How To Measure Your Influencer Marketing ROI

As the influencer marketing industry becomes one of the most popular marketing tactics, a key challenge marketers face is measuring the effectiveness of influencer campaigns. The process has evolved from one that primarily valued likes, comments and views to one that considers brand awareness, direct sales and even earned media. Here we’re sharing a few different metrics that are helpful for evaluating your influencer marketing ROI.

First, Clarify Your Goal

Before you examine your influencer marketing results, it’s important to set a clear objective for what you’re trying to achieve by working with an influencer. Rather than focusing on a few different goals, narrow in on one outcome as doing so will provide a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t. For example, are you trying to drive action or brand awareness or both?

Engagement

Tracking metrics like views, impressions, comments and likes provides insight into how your influencer’s content is performing. While you can track these metrics via built-in tools on social media or influencer analytics platforms, what’s more effective is determining what these statistics are worth to your brand specifically. Ask yourself how much you pay for these same impressions on other channels and how many impressions of influencer content you have to buy in order to produce a sale.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

To quantify your influencer marketing ROI, evaluate ROAS through metrics like direct sales, click through rate (CTR) and downloads. Promo codes, for example, are important for tracking direct sales from an influencer collaboration. Take it a step further and create separate affiliate links for your influencer to include in their promotion of the product or service. Affiliate links enable followers to directly purchase your product or service through an influencer and reveal stats on number of clicks, email captures, abandoned carts and sales.

Earned Media

One thing marketers fail to include in their analysis of influencer marketing is earned media, or the voluntary creation and sharing of a marketer’s branded content. This includes organic search results, videos, pictures, retweets and emails. It’s smart to understand how earned media value (EMV) plays into your overall marketing strategy as it enables you to benchmark your company’s performance against a competitor’s. One way to increase the volume of earned media is vetting and creating mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with influencers. But don’t forget, EMV should be calculated according to each separate platform.

Sentiment

Comments on an influencer post that’s part of your campaign is one overlooked but powerful tool to determine how your customers are responding to your influencer’s content. Tracking the number of comments is one thing, but doing a deep dive on the quality and nature of comments can be very telling when deciding on what your consumers like, think of the product your influencer is promoting and want to see more of.

Brand Lift Study

Among the intangible benefits of influencer marketing is brand lift. Given consumers find influencer content more relatable than a brand’s own content and the fact that research shows relevant influencer ads are 277 percent more emotive than TV ads, it’s helpful to conduct a brand lift study when measuring the result of an influencer campaign. This enables you to get a 360-degree view of how your influencer campaign affected consumer perception and intent to purchase.