When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. We’re taking the word of celebrities, public figures, niche-oriented influencers that a certain product or service will definitely change our lives for the better. Influencer marketing has become a thing of its own and marketers can’t deny it.
If you’re a marketer who likes to keep things organized and effective, you need to learn how to measure influencers’ performance.
But there’s one thing you must do prior to defining your KPIs.
That’s why we at Brybe Marketplace decided to give you guidelines on how to keep track of your influencers’ performance.
Let’s start.
First, Define Your Campaign Goals
If you don’t know where you are going, how are you going to measure the success of your influencers? Not only does it sound unfair, but what’s the point of spending all your resources if you don’t know your goals?
That’s why it’s crucial for you to set the campaign goals before you define the KPIs for your influencers.
These are the most common influencer marketing campaign goals:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase website traffic
- Reach new audience
- Increase sales
When you decide on a goal, you can dedicate yourself to finding the right KPIs for your influencers.
Here are some of the most common and most popular KPIs that you should measure to define the success of the work from your influencer.
1. Reach & Awareness
One of the first things that most marketers measure after an influencer campaign is finished is the number of people that actually saw the campaign. You need to discover how many people on social media heard of your brand, your products, or your services to see if the campaign is actually working.
There are different metrics that you can use to measure the reach of your campaign.
These are the KPIs you should be looking at:
- Followers’ growth
It’s quite simple to measure the followers’ growth. You just need to choose a specific date, for example, the date you launched your campaign and the date your campaign is finished. After that, the equation is pretty simple:
Followers’ Growth Rate = Followers Gained/Basic Followers Number * 100%
It’s very important to track the number of new followers. This is a sign that your campaign is working, you can get an insight into your audience, you can adapt your current campaign to increase your credibility even more, etc.
- Impressions and reach
People outside of the marketing world confuse these two quite often, but there’s a clear distinction between these two. Impressions are the number of times a post has been displayed on social media. Reach is the number of people who actually saw the post. These are quite useful metrics as they can show you just how many people can see your content so that you can broaden your brand reach and start adapting your content for new markets.
- Brand mentions
This is super important to keep track of. During your campaign and after it’s done, you should keep track of where your brand name appears. There are multiple applications you can use to check and see whether anyone is mentioning your brands, such as Awario or Social Mention.
2. Audience Engagement
Aside from the reach and engagement, the second metric that you should keep an eye on is audience engagement. The equation for audience engagement is pretty simple:
Audience Engagement = Number of likes and comments on a post/Number of followers*100%
By doing this, you’ll find out two highly relevant things - how much of your influencer’s followers are fake and how many of them are actually engaged with your influencer content.
You need to consider the specific type of influencer. If you’re collaborating with a micro-influencer, this number will be higher compared to the one of macro-influencer.
3. Website Traffic
You can’t possibly allow yourself not to track the changes that happen on your website traffic after you launch an influencer campaign. Use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of the campaign on your website.
What you should be extremely careful about are these metrics: the number of new users, the time users spend on your website, the number of unique visitors, the total number of sessions, referral visits, etc.
The number of referral visits is especially important because that’s an indicator of the number of people who visited your website through a specific URL. It’s basically the CRT metric, as an influencer can create a specific link for your campaign, making it easier for you to measure the results.
4. Conversions & Sales
These are the two metrics that actually bring in the money - conversions and sales.
It depends on the goals, but most influencers want to increase the conversion rate and the number of high-quality leads for the businesses they collaborate with. For both of these metrics, you can use Google Analytics. You can check the Google Acquisition Report to check all the traffic sources and find out which channel brings you the most conversions.
Also, you can use the same method to find out how many of those conversions are closed sales. If you’re collaborating with multiple influencers at once, you can compare these numbers and find out who brings the biggest benefit to your business. All influencers promote promotional codes or affiliate links which makes it easy for you to track down the exact sales numbers.
With conversions and sales, the goal is always to maximize ROI, so keep that in mind when you’re going to look at your analytics.
Conclusion
What’s the most important thing to take from our small guide?
You don’t have to memorize all the KPIs to launch a successful campaign. What’s important is to set the right goals. When you do that, you’ll know which KPIs to measure to review the work of your influencer and the results of the entire campaign.
By tracking, analyzing, and monitoring your influencer campaign, you’ll be able to adjust them accordingly, so that you can reach the target audience much more effectively. If you’re having trouble finding the right influencers, Brybe Marketplace got you covered - the sign-up is free!