METRICS THAT MATTER: HOW TO MEASURE SUCCESS IN INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
The influencer economy as we know it is changing. It’s more important than ever to use resources efficiently to plan campaigns to produce results, whether as an influencer, a service provider or a product-centric brand. Whichever side of the influencer/client line you sit on, you will have noticed a rising focus on practical, useful ways to measure campaign success across social media. The ways that brands categorise achievements coming from influencer activity are becoming increasingly concrete – it’s all about revenue and conversions, with vanity metrics (which can be artificially altered) holding less importance in this number-driven world.
From our perspective, this is a welcome shift – we work with brands to achieve their goals, and create bespoke campaigns designed around the key performance indicators – which are rarely ephemeral ideas. At this time more than ever, there’s no need to rely on hype, or try to impress your clients by sharing the biggest numbers only – most brands are beginning to see the value in a smaller engaged audience rather than a vast following that doesn’t convert, so as an influencer you can’t be afraid to dig down into the data. It is crucial to focus in on the most appropriate and relevant metrics – this allows both sides to channel efforts and resources into working together well.
Ultimately, this data-driven approach only emphasises that it’s essential to take a well-rounded view when working with influencers. There isn’t one person that will categorically work for a brand so it’s about looking at the collective factors that make an influencer desirable to work with and channelling this information into the plan for a campaign. There are plenty of metrics that feel outmoded, including the expectation that more followers = more conversions. Content from an influencer with 100,000 followers fundamentally doesn’t mean 10 x more sales that content produced by an influencer with 10,000 followers, nor should you add two extra zeros to the fee you pay them.
Once brands and influencers can move beyond thinking that one single measurement or metric equals influencer success, this means that each side can bring a bespoke approach to every campaign, and a dedicated means of assessing the value of the activity produced.
At the core, you want to safeguard your campaign data, so by setting up multiple parameters so that if one isn’t captured or delivers flawed data, you will be able to still track campaign success and learnings. Remember to avoid clouding your core aims as too many metrics (multiple hashtags, different calls to action, too much messaging) will ultimately risk fragmenting the traffic you’re seeking to capture.
If the influencer economy continues to develop a more robust awareness of itself and the way that campaigns can work, both influencers and brands will benefit from the continued maturation into an increasingly healthy and reliable form of strategy.
Now that you have a sense of the value that comes from monitoring your platform metrics, we have broken down three of the most popular vehicles for influencer marketing campaigns – Instagram, Google Analytics and YouTube – to spotlight the metrics that can share some unique perspectives on performance. This information will be interesting and relevant whether you are developing long-term relationships or working on a spot-campaign, but as the trend for clients and influencers to collaborate on a repeat basis becomes more and more prevalent, the deeper you can dive into these campaign metrics, the better you can tailor the work you do and implement learnings in the future.
Let’s begin with the influencer’s choice, Instagram. It’s the platform that has really nurtured the influencer economy as we know it, with nearly 9/10 marketers including it in their strategy.
While it might seem counterintuitive to go where everyone else is, Instagram’s suite of insights allows you to build a robust set of results for your influencer content, particularly when used in conjunction with Google Analytics.
General Statistics to Share with Brands
Engagement
You’re likely familiar with the basic formula for calculating engagement:
Total Engagements / Follower Count * 100 = Engagement Rate
But there’s a fundamental flaw here. When calculating expected engagement, it is essential to dig into comparative content, namely other paid partnerships. While engagement on organic content is essential, when predicting campaign success it’s fundamentally a vanity metric. Not to mention that it can lead to totally misguided expectations and brand-side dissatisfaction, when taken out of context.
For even clearer predictions, only include partnerships with a similar audience or structure to the planned campaign you’re projecting for. You want to see data that reflects the core engaged audience as accurately as possible. If this engaged audience aligns with a brand’s core values or products, then this customer value is one of the most dependable indicators of potential success.
Demographics
This is where to find the base-line numbers to check and share, which are Age, Gender, and Location: City and Countries. These percentages are an easy way to check whether core audiences correlate between a brand and influencer.
Instagram Content Insights
Discovery
Reach
The number of unique users who were presented with your content.
Impressions
The number of times your content was shown to a user. This will be higher than the reach as it could have been delivered to a single user several times over.
Interactions
Website clicks, Link clicks, Shares, Replies
Comparing interactions with the discovery numbers gives a valuable insight into how the content performed amongst the users that were actually exposed to it, rather than extrapolating from the total following.
Particularly when taken in conjunction with subsequent data from your destination website, these numbers can safe-guard your results and act as a cross-reference. For instance, how many people clicked vs how many actually landed and went on to convert.
Finally, there are ‘soft’ insights that are relevant depending on the campaign KPIs, including call-to-actions like the Instagram donate button. For a partnered charity, being able to run a fundraiser entirely within Instagram is a game-changer. Likes are also ultimately a ‘soft’ metric that are a ‘nice-to-have’, rarely anything more.
YouTube
YouTube is not only the second largest search engine, but it’s worth remembering that because the site is a Google product, that good content will also reap rewards through search terms and recommended videos within the platform. Paying attention to this will pay dividends in perpetuity for influencers and their branded content. There is a great deal of data available through the YouTube Studio dashboard, but we’ve highlighted a few of the most interesting and insightful numbers to pay attention to when activating and reviewing video content.
Overview
Watch Time
This is the number one factor in ranking content on YouTube, as it indicates to the algorithm that the content is accurately represented in search terms. If it is high from the outset, the content is more likely to continue attracting viewers.
