Undoubtedly, influencer marketing has been – and still is – booming these last few years. But because it’s all pretty recent and the results aren’t quite as tangible, its success is hard to define compared to other types of marketing. This makes the world of social media metrics, and KPIs an overwhelming one to venture into. We’re happy to help you navigate.

By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly which metrics your brand should be tracking and how to tell if a campaign was successful or not.

Before starting, you must decide the goal(s) for your campaign – as with any type of marketing. Brand awareness? More traffic to the site? A social boost? It’s important to know the key objectives of your campaign because then you can narrow down the relevant metrics to track its success and evaluate the strength of your social strategy. You don’t know the impact of your online presence until you have the data to back it up!

Below, we’ll tell you the key metrics that any brand should consider.

Let’s start quite literal: how do you measure the impact of a campaign on your socials?

o   Followers

The first – and most top of mind – metric is your number of followers. A growing follower count is a strong indication that more people are becoming aware of your brand, that you’re gaining more traction and thus reaching more people.

Which is a nice (confidence) boost. But keep in mind: only a few of those followers will see any given post (rumor has it about 10%). Why? Because every social platform wants you to spend money. If you invest in advertising, you get better results. A so-called ‘organic’ post has to work pretty damn hard to beat this algorithm.  

This is why we would advise you to look further than the number of followers. Next, have a look at the following: 

o   Impressions

As stated above, a growing fanbase means you’re reaching more people. After a campaign, an influencer will consult their statistics and tell you about the ‘reach,’ which means the total number of people who’ve seen the campaign’s content.

We would advise you to focus on ‘impressions,’ though. ‘Impressions’ stands for the total number of times the campaign’s content was displayed/shown to people.

Confused? We get it. Let’s clarify with an example. If you post one photo to 100 followers, and every one of them sees it, you have a reach of 100 as well as 100 impressions. If you post two photos to 100 followers, and every one of them sees it, you still have a reach of 100 (because that’s still the number of followers you have), but now you have 200 impressions (because all of them saw both photos).

‘Impressions’ is thus the more meaningful option of the two, as it helps you assess how the audience is responding to your content. And more importantly: whether your social strategy is working.

You want to look for a high impressions-to-reach ratio because this means your audience is viewing your content multiple times.

@onadventurewithdad for Devos & Lemmes (Influo campaign)

To get the complete picture, you need to know how many people commit to your content.

Thus, you should track: 

o   Engagement

It’s one of the current buzzwords in the social world, and rightly so, because engagement indicates the performance and effectiveness of your content/campaign.

It can be measured using metrics such as likes, reactions, comments, shares, and mentions. In short: engaged customers interact, and posts with higher engagement are rewarded (by the algorithm) with more reach. Logically, you should be striving for an increased engagement number!

The most basic formula to calculate this is the following: total number of engagements (likes + comments) divided by your follower count, then multiplied by 100.

Compare your engagement rate to a benchmark (preferably based on your industry/niche) to measure the performance of various influencers as well as the success of your overall campaign.

If your engagement rate is discouraging, dive into your content and try to figure out where it went wrong. It’s not necessarily a sign that you have to change everything. For example, a picture that receives a lot of likes, but no comments or shares, isn’t per se bad. However, if there was a call to action in the caption that encouraged comments or shares, and there aren’t any, that could mean a poorly performed caption and thus a badly engaged audience.

Next, let’s talk about the direct response to your campaign. This means:

Website traffic & sales

To measure this, you’ll need a tool like Google Analytics. That way, you can find out where your website traffic is coming from and how much of it is the direct result of your campaign. Google Analytics also provides you with a bunch of interesting metrics. Below, the most important ones.

  • Referrals: This is how a user lands on your website. Referral traffic stats let you know which content drives traffic to your website or a specific landing page. It provides enlightening insights into which campaigns are resonating with your audience and across which platforms.
  • Conversions: When someone purchases something, meaning they visited via your social channel and then purchased something in that same visit.

These two obviously speak for themselves: the more, the merrier!

  • Click-through rate: This metric compares the number of times someone clicks on your content to the number of impressions you get. CTR is measured in email links, social media ads, call-to-action buttons, links on landing pages, etc.

A high CTR means the same as an effective campaign. A low CTR tells you that users aren’t landing on your website. This could be because of a weak call-to-action, lousy design or visuals, wrong targeting, and more. The CTR is different for every industry/niche, so again, it’s best to research the right benchmarks beforehand and then compare and review your results accordingly.

In conclusion

The right metrics will tell you if a campaign (and in the larger picture, your strategy) is successful. The metrics summed up above will give you a good overview of your campaign’s performance.  

Keep in mind that working with influencers and launching campaigns is – like any other marketing effort – a matter of trial and error. The most important thing is that you know your goals, and you choose the right influencer(s). But if at first, you don’t succeed, don’t be afraid to try again.

With time, you’ll learn who and what works for your brand, how to interpret the results, and where to make the necessary adjustments. Practice makes perfect!

And if you are overwhelmed by all of this or need some assistance, we’re happy to help. Influo has an extraordinary automated system to collect campaign results. After every campaign, we can provide you with an automated clear-cut, complete report of your results with real-time data, so you don’t have to do the math yourselves!