Influencer marketing is a promising way for brands to grow their reach, engagement, and sales. But how do you track the progress of your campaigns to understand if they’re successful or not? That’s where influencer marketing KPIs come in.
These are the essential metrics related to your campaign that show you exactly where your campaign stands in comparison to your goals.
It’s hard data that can help you inform your team or clients about your campaign’s progress.
So, which are these KPIs that you should be measuring?
Before we dive into them, let’s understand why we need KPIs for influencer marketing in the first place.
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Why Are Influencer Marketing KPIs Important?
How do you know if your influencer marketing strategy is working or needs adjustment if you’re not tracking its performance? This is where KPIs come in.
Influencer marketing key performance indicators are crucial for the success and optimization of your campaigns. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your influencer campaign.
They help marketers like you make informed decisions for improving and optimizing your campaigns.
Here are some reasons why influencer marketing KPIs are important:
- ROI Monitoring: KPIs help determine the return on investment (ROI) of influencer marketing campaigns. Calculating your ROI helps you assess whether the money spent on influencers is generating desired outcomes.
- Campaign Optimization: Analyzing KPIs allows you to identify what works and what doesn’t. You can use this data to optimize future campaigns by focusing on high-performing influencers, content types, and channels.
- Budget Allocation: Understanding which influencers and campaigns deliver the best results helps you allocate your marketing budget more effectively. You can direct your resources towards the most impactful strategies, ensuring a higher return on investment.
- Target Audience Insights: KPIs provide insights into the behavior and preferences of the target audience. Metrics like engagement and reach help you understand what type of content resonates with your audience. This allows you to tailor your content and approach accordingly.
- Accountability: KPIs can help you hold influencers accountable for their performance. By setting clear expectations and tracking results, you can ensure influencers meet objectives based on their contract. This helps foster a more transparent and productive partnership between the influencer and your brand.
- Strategic Planning: Regularly tracking KPIs helps in strategic planning and long-term growth. It allows you to set realistic goals, track progress, and adjust your strategies to align with overall business objectives.
Important Influencer Marketing KPIs
Let’s uncover some of the most important influencer marketing KPIs to track based on your campaign goals and strategy.
We’ve grouped the KPIs under the common campaign goals of brand awareness, engagement, and conversions to keep it simple. The KPIs you choose to track for each campaign will differ based on your goals for the campaign.
Brand Awareness
This refers to the extent of how well your potential customers recognize your brand through your association with influencers.
It helps you gauge how effectively influencers are increasing your brand’s presence and familiarity with your audience. Here are some metrics you can track to assess brand awareness.
1. Reach
This influencer marketing KPI shows you the number of unique individuals who have been exposed to your campaign.
While impression shows the number of times your content has been seen, regardless of whether it’s the same person multiple times, reach focuses on how many distinct people have seen your content.
This helps you accurately measure audience size and brand exposure.
2. Impressions
Impressions show you how many times your influencer’s content was seen by people. This helps you determine how well the campaign reinforces your brand awareness as you can figure out how many people possibly visited the campaign content multiple times by comparing it with the campaign reach.
For example, Zelite Infinity Knives partnered with top-performing influencers through Get Hyped to increase their brand awareness. The campaign received an amazing 18.2 million impressions as many videos on TikTok impacted the audience and went viral.
That’s not too bad for a small business, wouldn’t you agree?
Image via Instagram
3. Audience Growth
Marketing is all about growing your brand awareness. So, it only makes sense that “audience growth” would be an important KPI to measure.
You can measure the overall follower growth during the campaign period and then head to the influencers’ profiles to see all the mutual followers you’ve gained during the period too.
Want even more followers from your influencer marketing campaigns?
Make sure that you’re engaging with your audience during the campaign. This means responding to comments on your influencer’s posts using your brand’s profile. You want to participate in the conversations that are happening to show your brand’s personality and that you care about your customers.
4. Social Profile Growth
This is one of the influencer marketing KPIs that measure the overall impact of your campaign. It involves monitoring the number of followers your brand’s social media profiles gain after starting an influencer marketing campaign.
