Over the years, advertising with influencers became one of the favored marketing methods for businesses. Influencers on social media, also known as content creators, often post riveting content and have grown a large and committed audience. They use social networks to share ideas and express opinions on matters and brands they're interested in. Because users see them as a trusted source, more and more businesses have decided to promote their products through various influencer collaborations.
Influencer marketing allows businesses to reach new target markets, launch new services or products and drive traffic to their sites cost-efficiently. Since creators are more approachable and relatable, brands can also build campaigns to improve customer experience and loyalty.
Using influencer marketing analytics, brands can measure the effectiveness of their marketing pursuits. By tracking key metrics like engagement, reach and conversions, they can optimize their influencer marketing approach and create campaigns that correspond more with their goals and target audiences. With analytics, businesses will get insights into ROI and EMV and can select the most productive and influential creators for future collaborations.
We’ve put together this extensive paper about how to monitor and measure your campaign performance. You’ll learn about influencer marketing analytics benchmarks, crucial metrics to track, and tools that assess the outcomes of your marketing efforts and can help to enhance your strategy.
What Steps to Take for Measuring Influencer Marketing Analytics
To learn how your influencer marketing performs and to get the most out of your subsequent campaigns, you need to set your goals, identify the metrics you'll track, and choose the tools with which you'll measure your progress. Let's review these steps in more detail.
Specify your goals and determine your metrics
Determining what you want to achieve through influencer marketing will help you define the metrics you need to monitor. Influencers can help a brand attain several goals, simultaneously key metrics give a deep understanding of the campaign’s effectiveness. It’s crucial to establish specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals and choose metrics that correspond with them.
So what are the most common goals and their associated metrics?
Increase brand awareness
You can grow your brand’s recognition by reaching new users with compelling content and improving the frequency of posting and brand mentions. You definitely need to track:
how many people see your posts, a.k.a. reach,
the number of brand mentions,
and engagement.
Boost sales
Promoting your products and services, thus driving sales can be achieved with various influencer collaborations, like affiliate campaigns, sponsored posts, or offering discount codes. To see your progress, keep tabs on:
the number of sales,
conversion rate,
and return on investment (ROI).
Generate traffic to a brand’s website or social media content
With the help of digital creators, businesses can gain more website visitors and increase their social media audience. To succeed in this, measure:
the number of clicks,
and the growth of social media followers.
Enhance customer loyalty and experience
Influencers on social media can help improve your customers’ satisfaction and deepen customer loyalty and trust. Keep tracking:
repeat purchase rates,
check customer satisfaction,
and calculate customer lifetime value (CLV).
What tools and platforms can help you measure analytics?
As a second step, consider using adequate tools or platforms for influencer marketing analytics. Select systems that provide features that line up with your goals, are easy to use, can be integrated with other platforms you’re already using, have good customer support, and are within your budget. Here are some helpful solutions:
Social media analytics tools: They allow you to measure your brand’s presence on social networks and your content’s popularity. If you want to learn more about how they work, check Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM are tools that enable you to measure the interactions between your brand and customers and get an idea of what you can do to nurture your relationship with users.
Influencer marketing platforms: Suites like HypeAuditor, Aspire IQ, Upfluence, and Klear provide several functionalities to track and manage influencer marketing campaigns.
Some of the most valuable influencer marketing analytics tools
HypeAuditor: As an all-in-one influencer marketing platform, HypeAuditor offers diverse functionalities for brands to streamline their marketing endeavors. The Campaign Management tool helps businesses plan and run campaigns and examine content performance, budget, and other campaign KPIs in real-time to ensure the effectiveness of collaborations.
Aspire IQ: An influencer marketing suite with various features, including campaign management and measurement.
Upfluence: A comprehensive platform providing a selection of tools, like tracking campaign metrics and reporting.
Klear: Klear offers solutions to build, handle and examine influencer marketing campaigns.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite, a social media marketing and management tool helps businesses schedule, manage and analyze social media content across multiple channels.
Buffer: Another social media management tool for planning and managing content on social media channels.
Sprout Social: With Sprout Social, brands can manage their social media content and get insights on how to improve customer service.
