Measuring Influencer Success & ROI

To successfully scale your influencer marketing program, you must know your numbers. Tracking the performance of your influencer marketing program is crucial for decision-making on where to allocate and increase your budgets. Here are some tips on how to track performance and ROI with influencer marketing:

Set Clear Goals and Objectives:

Before you begin your influencer marketing campaign, it’s essential to define your goals and objectives. This could include conversions, brand awareness, social following, or generating content. This section will focus on conversions as we want to explain how to turn your influencer marketing program into a performance marketing channel. ?

There are two ways to track your influencer marketing performance:

1. Affiliate Links:

Using UTM links, you can track clicks and conversions as well as conversion value. Using a cookie, you can assign sales to an influencer even if the customer places the order at a later stage. This is the most effective way to track performance.

2. Discount/Coupon Codes:

Creating personalized discount codes can be used as an additional method to track performance. Simply look at how often the discount code has been used and for which orders to determine the conversion value.

All of this is automated within the Influencer Hero CRM, where you can create discount codes and affiliate links with a click of a button.

Unattributed Sales:

As with every other digital marketing channel, you will never be able to attribute/track 100% of your performance. A good rule of thumb is that around ? of your influencer marketing sales are unattributed.

How Attribution/Tracking Gets Lost?

Your affiliate link and discount code can only track performance if they are being used. One major way conversion gets lost if the influencers tags your social media account. Lets take a step back and think about how the traffic behaves. If the influencer tags your social media account, a lot of the traffic will check out your social media page, e.g., on Instagram first, then click the link in your bio to access your store.

If you also have a coupon code in your website header or somewhere else on your website, the customer might not use the discount code of the influencer; hence, attribution/tracking gets lost.

Don't Add Coupon/Discount Codes on Your Website

We recommend not adding a coupon/discount code on your website. It also prevents the influencer from getting upset if you are working on an affiliate partnership. They know that their personal discount code is being used to track referrals, so if they see that you offer the same discount on your website, it reduces the trust in the affiliate partnership.

Keep all of these things in mind when preparing budgets.

If you are working with fixed fees, it is usually good to use the performance from previous posts and add around 30% unattributed sales to decide what amount you can allocate to achieve your desired ROAS / CAC. Simply divide your tracked sales by 70% to calculate the actual amount of sales.

E.g. If an influencer sold $2,000 worth of products (attributed) divide this number by 70% to get to the actual sales.

$2,000 / 70% = $2,857

Within Influencer Hero you will be able to automatically track your influencer ROI of each influencer on their respective deal page as well as campaign aggregated ROI through our reporting & analytics page.

Access the original article on our blog here.