Most Important Influencer Marketing KPIs to Keep an Eye on

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Although influencer marketing has been around since the late 1800s, it has become a critical digital marketing tactic lately. Previously, we would have simply referred to it as "word-of-mouth."

Digital marketers seeking a successful and complete approach to growing a brand cannot overlook the growing number of famous influencers on Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and other social channels. That said, it's also critical to understand how to evaluate the success of an influencer marketing strategy, which necessitates the use of key performance indicators (KPIs).

Essential KPIs

Conversion rates, reach and awareness, referral traffic, audience growth, and engagement are the five most critical KPIs to track for influencer marketing. These KPIs will help you keep track of your progress, quantify your success in meeting your goals, and stay on track with your influencer marketing approach.

Conversions

Influencer marketing aims to increase your reach, grow your audience, drive engagement, and drive traffic to your website, among other things. However, like with all marketing, the primary goal is to increase growth and sales, which is where your conversion rate KPI comes in. It's simple to track conversions created by an influencer marketing campaign by tracking sales before, during, and after the campaign and comparing any changes in sales that occurred while the campaign was running. You can use a sales tracker to track and analyze this data. For a more extensive approach, set up affiliate links, UTM parameters, promo codes, landing pages, and link tracking for the campaign, and you can trace the traffic sources of consumers that converted during the campaign.

However, conversions aren't always about sales, and you may track other conversion rates as well. A conversion occurs when a prospect completes the intended action. Logging up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, clicking on a link, or doing anything else you want your prospects to do is an example of this. Other conversion rates to track for influencer marketing and KPIs include how many Facebook likes you get, how many new followers you get, how many people sign up for emails, and other non-sales-related conversions.

Referral Traffic

Although the conversion KPI is vital to evaluate with influencer marketing, it isn't the only factor to consider; the volume of traffic generated by the campaign is also worth keeping track of. This is because referral traffic not only gives you a decent picture of the campaign's reach, but it may also tell you a lot about the campaign's overall success. It's crucial to remember that conversions don't always tell the full picture; if your site isn't adequately optimized for conversions, the campaign could succeed even if sales don't improve. Monitoring referral traffic can help by informing you how many people have visited your site.

The bigger picture is that you can use the same methods you used to track conversions to track campaign-driven traffic, such as promo codes and UTM parameters. You may also use Google Analytics to examine data and compare them to pre-campaign metrics to determine campaign success, with the following KPIs to pay attention to:

  • New visitors
  • Referral sources
  • Total page views
  • Time on site

Reach and Awareness

One of the greatest advantages of influencers is that they have ready access to a large audience that may help your brand gain visibility, which is a vital first step in increasing brand recognition and forming new partnerships. You'll want to track how many people your campaign reached, how many new prospects were aware of your brand, and how successfully the campaign reinforced your brand with pre-existing prospects to determine success with this goal.

Tracking impression data on your various postings, such as blog entries, social posts, videos, and other content you develop expressly for the campaign, is useful to gauge reach and awareness. This information is available via social media site analytics, your influencer's personal (such as blog) site and social media analytics, and your own Google Analytics if you compare new versus returning visitors during the campaign.

Audience Growth

Reach awareness is similar to audience growth, but a key distinction is that just because a campaign influenced someone doesn't mean they were effectively brought into the fold.

Let's assume you were going through your Facebook newsfeed when you came across a new article post from a food influencer you know and follow and then clicked through from the blog to a website for a new neighborhood restaurant. This would have been a success based on reach and traffic KPIs. However, suppose you looked at the restaurant's menu while on the website and discovered they didn't have anything that met your dietary constraints. After this understanding, you leave the site and never think about the restaurant again. The campaign was deemed unsuccessful based on the audience growth KPI. Assume you discovered while browsing the restaurant's website that everything on their menu was created with your diet in mind, so you chose to follow them on Facebook to receive updates on deals, new menu items, and the like. Again, the audience growth KPI is critical since it provides a complete view of your success. Remember that you're not simply attempting to reach as many people as possible; you're also attempting to turn them into raving, devoted followers.

You can utilize social networking site analytics, such as Recurpost, to track audience growth by monitoring your followers and seeing how many new ones you obtained throughout the campaign, then comparing the growth to pre-campaign figures. You can do the same with your email list and compare how many people signed up during the campaign to how many people signed up previously.

Engagement

Engagement is also an important KPI because it provides a complete picture of how your campaign was received. By looking at traffic and reach, you can tell how many people you reached, but audience and engagement will tell you how well you did. Because engagement is a good predictor of how your brand is received, how strong your relationship with your audience is, how relevant you are, and how loyal your customers will be, it's critical. A single engagement can refer to any of the following actions taken by your audience:

  • Likes
  • Reaction
  • Shares
  • Comments
  • Clicks
  • Votes
  • Pins
  • Video views
  • Brand mentions

One of the simplest ways to measure interaction is to use a platform like Shoutcart or Recurpost, which will track and measure engagement for you.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is becoming increasingly significant in the digital age, which is no surprise. People have trusted word-of-mouth advertising for years, and influencer marketing is just a more sophisticated version of that, leveraging the influence and popularity of specific people to help you spread the word about your business. But measuring the performance of your influencer marketing precisely is just as crucial, and KPIs like conversions, traffic, reach, engagement, and audience growth may help you do so. By concentrating on these five KPIs, you can get a good indication of how successful your campaign was at meeting your goals by including driving traffic, increasing sales, reaching new demographics, re-engaging former prospects, and building brand awareness.