In recent years, influencer marketing has become a critical component of many brands' marketing strategies.
With the rise of social media and the growing influence of content creators, companies are increasingly turning to influencers to help them connect with their target audiences. But with new marketing channels comes new data to report. And sadly, influencer marketing reporting isn’t as neat and tidy as other methods.
These challenges are lengthening the learning curve for marketers, but it’s one they must complete in order for influencer marketing to reach its full potential. Influencers aren’t going away and are expected to play an increasing role in branding marketing. According to recent data:
- As a whole, the industry is worth an estimated $13.8 billion as of 2021.
- 17% of companies have allocated over half of their budgets to influencers.
- 89% of marketers say influencers are at least as effective as other channels.
There are a wealth of benefits at stake, and mastering the process of influencer marketing reporting is your one-way ticket to bragging rights and the ability to demonstrate real value in your efforts.
Let’s look at how you can get influencer marketing reporting right despite it being more fluid and less rooted in numbers.
Table of Contents:
Track Campaign-Related Content
Set Specific Objectives for Each Campaign
Align Metrics to Funnel Stages and Content Types
Track Influencer Impressions and Engagement
Pay Attention to Consumer Sentiment
Generate Macro and Micro Campaign Reports
Monitor Sales
Get Klear on Your Influencer Marketing
Track Campaign-Related Content
To fully measure the impact of your influencer content, marketers need an easy way to keep all campaign content together. This way, you can dial into the performance of each piece of content so that no slice of ROI goes unaccounted for. Let’s look at some options:
Affiliate links
Affiliate links contain unique referral codes, user IDs, or other details that are specific to each influencer. The influencer will include this link in the content they produce, such as an ad, video, blog post, Instagram post, or other social media post. When a user clicks the link and completes the desired action, the influencer will receive a commission.
If your campaigns are geared to generate immediate sales, trackable affiliate links give you an easy way to gauge influencer success.
Here’s how:
- Assign each influencer their own link.
- Count up the number of conversions for each unique link.
- See who is pulling their weight in the campaign.
Discount codes
Similar to affiliate links, you can generate unique discount codes for your influencers to use in their content. These promo codes make it easy for marketers to track campaign performance at a glance.
See which codes are driving the most conversions to see your influencers’ effectiveness. Promo codes can also help you separate sales that come from influencers and sales that come from other marketing channels.
UTM parameters
Also called UTM tags, these parameters are simple codes that you can attach to a custom URL. They’re useful in tracking influencer marketing performance.
UTM allows you to see how many people are clicking on your links, where they’re coming from, and what type of device they’re using. This information helps you see which marketing channels are working and which ones aren’t.
Influencer Marketing Platforms
Platforms like Klear, a Meltwater offering, can help you manage all of your influencer marketing analytics and content from a single source. These platforms aggregate content from all of your selected influencers and social media networks, including Instagram Stories, hashtags, brand mentions, and keywords. This way, you can track the performance of individual influencers and pieces of content as well as your campaign as a whole.
Tip: Download your free Influencer Marketing Platform Buyer’s Guide.
Set Specific Objectives for Each Campaign
Setting campaign goals for your influencer marketing helps you decide what success looks like. Influencer campaigns can help with short-term sales, audience growth, brand sentiment, new product launches, and even vetting new product ideas before launching (among other things).
Once you set goals, you can more easily connect the dots between your current position and where you want to be.
If you achieve your goals, consider your influencer campaign successful.
And if you miss the mark, your campaign might still be successful. Progress toward those goals shows you something is working. Discover what you need to tweak or refine to do better on your next campaign.
Align Metrics to Funnel Stages and Content Types
Influencer marketing can satisfy a range of objectives, each one falling into different stages of the sales funnel. For instance, you might run influencer campaigns to raise brand awareness, grow your audience, generate sales, or collect signups for your email newsletter.
Each of these objectives and sales funnel stages has its own sets of metrics that make sense for a certain goal. For instance, you wouldn’t measure an influencer’s sales performance on an audience growth campaign. Sure, you might get sales from that campaign. But it seems unfair to judge the influencer’s performance on sales when their main focus was growing your following.
Let’s look at some general creator metrics for different campaign types and sales funnel stages:
Top of the funnel metrics
Typical top funnel goals relate to brand awareness
Top of the Funnel Content Types:
- Unboxing videos
- Audience growth challenges
- Blogs
- Branded hashtags
Top of the Funnel Content Creator Metrics:
- Follower growth
- Number of pieces of user-generated content
- Reach
Middle of the funnel metrics
Typical middle funnel goals relate to top-of-mind awareness
Middle of the Funnel Content Types:
- Contests
- Giveaways
- How-To’s
- Informational content
- Livestreams
- FAQs
Middle of the Funnel Content Creator Metrics:
- Engagement rate
- Follower growth
- Number of likes and comments
Bottom of the funnel metrics
Typical bottom funnel goals relate to conversions and action
Bottom of the Funnel Content Types:
- Product reviews
- Demonstrations
- Testimonials
- Promotions
- Special offers
Bottom of the Funnel Content Creator Metrics:
- Link clicks
- Conversions
- Subscriptions
- Marketing-qualified leads
- Sales-qualified leads
- Sales
- Redemptions
Tip: In this blog, you find more influencer marketing KPIs.
