You collaborate with the best of influencers using great content. You expect the influencer marketing campaign to be a resounding success. But how do you know?
How do you track and measure the results of your influencer marketing campaign?
There is no one parameter that decides if your influencer marketing campaign is a success or failure. It is the combination of some Key Point Indicators (KPIs) that collectively decide the fate of the campaign. The type of key metrics may vary as per your campaign strategy.
But let us discuss the 5 essential KPIs for your influencer marketing campaign.
Conversion is one of the important influencer marketing KPIs. But conversions needn’t necessarily mean sales. It is something that you have planned for in your influencer marketing campaign strategy.
Was it for buying a product? Was it for increasing the followers on your social media profile? Was it to just create brand awareness? Was it to click on a link? Was it for lead generation?
Conversion tracking in influencer marketing is tracking the number of people that have taken the desired actions.
The question now is, how to track influencer marketing campaign conversions?
The first step would be to start the campaign by setting up easy-to-track tools like-
UTM tags
Discount codes
Unique landing pages
Affiliate links
Once you set up these tools, it is easy to track the traffic coming from these tools. You just have to compare the before and after campaign results to know the conversions and the customer acquisition cost (CAC). The before-after comparisons may be for sales, signing of newsletters, clicking a link and so on depending on what action you have strategized.
If it is sales or the number of customers got during the campaign period, the CAC, which is one of the important influencer marketing campaign KPIs, is calculated as –
CAC= (Total influencer marketing campaign expenditure) / (Total number of customers got during the campaign)
The setting up of affiliate links or discount codes is a long-term action. Take, for instance, a blogger who has written about your product in a blog with an affiliate link to it. Here, some of the results may be instant. But it doesn’t stop. You might see continued results for a long time.
The promo codes and custom URLs help you to figure out the number of sales through the influencer marketing campaign. Google Analytics offers you tracking of sales generated from the affiliate links or the custom links and promo codes.
If you need to know how well the influencer campaign was received by the audience, there is nothing better than measuring the engagement rate.
Your influencer marketing campaign all boils down to the next among the essential influencer marketing KPIs, the engagement rate. Because this is what influencers are meant to achieve while promoting your brand.
Your influencer can provide you with a detailed analysis of the engagement rate for their campaigns.
To measure the engagement rate, you need to keep a track of-
Impressions
Likes
Comments
Shares
Clicks
Mentions
All the above factors including the impressions help in brand awareness and reach. It also gets new followers to your social media profile.
The audience growth can be measured by the new followers to your profile or the new subscribers to your email newsletter.
There are many external tools available to measure the engagement metrics. One important metric in the engagement rate is the cost per engagement (CPE). The CPE is one of the key influencer marketing campaign KPIs and is very simple to calculate.
CPE= (Total amount spent on the influencer marketing campaign) / (Total measured engagements)
The lesser your CPE, the better the engagement rate and the ROI.
The conversion rate is one metric that shows if you have picked the right influencer for your campaign and if, indeed, they are getting the amount of engagement you expected from them.
TikTok or Instagram, many social media platforms want active user participation.
One way is through user-generated content and this is another of the essential influencer marketing campaign KPIs.
An influencer can post a video or photo using a brand-generated hashtag or brand mention and urge their followers to do the same.
If your influencer marketing campaign is using this strategy, you need to measure the user-generated content to gauge the status of your campaign. User-generated content can be through-
Videos with brand mentions or hashtags (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook)
Images with brand mentions or hashtags (Instagram, Facebook)
Text with brand mentions or hashtags (like in Twitter)
Check the number of times the hashtags or the brand mentions were used in relation to the influencer marketing campaign.
Marketers can track the increased traffic on their website or a particular landing page generated from the influencer marketing campaign.
Website traffic is one of the important influencer marketing KPIs.
How do you measure the traffic to your website from the campaign?
One way is to provide a custom URL to the influencers. The other is the referral code. You can easily track the visitors from the referral code or the custom link or the separately created landing page for the influencer campaign through Google Analytics.
Landing page traffic
New users
Clicks through referral code
Total pageviews just before and after the ad
Use the campaign URLs to track the source of the traffic.
It will be enough to know if your influencer campaign has achieved enough website traction.
Clicks don’t necessarily mean to buy a product. The click can be routed to anywhere. It can be-
Product page
A product category page
Home Page
Blog page
Social media profile
Newsletter subscription
Lead generation form
The best way to calculate the result is to count the cost per click (CPC). An influencer marketing campaign can assure you of good clicks. But after that, it is up to your profile or website to convert the visitors.
Once you get a visitor through the click, you can measure the bounce rates, visitor behavior and engagement on the website or profile.
The CPC is one of the important influencer marketing KPIs and the formula to measure it is-
CPC= (Total cost of influencer marketing campaign) / (Total number of clicks)
In the same way, you can also measure the Click Through Rate (CTR). This tells us how many of the audience who saw the ad have actually clicked the link.
The CTR is another effective way to know if the impressions and reach have converted into clicks.
CTR= 100 * [(Total measured clicks) / (Total measured impressions)]
The sales KPI in the influencer marketing campaign gives you an idea of influencer audience interest in your product or brand.
The conversion rates show the effectiveness of the influencer content. The click-through rate shows the value of influencer brand promotion.
The influencer marketing campaign KPIs are essential to track and measure the results. While it is important to track as many influencer marketing KPIs as possible, importance must be given to those relevant to your business goals.
If you want to hire influencers and get help from marketers to start a campaign and measure its success, you just need to sign up for QuikPlace. A perfect influencer marketplace, it offers you thousands of influencers to choose from. It is also a readymade platform to run your influencer campaign and get traffic to your website converting into sales and profit.