More and more brands rely on influencers to promote their products and services. In this particular post, we will focus on influencer marketing KPIS and how to measure them.
This is a key step to be informed about the campaign's performance; mainly to be able to assess whether it can be defined as a success or failure.
During the campaign planning phase, we will define the objectives we wish to achieve with it. During the measurement phase, we will confirm if we have been able to reach them. The objective must be clear and measurable. It is not advisable to raise more than one main objective in each campaign.
Preparing the ground
This objective can also be defined as the total number of sales for a defined budget. This is, achieving brand awareness, increasing the visibility of an event, or enhancing the increase in visits to a website in a certain percentage. Depending on what our objective is, we will have to pay more attention to a KPI (key performance indicator).
In the event that we collaborate with more than one influencer, we will be interested in individual parameters. That way, we can count the visits or sales linked to each of the influencers.
In order to make a correct measurement, it will be necessary to use a tool that helps us throughout the process. This depends on the type of collaboration we have agreed upon with the influencer, as well as the product or service you want to promote.
UTMs codes
Usually, the influencer uses a link that leads your audience to your product, or your website. In this case, we will want to know when a visitor has arrived via the link we have provided our influencers. For this, we will use links with UTM codes.
The UTMs are parameters that we add “at the end” of the links. This will direct the user to our website or product.
With these parameters we are sending relevant information to Google Analytics that will help us to know where each visitor comes from. In these parameters, we can include a descriptive campaign name, the social network from which the influencer promotes us and its name, among many other options.
UTM example:
https://yourcompany.com ? utm_souce = youtube & utm_medium = nombrelnfluencer & utm_campaign = campaignname
There are websites that help you generate UTMs tags in a few seconds. Here you can enter the parameters you need and get your URL with UTMs included.
This way, in Google Analytics we can see the total amount of sales (or the objective that you have set yourself) that each of the influencers with whom you are working has individually provided.
Promotional codes
It is normal to provide the influencer with a discount code that they can offer their audience. It is a way to encourage the influencer to collaborate with you, in addition to helping you with the measurement. Send a unique promotional code to each influencer. Every time someone uses it on your website, you will know that it has come through that influencer. It will be easy for you to calculate how much income you have earned from each of them. In addition to knowing if your campaign has been a success, it makes it easier for you to know what type of influencers are the ones that “work best” in your sector. This way it can help you to optimize future campaigns with influencers.
APP installations
This is useful both if you have an ecommerce site, or if you offer a service through a website. However, maybe your product or service is an app? Can the same follow-up be done? The answer is yes. If you want to see what conversion your influencer marketing campaign has had, with Appsflyer you can measure the number of downloads or even payments within your app.
Appsflyer is a specific data analysis and measurement platform for mobile applications. If you are campaigning with several influencers, Appsflyer allows you to create a custom link for each influencer. This link will connect to the influencers’ promotion of their stories or posts. Also will provide you information about who it is that has generated more downloads of your app, or who is providing you with more revenue.
Within this platform, you can also configure the option called Onelink. This technology allows you to select which landing page each of the users that visit the influencers' links will have. For example, you can create a different landing page for people who already have your app installed and another one for those who haven't downloaded it yet. Everything can be done, all with the same link. Interesting, right? You can also differentiate between people who open the link with an IOS and Android device and show them App Store or Google Play.
Depending on the target set, the KPIs we should value (to qualify success or failure of a campaign influencer) are as follows
Scope, impacts, engagement, and visits
The scope is the potential number of people upon whom we have been able to cause some impact, which is directly related to the size of the influencer's audience.
The scope is very different from the number of actual impacts that we, non-audience members, see.
Impressions are the number of times the published content of the collaboration with the influencer has been viewed. Moreover, it is common to have a person who has gotten an impression on several occasions for the same campaign. For instance, maybe a person has seen several publications of the same influencer promoting our services or products. Furthermore, it may also be that the same person is “impacted” several times by publications of different influencers who collaborate in the same campaign.
The “engagement” is the relationship of interactions that users have made with the publication, with respect to the number of followers that the influencer has. Interactions are likes, comments, or reshares.
To access all of this data, the influencer must provide an appraisal report of their collaboration with us.
On the other hand, if we ask the influencer to include a link in their publication, Google Analytics will have the option to assess the real impact of the collaboration through the visits achieved thanks to the UTMs.
Conversions
There can be several types of conversion in the same campaign. For instance, the main conversion responds to the most important objective of the campaign. And secondary conversions help to understand the full dimension of the campaign (micro-conversions).
Among the most common conversions are sales, the records, or the download of an application. You can use any web analytics tool for this. Use UTM tags and a correct configuration of our analytics tool.
If our goal is to achieve a certain volume of sales, ROI is the formula that can help us know if our campaign is profitable or not.
ROI = [(income-investment) / investment] * 100.
In the case that we seek to obtain new records or facilities of an application, we must calculate how much money each registration or installation has cost us. This is to be able to know if the campaign has been profitable.
Good planning and initial planning of the campaign are essential. For this, we can make use of tools that help us identify the right influencers for our brand. Thus corroborate their authenticity with the appropriate metrics.
