In influencer marketing, success goes beyond catchy content and cool collaborations. If you want to boost your campaigns, knowing your numbers is key!
Today, let’s dive into the 10 essential metrics that will help align your influencer strategy with your business goals:
- Reach and impressions
- Engagement rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Audience demographics
- Sentiment analysis
- Brand mentions
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Content performance
- Long-term impact and relationship-building
Let’s explore them in detail and find out how to use data to drive your campaigns.
1. Reach and Impressions
Understanding reach and impressions is crucial in influencer marketing. Reach is how many unique users see your content, while impressions count every time your content is displayed.
Measuring these two metrics is vital for understanding campaign effectiveness and brand visibility. They allow you to refine a strategy and maximise brand exposure.
How to calculate?
Since these metrics are essential, most platforms calculate them automatically and display them on statistics and analytics pages. For instance, Instagram provides insights into reach and impressions under every piece of content – you just need to click “View Insights” and check the results.
Third-party tools offer even more comprehensive analytics, summarising reach and impressions across the entire campaign and providing breakdowns by influencer or specific content.
2. Engagement Rate
The engagement rate reflects the level of audience interaction and interest in campaign content. Simply put, it measures the extent to which users actively engage with an influencer's content, including likes, comments, shares, and other forms of interaction. Engagement rate shows how well your content resonates with the audience.
How to calculate?
Divide the number of total engagements by the total reach or impressions and multiply by 100 to express it as a percentage. This metric will vary on different platforms, content categories, and verticals.
Based on the latest research, here are the engagement rate benchmarks for major platforms:
- TikTok: 2.65%
- Instagram: 0.70%
- Facebook: 0.15%
- X: 0.05%
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR tells you how effective your content is in driving audience actions from a campaign asset to the final destination – usually a link to a website, profile page, document, registration form, etc.
How to calculate?
CTR is the percentage of users who click on a link in influencer content compared to the total impressions. To calculate divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply by 100 for a percentage.
A high CTR indicates strong audience interest and potential for conversions, which means the relevance and impact of influencer collaborations in driving your desired business actions. A low CTR means that content requires improvement – although it could be catchy and engaging in terms of in-app activity, it doesn’t motivate the audience to go down the funnel.
4. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of users who take an action to complete a specified objective, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a service, after engaging with influencer content.
How to calculate?
To measure the conversion rate divide the number of conversions generated by influencer campaigns by the total number of engagements and multiply by 100 for a percentage.
Conversions are typically the primary goal of the entire campaign, which makes this metric one of the most important. A high conversion rate means that influencer content successfully motivates audiences to take action, ultimately driving significant results for brands.
With a low conversion rate, the campaign is considered to be not successful. To improve, review influencer content (ensuring the call-to-action is clear), audience targeting, landing page design, product offer, and overall strategy.
5. Audience Demographics
Understanding your audience’s demographics shapes your targeting and content strategy. By analysing influencer audience demographics, you can gain insights into the characteristics, preferences, and behaviours of your target audience.
It is important to research creators' demographics before you start a campaign or even plan your collaboration because this information can influence everything from creators' fees and product offerings to the feasibility of partnering with a particular creator at all.
How to analyse?
Methods for accessing and analysing audience demographics vary, from utilizing platform insights to leveraging influencer marketing tools and third-party surveys. Armed with this information, you can tailor your influencer collaborations to resonate with your target audience.
We recommend trying this tool to vet influencers and obtain private stats about their audience and content. It analyses creator profiles with AI and generates a report that includes audience authenticity, details on engagement rate, performance of previously sponsored posts, the creator’s brand affinity to avoid overlapping with competitors, audience interests and brand affinity, and many other useful metrics.
6. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis evaluates how audiences perceive your brand based on their interactions with influencer content. It analyses emotional tone and sentiment in comments and mentions.
Various tools and techniques, including natural language processing algorithms, are used to conduct sentiment analysis on influencer content. Companion provides an AI-powered feature that can do this analysis for you in a matter of minutes.
By understanding audience sentiment, you can find out what people truly think about this campaign, and gauge your brand's perception and campaign effectiveness in fostering positive sentiment among your target audience.
7. Brand Mentions
Brand mentions indicate brand awareness and audience engagement. They occur when the brand is mentioned or featured in influencer content, such as product reviews, endorsements, or sponsored posts.
Tracking and analysing brand mentions across social media platforms provide insights into the reach, impact, and sentiment associated with brand collaborations. By leveraging brand mentions, you can amplify brand visibility, foster audience trust, and invest in a relationship with your community.
How to track?
Companion can track every single piece of content where your brand or product was mentioned – even without in-app tagging. The tool collects content in a neat feed, analyses its performance, and enables you to download everything in one click. Moreover, you can create an extensive report about the tracked campaign, summarizing its performance on well-designed slides. Definitely worth trying – the first 14 days for free.
8. Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI evaluates your campaign’s financial impact and profitability. It measures the ratio of the net profit generated by a campaign to the total cost invested, usually shown as a percentage or ratio.
How to calculate?
To calculate ROI for influencer marketing campaigns, you subtract the total campaign costs from the total revenue generated and divide the result by the total campaign costs. A positive ROI means the campaign generated more revenue than it cost to execute, showing its effectiveness in driving business outcomes.
By assessing ROI, you can make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and optimise future influencer collaborations for maximum profitability.
9. Content Performance
Analysing influencer content performance gives valuable insights into audience engagement, preferences, and behaviour. Metrics like video views, likes, shares, and comments show how audiences interact with influencer content. Monitoring content performance helps you find top-performing content, understand audience preferences, and improve future content strategy.
Usually, it can be challenging to get data-driven insights about campaign content because it requires creators to provide their private stats. If you’d like to see content performance automatically in real time, we recommend using influencer marketing tools for this task – it will save you time and resources, and will give you more accurate results.
10. Long-Term Impact and Relationship Building
Assessing the long-term impact and relationship-building in influencer marketing goes beyond immediate campaign results. Metrics like follower growth, brand loyalty, and repeat engagement show how influencer collaborations affect audience perception and brand affinity over time.
Building lasting relationships with influencers builds trust, credibility, and authenticity, leading to sustained brand advocacy and loyalty. Prioritise relationship building and long-term impact when collaborating with creators, it will add lasting value and contribute to your brand growth and success.
Conclusion
In wrapping up, the 10 key metrics we've covered are crucial for measuring how well influencer marketing campaigns perform. From checking reach and impressions to ROI and long-term impact, they give us a good peek into how our campaigns are doing, how engaged our audience is, and how visible our brand is.
Remember, keeping an eye on these metrics regularly, and tweaking as needed – it will help you stay on top of trends and keep ahead of the game in this ever-changing landscape.
You can easily access all these metrics in one place and save your time calculating every single one. Try Companion for free and enjoy the simplicity of measurement!