Traffic Source
YouTube Search
This feature highlights what keywords are driving traffic to that specific video. Were people seeking out a general review of the product and then arrived on the channel? This will give you an idea of other questions and search terms that are driving traffic to branded content. It may answer questions about next steps – is there space for a follow up video to address these new issues?
External
This is particularly worth paying attention to if the campaign involved cross-posting and promotion. Did the Instagram Stories with swipe-ups to the YouTube video drive significant traffic, and were they retained? This can be a thought-provoking stat, particularly when considering whether to split content across platforms in the future, and whether it’s riskier than linking to native content (such as Instagram Stories linking to IGTV).
Reach
Impressions and how they led to watch time
The crucial element here is reviewing the funnel for individual videos only. Overall channel results are interesting for YouTubers to plan their future content, but not from a campaign standpoint.
Impressions click-through rate
One of the most crucial ways of measuring performance (including as a YouTuber in general) is found here. This measures how many people are actually actively clicking through onto your video when it appears in front of them. This can show that the videos are resonating with people whenever it gets served to them by YouTube, whether they are discovering it in search on the homepage.
Engagement
Engagement matters no matter what the circumstances, but it’s essential if you’re hoping the video in question can work as a piece of perennial, evergreen content that continues to be a point of reference. A good rate of engagement will signal to the YouTube algorithm that it should be suggesting the video in search and as part of users’ recommended videos.
Audience
Unique viewers
The number of people that viewed the content within the selected date range. In order to take a view on this, run reports for 24-hours and 1 week after posting to identify reasonable impression of how the video was received. Remember that the content won’t expire, so if the engagement is genuine views will continue to roll on. This is not something to worry about right at the very beginning, but it can be weeks or months until the content sees a boost from YouTube itself, or another source prompting users to seek out the video.
Audience Retention Rate
The longer this is the better, not only because people are actually consuming the branded content, but it also tells YouTube that the videos are good quality, accurately described, and not just click-bait.
Google Analytics
GA tracks the amount of traffic to your site, where that traffic comes from, and what people are doing on-site – an invaluable tool for influencers and brands working with them. As an influencer, setting GA up for yourself is incredibly easy – you just add a small piece of tracking code into your blog format. Find step-by-step instructions to guide you through this process here. Exploring the features and functions means that you can create branded content with GA in mind, and design content that can effectively work with campaign parameters. It’s crucial to understand what information an influencer can share about their blog or website from a brand perspective too.
Core Settings
Date setting
Adjust the dates to view or compare specific time periods in all your reports. There is no limit to the dates you can search, apart from the earliest being the date you installed Google Analytics.
Useful too are the hourly/day/week/month settings which dictate how the graphs are formulated. Look for granular patterns by selecting the hourly option, or be more top-line and select week/month.
Download a GA report
Navigate to the report you’re interested in and then simply click ‘Export’ in the top left, select the format and a download will initiate.
Summarise Traffic Stats
Click Audience, then click Overview, and then adjust your dates to give a full month. This will reveal the basic details useful to brands when planning website content.
Sessions
The number of times people have been to the site.
Users
The number of individual people (tracked via IP address) who have been on site.
Page Views
The number of different pages/posts all these users have viewed. The best way to explain this is, if one person visits your site on 2 different occasions and views 3 pages, your stats would show = 2 sessions, 3 page views and 1 user.
Demographics
To access audience breakdowns, follow the steps below:
Audience and the Demographics > Overview to find their average age and gender of your visitors.
Demographics > Geo > Location to find out what country they are visiting from.
Further Navigation
Real-Time
Here you can see the traffic on the site in live, real-time. See which pages are the most active, where in the world visitors are coming from, what websites and social media channels referred them, and what device they are viewing on.
Audience
The Overview tab does just what it says on the tin – it’s a brief summary of the site’s audience. For more detail, choose between tabs for Demographics (where you find out the age and gender of your users), Geo (their language and location), Behaviour (what % of new vs returning visits you are getting and how many times people visit your blog), Technology (what browser and what platform people are visiting you from) and Mobile (the breakdown of visitors using your blog from mobile/desktop/tablet).
Acquisition
Overview is another one-stop-shop, this time to discover where traffic comes from. Use the granular tabs to delve a little deeper: All Traffic (the channels, sources and referrers sending visitors to the site), AdWords (if running Google advertising, you can view and analyse which advert campaigns work well, and what money you are making from them), and Social (which social media channels generate the most traffic for you). The Campaigns area is relevant if you are using tracking UTM links to monitor your content, find out more about this here.
Behaviour
All Content (where you can see which of your posts generate the most traffic and how long is spent on those posts), Site Speed (useful as an indicator that posts are taking too long to load), Site Search (reveals what people search for using the search box on the site).
Conversions
This section could be a whole article on its own, as it’s very much dependent on what exactly the desired conversion is – either a Goal conversion (such as signing up to a newsletter) or an E-Commerce conversion (a transaction or purchase). Further details on generating these kinds of reports can be found here.
Fundamentally, there is an overwhelming amount of information around how to quantify influencer marketing campaigns. These are just some of the results that we take into account when considering the work we do for our clients. But inevitably, each campaign is (and should be!) completely different. By familiarising yourself with what exactly can be recorded and shared, ultimately these insights will become tools to help you work as effectively as possible. A good campaign won’t try to achieve inappropriate KPIs; instead, set a campaign up for success by understanding the how’s and why’s of each platform –from the start you’ll find it easier and more effective.