Salesforce: As a CRM system, Salesforce provides solutions for customer relationship management and application for sales, marketing, and analytics.
HubSpot: As a CRM platform, HubSpot’s features help brands drive more leads and sales and retain customers.
When you’re looking for an adequate tool, consider which offers the means to measure your success and is within your budget.
Campaign tracking and measurement
We’ve now reached the practical part of influencer marketing analytics: monitoring and estimating campaign data. As we’ll explain below, there are several ways you can go about it, such as using tracking codes or setting up procedures that enable you to accumulate and examine data frequently.
Implement tracking codes. You can place a short snippet of code in your website’s HTML code to gather data and assess the volume of traffic to your website with Google or Adobe Analytics. Tracking codes help you understand whether your influencer marketing strategy works by measuring conversions, page views, and bounce rates. Use tracking codes for content that includes links, like Instagram Stories.
Use data management platforms or integrate your tools. You may utilize several platforms or tools to collect and calculate data. Thus, you gain better insights into your marketing activities, but switching back and forth between them consumes your time and effort. However, data management platforms and integrations provide you with a detailed overview of your campaign’s data in one place. HypeAuditor offers several e-commerce integration tools. You can connect your Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento stores to our platform and see how successfully influencers promoted your products.
Collect and examine metrics constantly. To make educated decisions about your influencer marketing program, keep tracking and evaluating statistics, even with the help of automation. An influencer marketing platform like HypeAuditor collects and evaluates key metrics in real time. Businesses can even adjust their campaign on the fly to better suit their goals.
Start collecting data as soon as you can. Thus, you’ll be able to make necessary modifications to your live campaign and your overall marketing strategy.
6 Key Influencer Marketing Metrics You Ought to Watch
As part of building your influencer marketing campaign, continue by determining what metrics you’ll survey. These metrics will help you understand where your influencer collaboration performs well and where you experience setbacks.
Track reach
Reach is one of the most fundamental metrics that show the number of people the influencer’s content reached. Through reach, you can assess your audience’s size and your campaign’s influence on people. Comprehensive influencer marketing platforms and social media analytics tools provide you with information about campaign reach.
Measure engagement
Engagement lets you know how your audience reacts to your content and whether it triggers the actions you want your followers to take. For this, you can count every share, like, and comment or again use platforms that count them for you.
Monitor the conversion rate
Talking about desired actions, conversion rate refers to exactly those. It demonstrates the percentage of people who take steps, such as downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, or clicking on a link, after seeing an influencer's post.
Calculate ROI
Your return on investment (ROI) illustrates how much money will you profit from working with creators. It reveals which influencer's posts are the most effective in terms of price and value, as well as which influencer doesn't fit into your budget. If your partners or stakeholders have ever doubted the efficiency of influencer marketing, estimating ROI can convince them of its worth.
Evaluate EMV
Earned media value signifies the value developed through mentions and influencer recommendations on social media. Together with ROI, businesses can get an idea of how well financially their influencer collaborations perform and the number of social media mentions creators generate.
According to our latest State of Influencer Marketing report, every $1 spent on Instagram promotion represents $4.12 in EMV.
Although you can find a few formulas and industry benchmarks online, calculating EMV can be tricky. A lot of metrics, like the number and value of shares, likes, and comments, plus reach and mentions, all play a contributing factor in assessing EMV. All-encompassing influencer marketing platforms, like HypeAuditor’s Campaign Management tool, track and estimate EMV, ROI, and many more metrics, you need to understand your campaign’s productivity. Or check Instagram creators’ earned media value with our free EMV calculator before you reach out to them.
Analyze brand awareness and post sentiments
Brand mentions and reach will help you assess the extent to which your brand is recognized within your audience and give a clear idea of your reputation. Take into account influencer and user-generated content that refers to your brand or product and the frequency of mentions.
Your brand and product and each influencer post evoke reactions and emotions from the audience. With sentiment analysis, you can grab how well your brand and the creator’s content are liked. You can quickly identify areas where you have to improve.
Sentiment analysis and brand awareness enable you to revamp your content and solve issues, thus enhancing customer experience and increasing consumer satisfaction.
