How to track influencer marketing campaign performance

Performance tracking is one of the most crucial parts of running a successful influencer campaign. To run a successful IM campaign you need to know what’s working and what’s not. And you will only have the answer when you accurately measure how each campaign performed.

It’s not just about finding how many likes or comments you get for a particular promotion. You have to dig deeper and gauge the real metrics like clicks, subscribers, sales, etc.

It also helps you gather feedback on what’s working and what’s not so you’re able to tweak your strategy accordingly.

Having a strong tracking system will not only give you these important metrics, but also tell you what type of influencers have performed well and what type of content is creating more buzz.

Campaign tracking can be difficult especially if you are doing promotions with dozens of influencers. In this post, you will learn how to track your campaign results and adapt to changes that help you skyrocket your return on investment in future campaigns.

Define your Goals

Start with a goal for your campaigns. Once you know your goals, you are in a position to see how much are you able to accomplish with your 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 creator or in totality. We recommend calculating it for each particular creator 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:

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Some creators would perform great for you, others will do okay, and some not so well. You will have to look at each of these 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.

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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.

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

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 creators 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 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.

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Influencer performance attribution with discount codes

If you are only looking to track sales, another way is to send unique coupon codes to each influencer and you will find out exactly how many sales you get from each promotion. 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.

Influencer performance tracking with Affiliate Software

If you have some money to spend, it may be worth investing in an affiliate link tracking software such as Goaffpro, ShareASale, or UpPromote.

Check them out once your influencers start driving sales for you, don’t sweat too much about this when you’re just starting.

Listen to the market 📣

Many brands tend to not do this analysis as they think it’s all about getting more creators 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 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

Performance tracking 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!

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