An effective campaign should generate interest in your brand and products and attract new followers to your social profiles. It boosts your follower count, boosting your online presence and expanding your reach.
Social profile growth indicates increased brand awareness and could boost engagement and conversions.
Monitoring this influencer marketing KPI helps you assess the long-term value of influencer collaborations and provides insights into audience preferences. This helps guide future marketing strategies to sustain and build upon the gained traction.
Engagement
It’s hard to determine which of your influencers are generating the most engagement. But we’ve compiled this handy list of some common metrics you can use for tracking. Let’s take a look.
1. Likes, Shares, Comments, Saves
Likes, shares, comments, and saves (on Instagram) are perhaps the simplest KPIs that you can measure to check the engagement your influencer’s content has received. Likes, in particular, may not matter as much as they are considered a vanity metric.
However, when it comes to comments, you can dive into the details by seeing if the comments are driving real engagement in the form of starting conversations about your brand.
The conversations happening in the comments of your influencer’s posts are possibly the most important aspect of your influencer marketing campaign. Do not ignore them! Make sure that as the brand, you are participating in these conversations and giving them just as much attention as you would to a customer service email.
That said, it’s important to measure all engagements to get an idea of your cost per engagement and engagement rate.
Subaru partnered with 20 influencers like Zach King to promote their brand online. The campaign got a staggering engagement rate of 9%.
Image via Instagram
2. Click-through Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate shows you the percentage of clicks on the promoted URL compared to the number of times it was viewed.
Essentially, it shows you how effective the influencer was in engaging their audience and compelling them to click on the URL to visit your website. The more referrals, the better.
A low CTR indicates that the call-to-action (CTA) wasn’t as effective. This, in turn, would mean that the campaign may not drive a lot of referral traffic to your website and take your audience further down the sales funnel.
CTR is one of the most significant KPIs for our influencer campaigns because it shows that your influencer content is driving leads down through your sales funnel.
3. Referral Traffic
This influencer marketing KPI is related to the CTR. It shows you the number of visitors who landed on your website after clicking on the URL provided in the influencer campaign.
You can track your referral traffic by adding UTM parameters to each link and track them using Google Analytics.
This can show you the individual performance of each influencer in your campaign along with the performance of different types of content and platforms.
Referral traffic is especially important as it can help in driving your lead generation efforts.
Cover Three Supplements, for example, partnered with influencers to drive their lead generation. Through the campaign, they managed to get over 2.5k link clicks in only a 3-month period with a strategic micro-influencer campaign.
Image via Vimeo
4. User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content is the content generated about your brand by social media users. When you pay influencers to create UGC as part of your campaign, it can also cause your audience to create organic UGC, or free UGC, just because they enjoyed your products and want to share about them.
Organic UGC helps in spreading the reach and engagement of your influencer campaign by generating more organic engagements and traffic.
You want to track all campaign UGC created by influencers to repurpose the content for your other marketing efforts assuming you have the proper licensing rights to use the content.
Additionally, you can leverage this content by sharing it on your social media pages, website, social ads, and more to generate further engagement from it.
And the best part about UGC?
It will help in boosting your engagement even after the influencer campaign is over as your audience continues to create UGC organically.
For instance, Daniel Wellington has a lot of UGC that they share on their Instagram account. This strategy has helped them grow their brand from a $20,000 investment to $228 million in revenue in just 3 years. There are over 2.4 million posts with their hashtag on Instagram today! These numbers speak for themselves.
Image via Instagram
5. Brand Mentions
While your influencer campaign may have generated lots of comments and conversations around your brand, you want a way to quantify these conversations, and that’s where brand mentions can help.
By tracking the number of times your brand was mentioned in posts, Stories, comments, Reels, etc., you’d get a good idea of the engagement generated specifically about your brand. Additionally, it’d help you spot those accounts that are saying things about you. Whether those comments are praising or critiquing, they’re valuable feedback from your audience.
