Without a doubt, influencer marketing has proven to be a highly efficient channel compared to other marketing methods. Businesses feel its impact, customers witness its power, and the industry economy attests to its success. The question lies in how to track this impact effectively!
In this article, we’ll explore how to align influencer marketing with your business goals and effectively measure campaign results.
Set Clear Goals
Influencer marketing is an incredibly versatile channel and can serve various purposes, be it lead generation, sales growth, increased engagement, or building brand awareness. Each goal requires monitoring specific metrics during your campaigns.
- For lead generation, keep a close eye on website traffic, conversion rates, add-to-carts, cost per lead, lead value and quality.
- Sales success can be measured by revenue, average deal size or order value, and marketing cost per sales opportunity.
- To track engagement, pay attention to engagement rates, sessions, average time spent on landing pages, add-to-carts and bounce rate.
- Brand awareness is gauged by followers’ growth, brand mentions, impressions, views, reach, sessions and branded search volume.
Choose Your Tracking Methods
Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to choose the way you will be tracking those key metrics. Here are some proven ideas for you to consider.
Let’s start with elementary approaches and move steadily to more advanced and easy-to-use techniques.
Influencers’ Private Analytics on Social Media Platforms
#leadgeneration #engagement #brandawareness
Using a professional dashboard on social media platforms, influencers can see comprehensive performance data for each piece of content they create. From reach and engagement to the traffic source and link clicks, these analytics provide valuable insights.
Ask influencers to share this data with you by providing screenshots. Monitoring Instagram posts or Reels within 24 hours after posting, then in 3 days and 1 week, can provide a clear picture of performance For Stories, comprehensive data can be gathered within 24 hours.
Such platforms like YouTube and TikTok have organic search and can show results even after a long time has passed. Determine the cadence of asking influencers for stats – it could be once a month or more often for influencers with wider audiences.
Note: Be prepared to remind influencers to share this data consistently, and keep in mind that its accuracy depends solely on the influencer
Alternatively, you can use tools to automate this process and gain access to influencers’ private stats effortlessly. By authenticating influencers on the platform and requesting specific, you can automatically get updates on the campaign results without any hassle.
Personal Promo Codes
#sales #leadgeneration
Implementing unique promo codes with discounts assigned to each influencer allows you to monitor sales generated by their campaigns. They are particularly useful for social platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, where links are not allowed in posts.
Promo codes serve as a direct call to action for audiences, driving them to make purchases with enticing incentives. Set time limitations for these offers, encouraging audiences to use promo codes promptly. Alternatively, you can opt for evergreen offers, turning influencers into your brand advocates and building a loyal community over time.
Ensure the promo codes are simple and memorable, potentially using the influencer’s username to forge a stronger association with their followers.
Note: While promo codes are effective for measuring sales and lead generation, they won’t provide details about customer journeys or other marketing metrics.
Nevertheless, we recommend trying this approach if you need to set things up quickly, and you have proper functionality on your website. Using promo codes along with UTM links can give you more comprehensive data about users behaviour on your website.
UTM Links
#sales #leadgeneration #engagement
Tagging your links with UTM parameters is a fundamental practice for tracking traffic sources across all marketing channels, including influencer campaigns. Creating a personalized UTM link for each influencer simplifies tracking and categorizes traffic sources in Google Analytics.
To create a UTM link, use Google’s recommended online URL builders.
Fill out the mandatory fields: campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, and a link, actually. You can also add some info into other sections as well to give more context about this campaign. But remember to use one standardized approach to every UTM link you create in order to keep your Google Analytics tidy and understandable.
Use this example to see what info to put in every field.
Campaign source refers to the channel of the traffic. For tagging influencer marketing links, put a social media platform in this field – Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter etc.
Campaign medium specifies the category of the traffic (organic, paid, social, etc). Put “influencer” here to separate traffic from influencer marketing campaigns.
Campaign name narrows down the traffic by a specific campaign, influencer, or seasonal promo. You can also combine different info in one field, like the name of the campaign and influencer – “loreal_goldenage_anita”.
Campaign content can help you highlight particular pieces of content created during this campaign. Depending on the approach you chose, you can put the name of the influencer in this field or type of content, like “story” or “bio”.
After adding all the information you’ll get a pretty long link which can be challenging to use on social media. Use default functionality or services like bit.ly to shorten the link for a cleaner appearance.
Note: UTM links are a reliable tracking method, but creating and managing personalized links for each channel and influencer can be time-consuming.
Unique Landing Page
#sales #leadgeneration #engagement #brandawareness
Create customized landing pages to precisely track traffic from influencers and offer tailored user experience.
Infuse the landing pages with influencer’s personality, tone-of-voice or special offers to enhance the customer journey. Additionally, dedicated landing pages are especially beneficial for showcasing relevant products when partnering with influencers.
For instance, when collaborating with a fashion influencer to showcase a total look created with your products, feature these curated items on the landing page for effortless purchase without the need to search or click through multiple links.
All the activity on the landing page – traffic, clicks, time spent on the page, sales and so on – can be seen in Google Analytics.
Note: Building and managing multiple landing pages can be resource-intensive, especially if you have multiple campaigns or influencers running concurrently.
Influencer Marketing Tools
#sales #leadgeneration #engagement #brandawareness
Embrace technology to streamline your tracking process and save time. Tracking tools are designed to automate campaign tracking, offering accurate and real-time results with ease. Usually they are quite affordable or even free, so there are no reasons to still choose manual tracking over automated.
Simply set up your campaign parameters, list your influencers, define the time frame, and outline branded content criteria. The tool will automatically capture, save, and analyse every piece of content created by influencers. With such tools as Companion, you can even capture Instagram stories automatically. You can then access comprehensive reports at the click of a button.
As you see, influencer marketing tools allow you to skip the most challenging parts of tracking campaigns and save you a lot of time.
Let us know if you’d like to get rid of manual tracking and will show you how Companion can help with it. You have 14 days of using a tool for free!
Summing up on influencer tracking
Influencer marketing is an incredibly powerful tool, but tracking its success requires a strategic approach. Set clear goals and choose the right tracking methods to maximize your campaign’s impact and achieve desired outcomes.
Whether you’re just starting or looking to level up your influencer marketing activity, tracking success has never been more accessible. Ditch manual tracking, utilize automation, and unlock the full potential of your campaigns.
We’re happy to help you revolutionize your influencer marketing tracking process with Companion.