The key to understanding the performance of an influencer campaign is first to set a goal for what you hope to achieve. Your goals should follow the SMART guide (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and fall somewhere in the marketing funnel.
Your campaign may want to focus on new audience awareness, consideration, conversions, or building loyalty amongst current customers.
It's best to first determine where in the funnel you are hoping to hit, as this will help you outline everything from your creative concept all the way down to which influencers you should select to partner with.
Once you've set your KPIs for your campaign, partnered with creators who can help you achieve your goals, and worked with them—utilizing their creativity and social media know-how to get influencer posts live—you can begin analyzing your organic campaign performance.
Your performance analysis should incorporate these key categories:
Reach, Engagement, and Views: These metrics are standard social media metrics that help determine how each post performs:
- Impressions/Views: The number of eyeballs on a piece of content or when your video begins playing
- Engagement Metrics (Likes, Comments, Saves, and Shares): Indicates a deeper awareness of the content
- Comment Sentiment: An understanding of the genuine interest in the posts
- Link/swipe-up/coupon code/affiliate tracking
- Engagement Rate: (Total Engagement Metrics / Total Impressions) × 100. This is a benchmark that ideally can be set at the start of the campaign. Industry averages fall between 1%-10% depending on the size of the influencer and their content focus.
- Video View Rate: (Total Views / Total Followers) × 100. This metric is specifically valuable for awareness campaigns. Industry average falls between 10%-20% VVR. This metric will help you understand if the posted content received a good number of views based on the influencer's follower count. You can also look at influencers' average views to understand specific benchmarks for each creator you partner with.
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Content Performance: Looking deeper into what kind of content performs best for your brand. This will take some testing and may vary depending on the time of year, the platform you're utilizing, and your goals:
- Content type: Testing everything from static images, short-form video, versus long-form video to educational content, versus skits/humor, etc.
- Platform: There are many platforms for influencer campaigns. They all have different benefits and strengths. Work with the team at Popular Pays to understand which platforms you should be testing on—Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube being the most prominent platforms, but also consider Snap, Pinterest, Facebook, and more.
- Messaging: Testing calls to action, hooks, and other brand messaging to understand what drives engagement.
ROI: Measuring the campaign's effectiveness compared to your spend. This metric is less cut-and-dry for influencer marketing than for other ad placements, as part of your cost goes to the influencer's likeness, content production and editing, and any usage rights you negotiate with them. It's good to look at influencer ROI over time as a standalone category while still comparing it to other ad placements. Just keep in mind all you get from an influencer and look at it holistically with the cost of other content production avenues.
- Cost per engagement/conversion/CPM: These measurements vary based on influencer size, content type, platform, etc.
- Some brands can also look at the lifetime value of customers acquired through influencers and revenue generated from campaigns. This is most appropriate for brands that sell their goods online and use pixels and custom links to track online users.
- Brand Lift Studies Brand lift studies can be run on influencer campaigns to provide valuable measurement of success from awareness all the way down to purchase intent. If you're interested in a brand lift study, work with the Popular Pays team to understand the best study type based on your goals.
Influencer-Specific Performance: Understanding which influencers performed best by digging into their audience demographics, content style, and authenticity. Analyzing influencer performance on an individual scale will help you understand which creators to partner with time and again, build deeper relationships with, and who would best fit as brand ambassadors. Additionally, it will help you determine what to look for in an ideal influencer going forward to ensure continued success of your influencer campaigns.
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There is a lot to consider when analyzing influencer marketing campaigns. Our team at Popular Pays can help you dig deeper into this information at the onset of your campaign to ensure success and can provide a comprehensive performance report at the end of every campaign that outlines successes and areas for improvement.
