How To Track & Measure Influencer Marketing Performance in 2025

Challenges in Measuring Influencer Marketing ROI:

Measuring influencer marketing success—especially ROI—remains a challenge as influencer marketing grows. While every $1 spent generates an average return of $5.20 (520% ROI, per Influencer Marketing Hub), many marketers struggle to define success beyond likes, shares, and engagement.

Unlike traditional digital channels, influencer marketing often lacks standardised benchmarks, making comparisons difficult. Individual influencer performance varies, but tracking additional KPIs is essential to justify investment and shape future strategies. Fortunately, calculating influencer marketing campaign ROI is more manageable than it seems.

Choosing The Right KPIs for Influencer Marketing Campaigns:

KPIs serve as the scorecard for measuring influencer marketing success, but choosing the right ones is key. To accurately track performance, align your KPIs with your campaign goals and ensure you're measuring what truly matters. Few important KPIs are:

Choosing Your Campaign Goals:

Start with a goal for your influencer campaigns. Once you know your goals, you are in a position to see how much are you able to accomplish with your influencer campaigns.

Usually, your goal will fall into one of two categories:

1. Conversions (sales, email subscribers)
2. Brand awareness (reach, engagement, site traffic)

The way you track will differ based on what goal you’re after. Most people care about conversions, so let’s go over that first.

How to Track Influencer Marketing Conversions?

The best metric to measure this is ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). The ROAS basically tells you the return you’re getting for every $1 in ad spend. In case you are wondering, 4:1 is considered to be a good ratio. It means you are making $4 for every $1 spent. Just make sure it’s not less than 1 while you’re getting started!

ROAS can be calculated per influencer or in totality. We recommend calculating it for each particular influencer first, and then the overall campaign aggregate.

The “ad spend” would include the fee that you paid to the influencers, the shipping cost, and the COGS of all the products you sent them. The “Return” would be the total sales generated. Now just divide:

Some influencers would perform great for you, others will do okay, and some not so well. You will have to look at each of these influencer marketing campaigns and find the common traits of the successful ones.

What are the things that made these campaigns better than others? Same with the least performing ones, why did these campaigns not work out? Is it because of the content or because you chose the wrong influencers?

This analysis is important because it’ll help you make the right decisions moving forward.

How To Track Brand Awareness From Influencer Marketing?

If you are aiming for brand awareness, the best metrics would be site-traffic, clicks, and engagement.

You can easily track clicks using a click-tracker like Bitly, we also have this functionality built-in to SARAL.

Again, track engagement and clicks for each of the campaigns and see which type of campaigns are performing well. Feedback is the most important, especially at the earlier stages.

Don’t quit because you don’t see a 3x ROAS, you’ll crack it eventually.

Tracking Influencer Performance via Technical Attribution

Now that you have the concepts down, let’s dive in some details about how you can actually get the numbers to do the calculations. There are three main ways to do it.

1. Google Analytics Method
2. Discount Code Method
3. Use referral tracking software

1. Influencer Performance Attribution with Google Analytics

Once you install GA on your site, you need to follow 3 steps to set up your tracking effectively.

Step 1: Create UTM Links

Create UTM links here for each of your campaigns. You will have to fill in four fields.

• Website URL(link to your product page)
• Campaign source (“Influencer”)
• Campaign medium (platform name)
• Campaign name (@username).

Here’s an example link: https://www.eatruani.com?utm_source=influencer&utm_medium=instagram&utm_campaign=foodsmithnyc

Step 2: See if this works

Once your influencers start posting about you, all you need to do is navigate to Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns in your GA account and you will be able to see the performance of each of the influencer campaigns.

UTM’s automatically sync the data on your GA account under campaigns.

Step 3: Create and track goals

This is optional when starting but do it sooner instead of later. Set up goals to measure your actual conversions from any particular campaign.

Conversions can be sales, email signups, clicks, add to cart, etc. Here’s how you can set it up.

Go to your admin toolbar at the bottom left-hand side. Choose Goals under the View section.

Now, you will have to select a new goal to create. You can choose a suitable goal like newsletter signups, product purchases, or clicks. You may also want to create a custom goal if you want to track something that is not already in the GA template.

Next is the Goal description, give your goal a name and select ‘destination’ under ‘type’.

In the ‘Goal details’ section enter the address of your thank you page. Don’t enter the full URL but only the address of the page such as /thank-you. You can enter the value if you want and also toggle on the funnel if you want to analyze the entry and exit points affecting your goals. Click save and you’re all set.

Now, you just have to go back to Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns and select a goal from the dropdown. You will be able to see your conversions from any particular campaign.

If you have moved to GA4, the setup would look different for you. You simply have to mark an event as a conversion. Here’s a short tutorial.

2. Influencer Tracking with Discount Codes

If you are only looking to track sales from influencer campaigns, another way is to send unique coupon codes to each influencer and you will find out exactly how many sales you get from each influencer. Whether you use Shopify, WordPress, Wix, or others. You can easily create and distribute the discount codes to the influencers.

You can set a custom parameter inside SARAL and add their discount code there.

Measuring Influencer Marketing Impact:

To optimize your influencer marketing campaigns, measuring the right metrics is essential. Here’s how to measure success and identify your most impactful influencers.

How Popular Brands Measure Influencer Marketing:

Influencer marketing is a proven strategy that builds trust by showcasing real experiences and decisions. It provides relatable insights that help consumers make informed choices while fostering genuine brand connections.

Take Goli and HexClad, for example. Both brands have leveraged influencer partnerships to drive massive success.

Tools To Track And Measure Influencer Marketing:

To measure the success of your influencer campaigns, you need access to the right data and there are certain tools that enable you to do that.

Here are some essential tools for tracking performance:

• Google Analytics: A powerful tool for measuring website traffic, user behavior, and conversions driven by influencer campaigns.
• Social Media Analytics: Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook provide built-in insights to track engagement, reach, and audience trends.
• SARAL: Get a complete view of your influencer campaigns in one place. Track performance and metrics across influencers, compare results, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

Listen To The Market 📣

Many brands tend to not do this analysis as they think it’s all about getting more influencers to post. That may be true, but you also need them to post the right things. Think about this step as “creative testing” on FB ads. You need to iterate and see what works in order to spend effectively in the future.

Once you start collecting data, it’s time to ask some questions.

• Which influencers are getting you the best results?
• Are they nano influencers or micro-influencers, specific niches, demographics?
• What type of content has performed well. Is it review posts, videos, or images?
• Which platforms are performing best for you- Instagram, YouTube, TikTok?
• What are the deliverables attracting the most engagement? Is it stories, reels, long form YouTube content, or perhaps short TikTok videos?

Asking these questions will make you understand your audience better so you can do more of that content in the future. This is how your ROAS will improve. Very soon, you will have built a system that consistently gives you profitable growth.

Conclusion

Tracking influencer performance is not as hard as it’s chalked up to be. You now know why it’s crucial to do and how to start doing it. Doing all this will take no more than a couple of hours and you should be all set!

With SARAL, you can automate influencer tracking and keep an account of all the require metrics such as ROAS, Visitors, ROI, COGS, Impressions, Content Value, and UGC Generated. Claim your free trial now.