If you’ve been thinking about tapping the influencer marketing waters, you’ve probably spent some time wondering about one question: “How do I measure the results of my campaign?”

But before jumping into how, let’s first briefly discuss why you even need this and what you can measure (spoiler alert: quite a lot!).

Why do you need to measure the results of your campaign?

Influencer marketing is exciting ― and it’s tempting to get into it as quickly as possible. But it’s not as straightforward as “1+1 equals 2”.

Just imagine how much effort goes into a campaign. First, you need ideas that will wow your target audience. Then, you need to start looking for the right influencers and begin reaching out to them. And, on top of that, you’re always keeping your finger on key performance indicators (KPIs) ― before, during, and after the campaign.

After all, influencer marketing is part of your overarching business plan. And business loves numbers.

This is why measuring results is one of the five most important steps in influencer marketing.

What can you measure in influencer marketing campaigns?

It depends on your goal. Do you want to increase engagement or your conversion rate? Or maybe you’re looking for a higher reach?

There’re a lot of indicators in marketing ― you can probably come up with some unique ones if you need them. But with a goal in mind, you’ll be able to narrow down this overwhelming number to a few options. And then you’ll focus on the indicators that are most relevant for you right now.

• For example, likes, shares, comments, views are all part of engagement. If engagement is your main goal, you’d probably want to define KPIs that will include the number of likes, comments, or views. Let’s say, the cost per impression.
• But if you want to boost your conversion rate, the number of clicks on the track links or any changes in the number of installs will be more valuable to you. In this case, you might consider tracking the click-through rate.

And when setting KPIs, keep in mind that it’s enough to have 2-3 indicators per goal or objective. That will help you avoid overcomplicating the process.

How can you measure the results of your influencer marketing campaign?

There are at least five ways to do this.

1. Use social media analytics

Are users interacting with your content? If yes, it means that you were able to get them to notice your campaign. But the main question should be “How do they interact with it?”

• Do people like your content? On YouTube, you can see the number of likes and dislikes and compare them.
• What emotions does your content trigger? For example, Facebook allows creators to dig deeper into different reactions (not only likes). You can also analyze comments under each sponsored post on all social media channels: are they mostly positive or negative?
• Is your content good? If a lot of people have shared your post, it probably means that your content quality is rather high. And this will also have a positive impact on their perception of your product.

It’s also important to track results for each influencer individually. You can use two sources of information:

• Publicly available data. Any social network has built-in analytics tools. For instance, the number of times a video has been viewed on YouTube.
• Private data. You can ask influencers to share their coverage data with you.

2. Explore what tools exist

There are media monitoring services such as Mention, HubSpot, Brand analytics, etc. They help you track mentions and tags, which are also important success indicators of your campaign. By tracking the number of brand mentions, you can see whether your content is being discussed and shared.

You need to decide which tool is a better fit for your goals. There’re many features that each of the solutions offer and the variety of features can be mind-blowing. Keep your end goal in mind. Don’t overpay for features that you don’t need.

3. Monitor Google Analytics

Social media visibility is only part of success. You also need to think about your website and if new visitors can easily find it. You can use Google Analytics for different tasks:

• Measure traffic from different websites and social media channels: what sources have attracted the highest number of visitors to your website.
• Conduct a branded search audit: how often are visitors searching for your brand directly?
• Check if the number of branded queries increased one month after the campaign.
• Use Google Adwords or any other keyword statistics service to assess any changes in user interest in specific keywords.

By analyzing traffic data, you’ll better understand how effective the influencer marketing campaign was compared to other marketing campaigns that you ran in the past. 

You can also calculate the income from each click (the revenue per click): divide the income received from the ad by the number of clicks on it. Did you manage to get a number that is higher than the cost per click?

4. Ask your customers

Sometimes the most obvious way is the most effective one. You don’t need to go directly to every customer and ask their opinion on every campaign you launched, but you can create a general survey or add a pop-up window to your website with 2-3 questions. This will encourage customers to share their experiences with you.

When creating a pop-up or a survey, keep your customers’ time in mind. Use multiple-choice options instead of open text questions.

5. Create unique links

You don’t always need a complex system to do the job. For example, you can also provide each influencer with a unique UTM link that they will use in their posts. You can generate these links for free (bit.ly) or use some paid tools. These tools help you see how a user got to your website (where they came from and via which channel). And you can find out which social network or influencer is driving more traffic to your website.

Conclusion

This all sounds pretty straightforward, right? But there’s one catch. Sometimes it can take up to a couple of months before the results accumulate.

After your marketing campaign is over, the content created by influencers continues promoting your brand. To effectively measure the success of your campaign, you need to take this delayed effect into account.

And ― you guessed it ― some results are hard to measure:

• You can’t know whether a new user who downloaded your app learned about it from an influencer some time ago or just found it on some other source.
• People who have used your product before but have stopped using it for some reason might re-consider their decision after seeing a post from their favorite influencer.

Although influencer marketing can be challenging and puzzling sometimes, it’s one of the most effective marketing strategies out there. 

So if you’re still thinking about launching an influencer marketing campaign but don’t know where to start, reach out to HypeFactory, and we’ll take it from there together.