Additional metrics and KPIs to consider include the following:
Audience size
The influencer’s audience size can help you put your outcomes into context. A bigger audience doesn’t necessarily mean a better one. In fact, many brands are choosing micro-influencers (those with under 100K followers) because the relationships are more intimate and authentic.
Website traffic
Anytime you run a marketing campaign, there’s the expectation that your website traffic will increase. Check Google Analytics to see if there’s an uptick in the number of unique website visitors.
Media value
Media value (sometimes called earned media value) refers to the monetary value of all the exposure you receive as a result of a campaign.
Picture it: The influencer creates user-generated content for your brand to share on their social networks. Some of their followers will share it with their own audience. Some of those will share it with their audience, and so on.
That’s a lot of brand exposure from just one campaign, and it all stems from the influencer.
Your earned media value from the campaign represents the dollar amount it would cost you to acquire that same reach and publicity if you had to pay for it all yourself. This is one of the most important KPIs when comparing the cost of the campaign to its total value.
Reading Tip: Are you wondering how much influencer marketing costs? Learn more about influencer pricing.
Conversion rates
Conversion rates show you how many people acted on your offer compared to the total number of people who viewed the content. Conversions can be lots of things, including e-commerce sales, sign-ups, downloads, or opt-ins.
With the right metrics for the right campaign, you can more easily track whether that campaign was successful.
Track Influencer Impressions and Engagement
Regardless of the campaign type, platform, and objective, impressions and engagement can paint a compelling picture. Both of these metrics reflect whether your campaign is being seen and whether people are interested in the content.
Impressions refer to how many eyes saw your campaign content. It doesn’t count the number of individuals who saw the campaign; one viewer may have seen the content multiple times, and each time would count as an impression.
Engagement data adds context to impressions. Of the people who saw your content for any length of time, how many people liked it? Shared it? Commented on it? Clicked through to your offer?
Together, these metrics show you how others perceived your influencer campaign. Use these metrics to help you vet influencers for future campaigns. Influencers that got lots of engagement may have a more active audience that cares about the content the influencer produces.
Keep in mind that social media influencers will likely have access to data that you don’t. For example, if they’re using Instagram and Facebook for paid ads, they will see things like follower growth, impressions, and clicks. You can ask them to share this information with you to support your influencer marketing reporting.
Pay Attention to Consumer Sentiment
Influencer campaigns have the potential to alter consumers’ perceptions of your brand. One underrated way of measuring influencer campaigns is to look at how others perceive your brand before and after the campaign.
Consumer sentiment refers to how customers feel about your brand. A rise in consumer sentiment after an influencer campaign indicates your audience feels more positively about your brand.
Meltwater’s PR suite gives you a clearer picture of consumer sentiment. With real-time data, you can track how sentiment changes over the course of your influencer marketing campaigns.
Tip: Learn how to perform sentiment analysis.
Generate Macro and Micro Campaign Reports
Influencer campaigns have various layers of granularity. To get a clear idea of how your campaign performed, you need visibility into every layer.
Start by generating a high-level macro influencer marketing report of your complete influencer campaign. This includes all of your influencer partners, content, and platforms. Then, start getting more “micro” with your reporting. Generate reports on individual pieces of content, different social media platforms, and influencers to see where your best performances came from.
Using dedicated influencer marketing platforms like Meltwater Social Influencers can turn these insights into visual summaries to see where you’re moving the needle.
Monitor Sales
Tracking sales based on affiliate links, redemption codes, or just a general lift in buying activity is an important part of influencer marketing analytics and reporting. If influencers are promoting specific products, track the sales of those products to accurately attribute influencer ROI.
Influencer management platforms can automatically calculate commissions and process payments in a timely manner. This is a great way to maintain trust and transparency in your influencer relationships and ensure influencers are adequately compensated.
Get 'Klear' on Your Influencer Marketing
Learning how to demonstrate influencer ROI begins with setting up robust reporting processes for every campaign. Understand the details you want to capture, then systematize a way to collect, organize, and analyze them.
All of the above is easier with an influencer marketing analytics platform. Meltwater’s Klear influencer marketing platform handles influencer campaigns from start to finish, including finding and vetting influencers to managing ongoing relationships. Learn more when you schedule a demo!
