influencer marketing agency, your biggest focus should be on maximizing campaign outcomes for your clients. You want to make sure that each client gets the most value out of their influencer marketing spend. This is why you need a strategic approach to influencer performance analysis.
Not only will this help you fine-tune campaigns and improve results, but it will make it easier to showcase the business value of your campaign. That way, you can prove the value that you bring to your client, which boosts credibility and loyalty. Not to mention the ease of putting together case studies with real, measurable results that will draw in potential clients.
Make the most of the steps and instructions I shared above to analyze influencer performance and maximize campaign outcomes.