Some of these might be potential influencers for your future campaigns too!
Brand monitoring tools can help you track the conversations generated by your influencer campaign. By monitoring posts, stories, comments, reels, and more, these tools provide insights into engagement specifically related to your brand.
They also help identify accounts that mention your brand, offering valuable feedback and potential future influencer partnerships.
6. Brand Sentiment
Brand sentiment is a key influencer marketing KPI that measures how your target audience feels about your brand.
By monitoring comments and mentions, you can spot accounts discussing your brand and offering valuable feedback through praise or critique.
This feedback helps you understand audience perceptions. These insights will help you improve your products and services.
Positive brand sentiment can indicate strong brand loyalty, while negative sentiment reveals areas needing attention.
This is why brand sentiment is crucial for maintaining a favorable brand image and fostering effective influencer partnerships.
Sales
This measures the financial impact of your influencer marketing campaigns. It offers a clear picture of how effectively influencer partnerships drive profitability and growth.
By tracking sales-related influencer marketing KPIs, you can assess the return on investment and optimize future marketing strategies.
1. Lead Generation
Through influencer campaigns, you ultimately want to grow your leads and sales. To generate more leads, you want your campaign audience to provide their contact information to you.
You can do so by driving them to your landing page and capturing their contact info, getting them to download your app, or asking them to fill out a form. High CTR and referral traffic can help you achieve better lead generation results.
TP-Link, for instance, partnered with numerous influencers on TikTok and YouTube through Get Hyped to drive lead generation efforts. The campaign led to 18,601 leads being generated. This is what we like to call a successful campaign!
Image via YouTube
2. Sales
Simply put, this influencer marketing KPI shows you the number of trackable sales generated directly from your influencer campaign.
You can provide custom promo codes or custom URLs to your influencers to track the sales that they’ve generated. This is one of the most critical KPIs you need to track to understand the impact of the campaign on your bottom line.
3. Revenue Generated
This KPI is similar to the sales KPI and shows you the revenue that your influencer campaign has generated for your business. It’s a pretty straightforward metric that helps you determine your ROI.
You can calculate the ROI by dividing the revenue generated by the cost of the campaign and multiplying it by 100.
That said, this isn’t the only way of calculating your ROI. For engagement and brand awareness campaign goals, you’d want to determine the earned media value (EMV) to determine the campaign ROI.
4. Earned Media Value
This influencer marketing KPI quantifies the value of organic exposure generated by social content and influencer campaigns. Earned media value estimates the monetary worth of the content created by influencers, fans, and consumers who promote a brand or product without direct payment.
There’s no standard approach to calculating EMV. That’s why you shouldn’t compare this metric against that of your competitors. You can only compare it against the EMV of your other campaigns.
In a nutshell, here’s the formula to calculate EMV.
EMV = impressions × CPM (cost per mille)
CPM depicts how much your brand usually pays to reach 1,000 users via paid media.
To calculate EMV, you can analyze metrics like shares, likes, comments, and views on social media platforms. These interactions are then assigned a dollar value based on comparable paid advertising rates.
For instance, if an influencer’s post generates significant engagement, the EMV reflects how much it would cost to achieve the same reach and interaction through paid media.
How to Choose KPIs
Choosing the right influencer marketing KPIs is key to accurately measuring the success of your campaigns. Here are some tips to get you started:
- Determine Your Goals: Influencer marketing KPIs should align directly with your campaign objectives. Whether it’s brand awareness, engagement, conversions, or reach, ensure your KPIs reflect your goals.
- Ensure Relevance: Your KPIs should be relevant to the outcomes you want to achieve from your influencer marketing campaigns.
- For example, if your goal is to increase brand engagement among a younger demographic, a relevant KPI would be tracking the engagement rate (likes, comments, shares) specifically among users aged 18-25.
- Align with Audience: Consider metrics that reflect the influencer’s audience demographics. To gain valuable insights, you should monitor audience demographics, geographic reach, and audience engagement levels.
