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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.

Why Are Influencer Marketing KPIs Important?

Influencer marketing fraud, unfortunately, is still a reality in 2022. In fact, the average share of influencers involved in fraud was about 55.39% in the year 2020.

These influencers typically use fake followers, likes, comments, or shares to inflate their worth.

If you don’t do due diligence before partnering with an influencer, you risk falling for such scams that would deliver you nothing more than vanity metrics.

Instead, you want to analyze each influencer before reaching out to them to understand their level of authenticity and potential to help you hit your campaign goals.

And even once you’ve launched your campaign, you want to measure its progress to see if you’re on your way to hitting your goals or not. This is when influencer marketing KPIs come in handy. These metrics show you where your campaign stands and help you estimate your return on investment (ROI).

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

1. Reach

This KPI shows you the number of unique people you’ve reached through your campaign. Reach tells you how many unique people have seen your campaign content.

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?

Impressions

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.

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%.

Likes, Shares, Comments, Saves

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.

Click-through Rate

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.

Referral Traffic

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.

User-Generated Content

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!

Sales

What’s the point of generating all that awareness and engagement if it doesn’t eventually lead to an increase in sales?

1. Lead Generation

Through influencer campaigns, you ultimately want to grow your leads and sales. For generating 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!

Lead Generation

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.

Revenue GeneratedThat 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.

FAQs

1. What is KPI 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.

Dan Coughlin

Dan Coughlin

Dan is a seasoned digital marketing strategist, Cofounder, and Managing Director of Get Hyped. Dan’s expertise lies in developing creative storytelling strategies and compelling content that drives conversions and enhances ROI. Alongside his wife Kristina, an established Instagram foodie influencer, Dan has developed innovative marketing strategies that deliver measurable results for consumer brands. With his dynamic blend of technical knowledge and creative flair, Dan continues to revolutionize the way brands leverage social media and influencers to connect with their audiences and drive growth. When he's not devising marketing strategies, you can find Dan exploring the vibrant food scene with his family or unwinding with a cigar and a good book.