Although the concept of “influencer marketing” dates back to the late 1800s, it has only lately emerged as an important tactic in the realm of digital advertising. The term “word of mouth” was once the standard for this type of communication.
With the proliferation of social media influencers across sites like Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and more, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for digital marketers to ignore this method of expanding their clientele and generating new leads. But, knowing how to gauge the efficacy of an influencer marketing initiative is as crucial (KPIs).
While there are numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider, influencer marketing specifically requires that you pay attention to conversion rates, reach and awareness, referral traffic, audience growth, and engagement. With the aid of these key performance indicators, you can monitor your influencer marketing campaign’s development and ensure that your efforts are producing the desired results.
Conversions
One of the main purposes of influencer marketing is to boost traffic to your website, but other objectives include expanding your audience and stimulating more interaction with your brand. Your conversion rate KPI is helpful because it is the ultimate aim of any marketing effort. Keeping tabs on sales before, during, and after an influencer marketing campaign and comparing them to changes that occurred during the campaign’s time period is a simple approach to gauge the campaign’s success in terms of conversions. If you want to take a more technical strategy, you may set up affiliate links, UTM parameters, promo codes, landing pages, and link tracking for the campaign, which will allow you to monitor which channels brought you the most conversions.
Not all conversions are related to sales, but there are still rates you can track. A conversion occurs when a lead takes the next step you wanted them to take. This may be anything from registering for a newsletter to downloading an ebook to clicking a link. Other non-monetary conversions that may be of interest to measure in relation to influencer marketing and KPIs include the number of Facebook likes, new followers, email signups, and so on.
Visitors Acquired Through Referrals
With influencer marketing, it’s crucial to analyse the conversion KPI, but you should also keep an eye on how much traffic was generated by the campaign. Referral traffic is important since it not only reveals how far your promotion has reached, but also how successful it has been overall. Not all success can be measured by an increase in sales, and it’s crucial to remember that conversions don’t always tell the full picture, especially if your site isn’t properly designed for conversions. Referral traffic tracking may help with this since it reveals how many individuals were brought to your site as a direct result of the promotion.
The good news is that you can track campaign-driven traffic using the same methods you used to track conversions, such as discount codes and UTM parameters. In addition, you can compare the metrics you’re seeing after the campaign with the ones you were seeing before the campaign to get a sense of how well it’s doing.
Visitors’ First Points of Contact
Views and visits to the site as a whole
Reach and Exposure
Having an influencer promote your company is a great initial step in increasing brand recognition and establishing new connections because of their ready access to a massive audience. To evaluate the campaign’s efficacy in this regard, you should keep tabs on how many people it was able to contact, how many new prospects it exposed you to, and how successfully it re-enforced your brand among your already-existing prospects.
Impressions data on your different postings, including blog entries, social posts, videos, and other material created expressly for the campaign, is a fantastic method to gauge reach and awareness. You may get this data by comparing new and returning visitors in Google Analytics while the campaign is active, as well as by analysing the statistics of the social media sites the influencer uses to promote their own content (such as a blog).
Engagement
Similar to how crucial reach is, engagement is a key metric since it shows you how well your campaign was received from the ground up. Again, traffic and reach will tell you how many, but audience and engagement will tell you how effectively. The level of interaction between you and your target audience may tell you a lot about how well your brand is accepted, how well you connect with them, how relevant you are, and how loyal your consumers will be. A single engagement may consist of any of the following activities made by your target audience:
- Likes
- Reactions
- Shares
- Comments
- Clicks
- Votes
- Pins
- Video plays
- Appropriate Mention of Brands
Using a platform like BuzzSumo, which automatically tracks and measures interaction, is one of the simplest methods to gauge audience interest in your content. If you’d rather do it by hand, you may calculate engagement by dividing the number of interactions by the total number of impressions or by dividing the total number of interactions by the total number of followers. You may get a better feel for your return on investment (ROI) and budget needs for future campaigns by calculating the cost per engagement (CPE) by dividing your total ad spend by the number of engagements.
It’s hardly shocking that influencer marketing is gaining ground in the digital era. Word-of-mouth advertising has always been effective because it appeals to consumers’ natural confidence in those they know and like promoting a product or service through influencer marketing is just a more nuanced approach to this time-tested technique.