- Consider Measurable KPIs: Having quantifiable metrics ensures you can track progress and evaluate performance accurately over time. Also, if you’re not getting the desired results, you can make necessary adjustments to your strategies.
- Specify Timeframes: Aside from being quantifiable, your KPIs should also have specific timeframes. Whether it’s daily, weekly, or for the duration of the campaign, clear timelines help in tracking performance effectively.
- Focus on ROI: Monitor influencer marketing KPIs that directly tie into return on investment (ROI). This includes cost per engagement (CPE), cost per click (CPC), or cost per acquisition (CPA), especially if conversion is a primary goal.
- Get Influencers Involved: Influencers are well-versed in influencer marketing KPIs. As such, you can involve them in defining relevant KPIs your brand should monitor.
How to Measure KPIs
Measuring influencer marketing KPIs helps you track your campaign’s progress and ensure its success.
Manual Tracking
This method involves using spreadsheets or databases to record and analyze data manually. It’s useful for tracking basic metrics like engagement rates and follower growth.
Influencer Marketing Platforms
Certain platforms provide comprehensive analytics on campaign performance, such as engagement metrics, audience demographics, and ROI. They help brands determine which influencers drive the most impact.
Here are some of the top platforms to consider:
- Grin: This tool helps brands find influencers and manage relationships with them. It also offers tools for branded content, public relations, and affiliate marketing.
- Upfluence: A platform catering to nonprofits, brands, and influencer agencies, Upfluence helps you find influencers that your brand can easily work with.
- Neoreach: With its comprehensive influencer search tool, Neoreach allows brands to look for influencers by profile performance, social platforms, keywords, and audience demographics.
Here’s an example of Neoreach’s influencer search dashboard.
Image via Neoreach
Sales and Affiliate Tracking Tools
These tools enable you to track conversions and sales driven by influencer campaigns. They provide valuable data on revenue generated and cost per acquisition (CPA).
Here are some affiliate tracking tools to take note of:
- Google Analytics: This platform provides detailed insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion tracking.
- Shopify Analytics: Mainly for ecommerce, this tool offers comprehensive data on sales performance, customer behavior, and conversion rates.
- ShareASale: This allows merchants to monitor affiliate-driven sales, commissions, and overall campaign performance.
Social Media Platform Analytics
Most social media platforms provide data on reach, impressions, engagement (likes, comments, shares), demographics, and audience insights. However, there also are several third-party analytics tools that you can use.
Here’s an example of the reach-related metrics provided by Instagram.
Image via Instagram
FAQs
1. What is KPIs in influencer marketing?
KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable measures of performance that can help you gauge the progress and success of your influencer marketing campaign based on your goals. There’s a wide range of KPIs related to awareness, engagement, and sales that you can track.
2. How do you measure influencer marketing?
You can measure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaigns by tracking the major KPIs related to them. These can include KPIs like:
- Reach
- Sales
- Impressions
- Revenue Generated
- Referral Traffic
- Brand Mentions
- Leads Generated
3. How do you evaluate an influencer’s performance?
You can measure an influencer’s performance similar to how you’d measure the performance of an entire campaign. Decide which KPIs contribute to your goals and then measure the influencer against those KPIs.
4. What are the most important metrics for an influencer?
We believe the most significant metrics for an influencer are their:
- Engagement rate
- Reach
- Impressions
- Average views
- Audience demographics
- Audience authenticity
5. How do we measure the ROI of influencer actions?
The type of ROI depends on your campaign goals. One way to calculate ROI for a sales goal is by dividing your revenue generated from the campaign by the cost of the campaign and multiplying it by 100.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing is a powerful marketing method that you can leverage to reach a vast audience effectively and grow your business. But it’s essential to track every campaign to understand its progress and impact.
With the right set of influencer marketing KPIs, you can determine where you stand and how you can improve your campaigns over time.
That said, tracking and analyzing these KPIs can be a challenge, and that’s why we’re here to help! Get in touch with us if you need support with your influencer campaigns.
