Top 10 KPI’s For Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a value that measures how well a company is achieving a business objective. There are various types to measure the different goals companies set for themselves. Choosing the correct one to use depends on the industry and part of the business a company is attempting to track.

KPI’s are exceptionally useful in influencer marketing campaigns because of their ability to show how successful a campaign was. However, KPI’s are only helpful if used correctly. If you’re struggling to figure out which KPI to use or having difficulty choosing where to start, these are the 10 best KPI’s to measure an influencer marketing campaign:

1. Awareness of Social Media

There are multiple KPI’s that fall under the umbrella of measuring brand awareness. Understanding how well your brand is reaching audiences through influencer marketing campaigns will make it easier to gauge the level of its success.
Social Reach: This is the total sum of followers for each influencer that has posted. If five influencers with 5,000 followers each post, the total reach is 25,000. Though this is a simple calculation, understanding the reach of a campaign can help to explain other KPI results.

Impressions: Though Instagram doesn’t give impression data immediately, if your influencers have a business account the data will be provided seven days after their sponsor post is uploaded. You can ask them to send you the post insights where you will find the impressions. This is another easy way to understand how many people came across your campaign.

CPM: This is the cost per 1,000 impressions. This is measured by finding the total amount spent and dividing it by the total measured engagements. Though macro-influencers and celebrities can produce CPMs under $1, you shouldn’t be worried to spend a little more on nano- or micro-influencers. While macro-influencers are less targeted, nano- and micro-influencers produce some of the highest quality of funnel traffic available.

Follower Growth: This is pretty straightforward. How many followers did you gain during the campaign? Though it’s very simple, it’s a very good indication of how many new people discovered you and like you enough to want to stay in the loop.

2. Engagement Rates

Engagement rates are another form of simple but telling KPI’s for influencer marketing campaigns. Widely considered more important than reach as they effectively show return on investment (ROI).

• Total Comments: Find the total sum of comments across all influencers posts.
• Total Likes: Find the total sum of likes across all influencers posts.
• Shares: How many people reposted, retweeted or shared your influencers’ posts? A higher rate of shares can act as a multiplier for your audience.
• Clicks: You’ll need a UTM code for this that can only be used in certain places. Unfortunately, Instagram grid posts are not one of them, but it can measure the total number of new customers that come to your website. It’s a great way to see what content drives action from an audience.

3. Trackable Links

As briefly mentioned in Clicks, you can easily set up trackable links that will give you data on who has been visiting your page, how frequently, how long and more.

Create unique links that can easily be shared. On Facebook and Twitter, place Bitly and SmartURL tracked links in posts to track the origin of the traffic. Unfortunately, you can’t include links in Instagram posts. Instead, focus on the popularity of your hashtags, visits to your website from your bio, and feedback from followers. Instagram stories can include links if a profile has over 10,000 followers. Influencers can easily post a story highlighting your brand and hyperlink your website. Youtube is probably the easiest to track. Google Analytics is easily integrated into it as the same tools are shared between the two.

4. Website Traffic

Under trackable links, you can dig deeper into the data to find out exactly who is visiting your page.

• New Users: Focusing on the number of new users visiting your page will help indicate how rapidly your audience is expanding and how effectively your campaign is motivating its new audience to visit.
• Total Sessions: This will give you a good understanding of how many times a user visited your page. Whether they’ve been there before or not, consider this the overall amount of views your page is receiving.
• Time on site: This is also an important factor to pay attention to. Knowing how long each visitor stayed on your page is just as important as how many that visited.

5. Referral Traffic

While tracking links you create, you can look into them more specifically. Understanding where the traffic is coming from is another important factor. This will give you a clear idea of how successful each influencer is at driving audiences to your website.

Using the same trackable links, you can discover exactly how viewers ended up on your website. This is a valuable asset because it gives a clear indication of what worked and who is interested.

6. Quality Content

Understanding what is being posted is just as important as understanding the data it drives. Keeping track of the original content the influencers create can help indicate how well a campaign is doing. Keeps tabs on every video, photo, blog post, and anything else the influencers produce to make sure you are getting enough content out.

It’s also important to make sure the content is reusable. This makes it easier to repost on your own account and can increase the number of reposts and shares as well.

Tracking the amount of content being produced, the frequency influencers are posting, and the type of content being posted will help you maintain control of the campaign.

7. Follower Behavior

Knowing what your target audiences are doing and noticing patterns in their behavior will make your campaigns more effective.
Stay up to date on new social media trends, hashtags, topics or other popular things that audiences you want are into.
Simply tracking what types of posts in your company’s area are getting attention and what types are not can also help.

8. Sales

Track sales to understand how well your campaign is turning visits into profit.

• Coupon Code: Use special coupon codes to figure out exactly which sales are coming from the campaign. It will also give you an understanding of which audiences are more likely to buy your products.
• UTM Code: As explained before, this code can be attached to a custom URL to track a source, medium and campaign name. It will enable Google Analytics to tell you where searchers came from.

9. Return on Investment (ROI)

It’s important to know what you’re spending money on is making money back.

• Set Your Budget: Come up with a strict budget and stick to it to ensure you don’t overspend.
• Figure out Influencer Worth: This can be a little tricky and might take a couple of times and calculations of CPMs before you find out how much you should be paying for an influencer. As said earlier, you’ll probably spend more on nano- and micro-influencers per impression than on macro-influencers and celebrities but they’ll hit target audiences more effectively.
• Goal Setting: Simple but very important. Make a goal and track your campaign to make sure you’re staying on track until you hit it.
• Cost Measurements: Figure out how much you spent and how much you received as a result of the campaign. After all, aside from brand recognition, sales are the main reason for a campaign.

10. Lead Generation and Conversion Rates

While looking into the coupon codes, UTMs, Google Analytics and Trackable links you have set up, ask yourself: How it will all impact the bottom line?

• Conversion Rates: This measures the overall success you had at getting your campaign to produce results. More than just the number of sales, this KPI also factors in things like brand recognition and rise in popularity.
• Lead Generation: This is the measure of how many different leads you are able to supply in order to generate revenue. While focusing on these, consider things like how many different types of content you have and how consistently you are supplying them. With the more leads that you create, there will be more opportunities for viewers to find your page.
  KPI’s are an easy and effective way to track your influencer campaign’s performance. By following these top 10 KPI’s you’ll be able to see what worked in your campaign and focus on what didn’t. If you’re willing to invest money in influencers, then taking the extra time to establish goals, track progress and analyze results should go without question.

Want to effortlessly create, manage, and track influencer marketing campaigns? Get started with us today to find out more!

This article was written by Ryan Eaton.