Beyond the vanity metrics: 4 important ways to measure success in influencer marketing campaigns

When it comes to measuring influencer marketing success, one of the most basic mistakes we see brands make is in putting too much focus on “vanity metrics” instead of the measurements that really matter. Sure, getting thousands of likes and comments feels good, but alone, those don't provide the information you need to work out the true costs and benefits of your campaigns, or how to improve them over time.

While influencer marketing can drive significant ROI, the success of your campaigns can be measured by many different metrics and data sources. As we discussed in our previous blog post about the importance of data for influencer marketing, the objectives of your campaign will determine the most important metrics for you to measure. 

For one-off campaigns or long-term influencer marketing strategies, it is absolutely critical that you know how you measure and determine success, by defining what the right KPIs are. There are many KPIs that will compliment different elements of your campaign. At Fourth Floor, we typically look at 4 key metrics: conversions, engagement, reach & awareness and audience growth. Below I go into more detail about each of these metrics and how you can use them for ongoing success: 

Conversions

Driving growth and sales will always be the number one marketing goal, but conversions don’t always have to do with sales. Any action you set as you objective is your conversion; app downloads, email subscriptions, competition entries, new followers, website purchases… they all count if they’re relevant to your goals. 

When working with influencers, you should be measuring conversions at every stage of the sales cycle, and using that data to inform future activities. 

How do you track conversions? There are many effective ways, depending on your objectives, such as promotional codes, affiliate links, segmented e-mail lists and landing pages. 

Engagement

Influencer engagement is a great indicator of how responsive new audiences are to your brand, and how well your campaign is being received. 

When your campaign objective is engagement, there are lots of ways in which this can be measured. Deciding which engagements are the most important will help you be more focussed and targeted. Measuring engagements also allows you to work out the cost per engagement (CPE). CPE is how much it costs for each like, comment or reaction on a piece of influencer content. The lower the cost, the better you've done!

Typical engagement metrics are:

• Likes

• Comments 

• Shares

• Views

• Reactions

• Clicks

• Pins

• Mentions

Reach & Brand Awareness

Organic reach is the holy grail for all social marketers. It economically builds brand awareness and allows you to reach valuable new audiences. Working with influencers does exactly this at scale. 

Measuring the reach and resulting awareness from a campaign is a good identifier of how an influencer has 'influenced' their audience.

The main KPIs for brand awareness are frequency and sentiment. Sentiment gives you an understanding of how positively, neutrally, or negatively audiences are talking about your brand. The frequency measures how often those audiences are exposed to your brand or campaign. 

Audience Growth

Demographics and targeting are key for audience growth. If you want to go beyond engagements and awareness and grow your own audiences with influencers, then your targeting and campaign message need to be on-point. 

Getting people to see an influencer campaign is one thing, but converting them into followers or subscribers is another. Just because somebody engaged with your campaign, doesn't mean they are now part of your audience. 

With audience growth KPI, we're trying to reach as many people as possible (as with reach and awareness) but we’re also working to make the content and message compelling enough to turn them into brand advocates. 

There are many tools to provide you with detailed audience growth analytics. We recommend tracking your growth before, during and after a campaign to get a clear picture of success.

We work with brands to create high-impact influencer marketing campaigns using hard data. We help you to get under the skin of your audiences, understand who and where they are, and collaborate with respected influencers to get your message to them. If you’d like to chat about working together, get in touch.