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Performance Tracking
How to track influencer marketing to the best of your ability
Contents
Collaborating with influencers is one of the most powerful methods to show your small eCommerce business to the world. Well-known influencers can significantly help you reach a larger following and build ever-lasting trust and credibility.
However, having an influencer to promote your campaign is only half the battle; you’ll need to constantly track and measure the results to ensure the proper Return On Investment (ROI).
Is your influencer performing as you expect? How are their followers reacting to your campaign? Should you keep investing in it? In this article, we’ll delve deep into the world of influencer marketing campaigns to give satisfying answers to all of your burning questions.
Not only that, but we’re also going to give you a game-changing bonus tip to get the most out of your influencer campaign and boost your sales.
So, without further ado, let’s get down to business!
Before we dive into the 5 ways that you can track your campaigns, let’s first highlight the importance of tracking them.
Keeping an eye on your campaigns is crucial for their success because you want to be able to see what’s working and what isn’t. That way, you’ll be able to avoid mistakes and make informed decisions when running future campaigns.
For example, if you use 3 influencers for 1 campaign and you start to see increased engagement, followers, and website traffic, you’ll need to know which one of them is responsible for most of this success so you can work with them again in the future.
Likewise, you’ll be able to tell which influencers are not performing as expected and maybe exclude them from future campaigns.
This is why putting systems in place to track your campaign is part and parcel of any successful influencer campaign.
Now that you know that tracking your influencer campaigns is a must, let’s get into the 5 most effective ways to measure the performance of your influencer campaigns:
First thing first - establishing your campaign goals is the first thing you NEED to do before starting any other influencer marketing activities.
This will help you set up your campaign for success by identifying the exact influencer marketing metrics that you need to track to determine if your selected influencers are performing well.
That said, here are the most common goals of influencer marketing campaigns:
Setting clear campaign goals will not only help you track and measure its performance but will also help you write a convincing briefing when reaching out for collaboration.
Related: How to track influencer marketing campaign performance
Once you’ve set clear goals for your campaign and decided the metrics you want to track, the next step is to set your influencer campaign to trackability.
There are multiple tools out there that can help you set up campaign tracking, but we highly recommend using Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) for this.
This is a simple code that can be attached to a custom URL to track a source, medium, and campaign name. It also allows Google Analytics to tell you the source of the searches and the campaigns that directed them to you.
You can use the following UTMs tags to set as part of your tracking strategy:
Using a UTM link can be super helpful for brands looking to see a greater return on their investment when using influencer marketing.
Since the UTM link is linked to your website’s Google Analytics, you get to access all of the valuable data stored up from all of your influencer campaigns, allowing you to get in-depth to see what’s really working for you and what’s driving the most traffic to your website.
Since UTM influencer tracking helps you compare influencer marketing efforts to your organic, social, and paid ads, it gives you a good idea of how your campaign aligns with your overall marketing strategy.
Simply put, it tells you how your influencers are performing and if your investment is paying off.
It’s worth noting that it may take you a long time to build a solid and effective influencer-marking collaboration—building connections with your target audience through influencers is hard work and won’t happen overnight, unlike paid ads where you can see visible results.
So keep this in mind if you don’t want to set yourself up for disappointment when comparing your results!
Using coupon codes is one of the most effective ways to track influencers and boost your sales, especially if there are several influencers marketing for your products or services and you want to track their performance separately.
So what are coupon codes all about? Coupon codes enable you to track both sales and conversions before, during, and after your campaign! They enable you to measure the immediate effect of your influencers on your business as a whole.
To employ this effective sales-boosting strategy, you’ll need to create a unique coupon discount code for each of your influencers and make sure each one of them includes their unique coupon code in their promotions and convince their fans to use them every time they make a purchase on your website. For example, Flipkart offers exclusive coupons to many influencers, especially for YouTube, when they work with them.
This enables you to track the effectiveness of each of your influencers’ campaigns.
Related: How influencers put word-of-mouth on steroids
An automated influencer marketing tool is an excellent way to streamline the process of gathering influencer performance data. Additionally, these tools give you a lot more useful insights into your campaigns, influencers, and audience.
A good example of such tools is Influencity, which does a great job at helping brands and agencies manage their influencer campaigns from A to Z.
This is an uncommon yet effective way to get the most out of your influencer campaign. You may be thinking, ‘why would I go to the trouble to create a unique page for each of my influencers?’
To understand the rationale behind this, think about the primary goal of a landing page; capturing information! Tracking your campaigns using customized landing pages is an excellent way to boost your brand awareness and build a community around your business.
To do this, simply give the landing pages’ links to your influencers, and when followers go there, they should receive a discount code of your choice after inputting their name and email.
So, instead of the audience forgetting about your brand after using the discount code, you can now use their email addresses to constantly remind them of your brand and the products they purchased and loved—genius!
There you go! These were the best ways to track and measure your influencer campaign’s performance. You can also use the tips we provided to set up your future campaigns for success.
If you still want some help running and tracking your influencer marketing campaign SARAL is an effective and reliable tool to help you find creator contact info, send outreach campaigns, and never lose track of your relationships!
Learn what’s working in real-time with influencer marketing for otherbrands.
If you want to build a community of influencers that can’t stop talking about you, consider giving the free trial a shot!