Advanced Methods for Influencer Marketing Analytics
Even if you took all the steps we’ve covered so far, you can still apply several methods to increase your chances of success and make the most of your influencer marketing analytics.
Map customer journey with multi-channel attribution
Customers can interact with your brand or product on more channels and across several touchpoints. Since every customer's path is unique, it's helpful to use attribution to discover the events that trigger specific customer behaviors. Applying multi-channel attribution helps you identify the most potent channels and touchpoints and focus on those that perform better.
Understand and analyze your customers’ journey
Through customer journey analytics, you can determine the measures different buyer personas make before, during, and after purchase. An analysis can reveal steps where influencer marketing can direct users to high points and improve customer experience.
Maximize Influencer Marketing Analytics with These Best Practices
Influencer marketing analytics will only help you in your social media marketing endeavors if you work with as accurate and up-to-date data as possible. Therefore, use the following best practices in your marketing workflow to gain the most valuable insights.
Make sure to check data accuracy and reliability. Monitor whether the data you collect before, during, and after the campaign is authentic and reliable. Apply tools for data organization and segmentation and integrate data across staff and departments.
Examine data constantly. To ensure that your data is valid, you must examine data frequently. With regular and automated reporting and reviews, you can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses and decide where to make changes to your approach.
Optimize your decision-making process and strategy with data. Make decisions on the data gathered from your marketing activities. Experiment with various approaches and content, and target different markets. Use this information to improve your practices and upcoming campaigns.
Why Influencer Fraud Analysis is Crucial in Influencer Marketing Analytics
With the rise of influencer marketing, businesses partnered with celebrities who had a large and engaged audience. They wanted to reach the highest number of people possible. This spurred other influencers to boost their follower numbers or generate engagement in a short period with various techniques.
Although fraudulent activities decreased by 12.5% since last year, 36.28% of Instagram influencers are still involved in some kind of fraudulent activity and this presents a serious risk for businesses. Your influencer partnership will be a failure and financial flop if you work with influencers who bought their followers and have bot-generated reactions under their content.
A thorough influencer fraud analysis will reveal suspicious growths and drops in audience size and engagement. You can check Instagram creators’ accounts for fake followers with several free tools online. Alternatively, you can use platforms like HypeAuditor, which provide data on audience and engagement authenticity and allow you to pinpoint authentic creators.
Influencer Marketing Analytics Benchmarks
Through industry benchmarks, you can evaluate your brand’s influencer marketing efforts concerning the best practices of other players in your niche. Benchmarking allows you to position your business in the market and identify areas for enhancement.
Reach: The number of influencers you work with, their audience sizes, and your industry can all affect the benchmark for reach. Let’s say you are a micro-company present in a very tight niche and you have a micro-business. In your case, a reach between 75,000 and 100,000 is very high, but for a large enterprise in a popular industry, it’s very few.
Engagement rate: Again, the average ER changes significantly based on the number of followers and the industry. Our report revealed that the ER of nano-influencers on TikTok is 15.2% and 2.53% on Instagram, making this influencer tier generate the highest ER on both platforms.
HypeAuditor calculates the Instagram ER benchmark annually. In 2022, there was a 0.13% decrease compared to 2021.
Conversion rate: Campaign type, the desired action the user has to take, and the niche all affect conversion rates. A 1.5% increase in the number of newsletter subscribers is high for a consulting company, but a 1.5% increase in sales for a beauty company is low.
Your goals, industry, and partnership types will affect the metrics you measure. Still, it’s worth checking these influencer marketing benchmarks to know where you need to develop.
Choose the best influencers for your campaigns
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The Future of Influencer Marketing Analytics
The rapid changes and innovations in influencer marketing trends and the huge emphasis on working with data entail the continuous development of influencer marketing platforms and tools. Technologies, such as automation, AI, and machine learning, facilitate the collection and analysis of enormous amounts of data. Brands need to continue tracking and evaluating metrics like reach, ER, conversions, and ROI and work with tools that can streamline their marketing pursuits and help them run successful campaigns.
This article hopefully gave you greater insights into the importance of influencer marketing analytics. The methods and best practices outlined in the post will help you meet your marketing goals, understand industry standards and let you know how you need to change your strategy.
