10 Influencer Marketing KPIs for Your Campaign

Ever found yourself wondering why some companies rock the influencer game while others barely make a ripple? The truth is that generating sales through social media isn’t solely dependent on the quality of content or the influencer’s popularity but also revolves around the vigilant monitoring and measurement of results. 

Management guru Peter Drucker’s words, “What gets measured gets managed,” ring especially true in the realm of influencer marketing. Without a clear understanding and measurement of a campaign’s effectiveness, steering it toward success becomes a challenge. This is precisely where key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to 10 pivotal influencer marketing KPIs, explaining not just what they are but also how to integrate them for maximum success. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

What Exactly Are Influencer Marketing KPIs?

KPIs are quantifiable metrics, typically expressed as numbers or percentages. They are instrumental in tracking and evaluating the progress of an influencer marketing strategy or assessing a collaboration against pre-set objectives. Simply put, KPIs serve as essential indicators to ascertain whether the chosen content creator is successfully attaining their intended goals.

Benefits of Measuring KPIs

Now, let’s turn our attention to the significance of integrating KPIs into your marketing strategies. Here are three key benefits:

1. Sharper Insight Into Performance and ROI

As previously stated, tracking KPIs helps you better understand influencer partnerships. It revolves around scrutinizing finer aspects, such as the acquisition of new followers, the extent to which your brand connects with the audience and the financial implications. Hence, by monitoring parameters like conversions, purchases, and social interactions, you get a clear picture of your influencer marketing ROI, allowing you to make informed decisions that will boost your brand’s reputation and profitability.

2. Partnering With the Right People

Sometimes, complexities in collaborating with influencers can stem from an unsatisfactory fit between their follower base and the product or brand they endorse. For instance, consider a cosmetics company that highly prioritizes minimal and natural looks, teaming up with a trendsetter known for their bold and avant-garde makeup style – the mismatch is evident. Thoroughly evaluating KPIs enables you to select influencers whose followers, interactions, and audience demographics align seamlessly with your company’s objectives.

3. Informed Planning via Comparative Analysis

Leveraging KPIs empowers you with a panoramic view of various influencer marketing initiatives. By examining data from multiple campaigns, you can identify patterns, emerging trends, and tried-and-tested tactics that lead to favorable results. This knowledge helps in refining strategies, allocating resources wisely, and setting pragmatic benchmarks for forthcoming endeavors. Additionally, understanding which content creators and influencer collaborations are most effective allows for long-term partnerships and strategic reinvestment in those ties, encouraging a cycle of continual development and growth. 

10 Influencer Marketing KPIs

In this section, we’ll discuss some common KPIs that you can use to measure the success of your promotional activities. Importantly, it is essential to choose the ones that make the most sense with your end goal.

1. Impressions

First on our list, without any specific order, are impressions. It indicates how often your content appears on users’ screens. Picture this: you’ve teamed up with an influential figure who posts about your brand. Each instance that this piece of material shows up for viewing is tallied as one impression. 

It’s important to note that a single viewer can contribute multiple impressions by revisiting the content. As such, this metric provides valuable data about how effectively your brand captures and retains the audience’s attention. To access this statistic, simply ask the influencer to provide a screenshot of the post insights, readily available on the respective social media platform.

2. Reach

Reach measures the total number of unique individuals who encounter the influencer’s post. This includes not just direct followers but also a broader group of people who discover the content through various channels such as shares, hashtags, or even as a result of being tagged by friends or family. 

With the help of this KPI, you can assess the extent to which your brand’s message circulates and the number of fresh potential customers it reaches. The higher the reach, the better the chances of conversions. Similar to impressions, you’ll need to reach out to the content creator and request them to share a snapshot of this data with you.

3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

One of the main reasons for having an influential profile endorse a business via a post is to entice those who are watching to click on a link. This is precisely what CTR, or Click-Through Rate, measures — the frequency with which potential customers interact with the URL provided. 

Furthermore, vigilantly monitoring this KPI is imperative; a low rate may signal potential issues with the influencer’s messaging or targeting, whereas a high CTR suggests effective engagement, nudging the audience closer to making purchase decisions. It is calculated with the following formula:

4. Engagement Rate

Another must-implement influencer marketing KPI is engagement rate. It’s a comprehensive metric that factors in likes, comments, shares, and other forms of interaction from viewers. A high figure signifies that the material effectively resonates with followers, reflecting trust and satisfaction. 

To this end, consider collaborating with micro-influencers as well, as they offer cost-efficient solutions and tend to have higher engagement rates, thanks to their authentic and niche-oriented follower base. For more details, explore our guide on how to find micro-influencers fast. Additionally, when monitoring interactions, don’t forget to keep an eye on your Cost Per Engagement (CPE), which reveals the investment per click-through.

5. Cost Per Click (CPC) 

CPC is a financial metric that quantifies the expense for each individual click generated from the influencer’s content. In simpler words, CPC is a cost measure that shows how much you pay for each click on the influencer’s content. 

To calculate it, divide the entire budget allocated for the initiative by the total clicks received. This figure is a key indicator of cost efficiency. The goal is to keep CPC as low as possible, indicating that each click is yielding maximum value for the investment made.

6. Referral Traffic

Referral traffic represents the volume of visitors arriving at your webpage from different sources. Various creators employ distinct approaches to enhance brand awareness and attract new customers and users, and one of these strategies may involve boosting website traffic. This metric serves as a valuable benchmark for gauging how effectively influencer content drives people to your website. 

To accurately trace the source of your website visitors, two distinct approaches can be employed: the first involves utilizing unique tracking links or UTM codes. This cost-free solution seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics. Alternatively, the second method employs paid link shorteners such as Bitly and Short.io, which frequently include built-in analytics tools.

7. Follower Growth

Partnering with a highly influential profile presents an exhilarating opportunity to capture the attention of their supporters and persuade them to join your business page. This not only enhances your chances of future sales but also ensures they stay informed about exclusive discounts and the latest product releases. 

You can also use UTM parameters here to track the acquisition of new followers resulting from your influencer marketing campaign. Additionally, keep a close eye on follower growth in your social media analytics both before and after launching the campaign.

8. Conversion Rate

Next on our list is conversion rate, a KPI that addresses the million-dollar question: How many viewers are transitioning from mere spectators to active participants due to the influencer’s shout-out? 

This transformation can manifest in various forms, including purchases, newsletter sign-ups, app downloads, or subscriptions. It plays a key role in figuring out which aspects of your project – be it the influencer, the platform, or the content type – are driving the most effective customer actions.

9. Sales and Revenue

The tracking of sales and revenue varies significantly between business models. For those directly selling to consumers (B2C), the primary focus is on the surge in product sales attributable to influencer endorsements. Conversely, for business-to-business (B2B) or software as a service (SaaS) companies, the evaluation metric shifts towards monthly recurring revenue (MRR). 

Regardless of the model, the crux of these approaches revolves around the implementation of a robust attribution system to pinpoint the source of sales back to specific influencer activities. This can also be achieved by providing them with unique affiliate links or promotional codes.

10. Return on Investment (ROI)

Last but certainly not least in our lineup of KPIs is ROI, a metric that acts as the definitive measure, weighing the total revenue generated against the resources invested in the campaign. In simpler words, it calculates how much profit you make compared to how much you spent on the marketing campaign.

To calculate ROI accurately, it’s essential to consider both concrete financial gains, such as sales, and intangible assets, including improved brand visibility and the inherent value of the content created. This approach ensures a well-rounded evaluation of the influencer’s impact, equipping businesses to make informed decisions regarding future partnerships. 

Crafting KPIs for Influencer Marketing Success

By now, you’ve likely grasped the concept that KPIs act as the guiding stars, shaping the trajectory of your influencer marketing endeavors. But the pressing question remains: How do you navigate this path with confidence? Here’s the blueprint:

Your KPIs, Our Expertise: The Influencer Marketing Factory Advantage

We completely understand that as your business continues to grow, juggling your daily operations while also vetting influencers and keeping tabs on KPIs using the formulas mentioned in this article can be quite a handful. 

That’s where The Influencer Marketing Factory steps in. 

With a proven track record of successfully executing award-nominated campaigns, we possess a profound understanding of this field. When you choose us, you can rest assured that every detail, no matter how small, is handled with the utmost care. We provide transparent, easily understandable reports, ensuring you’re always in the know about every aspect of your project.

Moreover, being a worldwide, full-service influencer marketing agency, our team is composed of the best campaign managers, digital marketing experts, and media specialists. We’re here to guide your company and bolster your brand throughout the entire journey, starting from setting KPIs and objectives to identifying influencers, crafting compelling narratives, and executing campaigns. Regardless of your chosen platform, we have expertise across all major platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Here are a few of our clients who witnessed phenomenal results:

• For Aura Frames, our collaboration with 5 TikTok influencers, having a collective following of 12 million, positioned the product as the ideal Christmas gift. This initiative soared to a hashtag reach of nearly 10 million, amassing 1.8 million likes on TikTok and sparking widespread engagement.

• In the case of ExeGi Pharma, we helped them promote their Visbiome Vet using YouTube and Instagram content creators. This initiative reached over 1.45 million people, generated over 75K views, and drove substantial website traffic and sales.

• As for our campaign with Built, we got more than 80 influencers on board from the fitness and lifestyle sectors, whose total YouTube subscriber count was 17 million. This promotional push introduced new products and captured the attention of over 10 million viewers, resulting in significant engagement.