Whether you're a company marketer or an agency working for a brand, tracking the performance of your influencer marketing campaign and reporting results are essential steps to determine the success of your campaign and justify your investment.
In other words, you need to demonstrate to your boss or client the value of your efforts – what worked, what didn't – to secure continued or increased budget allocations and recognition for your work.
Reports also serve as a learning opportunity, providing valuable insights on what works best to help you refine your strategies for future campaigns.
However, determining which data and insights to include can be hard, as influencers are capable of impacting a large variety of metrics. Additionally, in influencer marketing, some benefits or long-term impacts may be challenging to fully measure or quantify. That's why preparing a comprehensive campaign report, showcasing the overall value of your work and additional top-of-funnel metrics in an effective and strategic way, is essential.
To do so, you can access our free influencer marketing reporting template to better showcase the impact of your influencer marketing campaign.
Let's now explore what are the KPIs you should include and several tips to consider when creating an effective campaign report!
Every day, more brands are investing in influencer marketing as it has become an ideal and cost-effective strategy for connecting with their target audiences in a more authentic way. However, once you decide to launch an influencer marketing campaign, finding the right influencers who align with your brand and objectives is a key part of the process that can determine your campaign’s success.
Before searching for influencers, there are a few steps you need to take, such as defining your campaign’s objectives, KPIs, budget, and the strategy that will help you achieve them. Then, in order to find the most suitable influencers for your brand, you need to understand first how influencers work, the different types of influencer campaigns, and what factors or metrics are important for choosing or vetoing influencers.
In this guide, you’ll learn the basics of influencer marketing and how to find the right influencers to promote your products on each social media platform, either manually or using certified tools and softwares. Let’s dig in!
Various performance metrics should be explored based on your campaign's objectives. That’s why it's crucial to set up clear objectives and ways to measure them before launching your campaign. Then, while creating your report, remember your main goals when selecting metrics to measure how close you've come to achieving them.
For instance, if your focus was on brand awareness or top-of-funnel goals, you may want to emphasize metrics like impressions and reach. Alternatively, if your aim was to drive traffic to your store and boost conversions, highlighting middle-of-the-funnel metrics such as engagements and conversions would be more relevant.
However, it’s important to understand that an effective influencer marketing campaign should impact all 3 levels of the funnel.
Let's try to understand the main metrics according to the goals of each stage in the consumer journey's funnel.
Highlight how many influencers you were able to successfully onboard for the campaign.
If an influencer has posted more than what was initially agreed upon, this demonstrates extra value and potential in building long-term relationships with them. Always showcase the total number of posts collected throughout the campaign, including both the agreed-upon posts and the bonus posts. This is valuable UGC which the brand can reutilize for their own social media platforms, website, or any other purposes.
Reach refers to the number of people or accounts who have seen your content while impressions means the amount of times the content has been seen or was displayed, regardless of duplicated users. This means that impressions can include multiple views by the same user. They are both essential as they help dimension the exposure of your campaign.
The amount of followers you’ve gained on your social media platforms can be another proof of the effectiveness of your influencer marketing efforts. Influencers can significantly drive new followers to your account as they tag you on their posts. Make sure to acknowledge the amount of followers you have before launching your influencer campaigns and see how they increase after each post. Though the increase of number of followers cannot be attributed to each influencer individually, you can keep track of a general follower growth during the campaign and highlight this as an additional value of the campaign’s results.
It represents the cost per thousand impressions. Therefore, it compares the cost-efficiency of a campaign based on how many people actually see the ad. It is a crucial metric if you wish to maximize your reach within a specific budget.
CPM=(Total Cost of the Campaign/Number of Impressions)×1000
Essential metric to consider on video contents, as impressions can differ to video plays. The criteria for a video view varies across different platforms:
It measures the amount of shares, clicks, saves, likes and comments on a social media post, therefore the overall interaction the influencer’s audience has with their content. This is an essential metric for brands as it highlights how influencers engage with their audience, which most likely will impact on the campaign’s performance as an active audience will most probably react to the branded content and become potential customers.
While the number of engagements considers the total interactions per post without considering the influencer’s follower count, engagement rate is a relative figure to consider performance across accounts or posts with different audience sizes. It represents through a percentage the level of interaction a piece of content receives relative to the number of followers or impressions.
Engagement Rate=(Total Engagements/Total Followers or Impressions )×100
If you wish to compare the influencer’s engagement rate during the campaign to their usual rate, you can find data about previous performance using our free engagement rate calculator.
It's valuable to highlight the amount of clicks separately to general interactions if you have requested the influencer to share a link to your website or ecommerce, as this can determine website traffic and also interest gauged through the influencer content.
This metric measures how many people who saw the ad clicked on it, showcasing its potential to generate interest. If this metric is low, you can always take action to further improve results during the campaign.
CTR: (Number of clicks/ Total Impressions) x 100
If you are either an agency or a marketer within your company, this is probably the metric which your stakeholders or bosses will be mostly interested in, as after all any marketing strategy comes down to sales, which shows the direct impact of your campaign.
Conversions, however, can include other types of actions that consumers take as a result of interacting with the influencer’s content. This could include downloading an app, signing up for a newsletter, or any other measurable action according to the campaign’s goals.
Additionally, you can get a more in depth understanding and overview of different KPIs to measure influencer marketing success here.
Influencer conversions can be easily tracked by using technologies such as affiliate links and discount codes. If possible, create custom links and personalized voucher codes for each influencer to track precisely the number of clicks they generate and the resulting conversions. This will facilitate your ROI analysis.
It’s important to understand and clarify in your report that, as with any digital marketing strategy, sales are not attributed 100%. