It’s no secret influencer marketing has become a crucial component of most marketing budgets. A huge number of bloggers on various fast-growing platforms can effectively influence almost any audience. But, what data metrics are relevant to influencers? What do these metrics reveal and how can they improve efficiency and scaling? Valeriya Panasovskaya, Influencer Marketing Project Lead, Zorka.Agency, gives you all the answers.

After you find the right influencers for the campaign, set the most relevant and clear objectives, and agree on the type of content to be created, you need to identify correct metrics to measure the results.

Is that important? Yes. These metrics will help you to stay on track with your influencer marketing campaign and measure the success of your strategy. How to understand which indicators to look at to assess the performance? We’ll give a brief and clear overview here.

How can you understand whether your IM campaign is successful?

To identify the success of your influencer marketing campaign, you should track campaign performance and assess your ROI as adequate.

To run such an influencer program, it’s better to plan and execute properly and also develop a detailed measurement strategy.

Which key points should you stick to as an advertiser to do everything on your side for a campaign to go like clockwork?

We are covering all major points to make sure that the campaign is successful. But there is no doubt that the advertiser knows his product much better than we do. And here, we need his help with all information about the product: why people use the service, that is the key message of the campaign, what are the unique selling points, etc.

If the brand can provide the audience with promo codes/trials, if bloggers’ accounts can be upgraded or the bloggers can be provided with some materials for promotion, that would help a lot to make the campaign more effective. The audience trusts a blogger only in case he is convincing enough. So, it’s important to help him to understand the product by providing trial, sample, etc.

Also, it’s essential for us to receive information about brand policy and limitations. For some brands, it’s vital to avoid any obscene language or political topics. Other ones want to be “mate-brands” and so they are completely loyal to all types of expressions.

Using all this data, we are more likely to find the most appropriate channels and brief them in the most accurate way. At the same time, we have a huge experience of working with bloggers, and extremely interested in the best results. So, trust in us and readiness to follow our recommendations significantly increase the possibility to achieve the best results.

Which metrics help to measure the results?

It depends on the brand and the final target of the campaign. Normally, the targets might be roughly divided into brand awareness and performance campaigns, and usually use different metrics to measure final results. Let’s discuss each of them separately.

Performance-oriented campaigns are normally launched to receive specific actions from the user (e.g. installs, deposits, registrations, etc.). So, to measure the effectiveness you may use metrics that shows you the cost of such actions or interim ones:

1. The first metric and the most basic one is CPM (Cost per Mile model). The more people have seen the video/post, the cheaper CPM you receive, and more likely you’d receive more target actions.
2. The second metric you should be aware of is CPC (Сost per Click). Obviously, the more people get interested in the ad, the more effective it is.
3. After checking CPC, we need to draw attention to the CR (conversion rate). To measure it, we divide the number of clicks by the number of our target actions (e.g. number of deposits, installs, orders, etc.).
4. CPI (Cost per Instal) or CPA (Cost per Action). Here, you pay your attention to the number of installs or actions accordingly.
5. And finally the most important metric — ROI. If the ROI is positive, you are on the right way. If not, you’d rather choose a different strategy.

Brand awareness helps audiences to feel comfortable about branding and products. It’s much easier to acquire the target audience when people know your brand. And it’s perfect if your company is the first association with a product. For sure, one of the most important channels to increase brand awareness is influencer marketing. But if the bloggers don’t connect you to the target audience, it isn’t worth much. So, you need to measure the effectiveness accurately. Here are some channels to measure if your approach is right:

1. Reach tells you how many people viewed a piece of content. The more people have seen it, the better the brand awareness you receive, the more people trust you.
2. Engagements show if people react to the content and brand. All actions the content receives show the number of people engaged with it.
3. Impressions reflect the number of times your content is actually displayed online.
4. Sales, database growth, social media growth, etc. should be measured constantly. If you notice the permanent growth of these indicators, this means the campaign is going successfully.
5. Sentiment is also an important metric. Especially if you launch a new product or try to reach a new market. It can tell what’s the audience response to a brand and identify the focus of digital conversation.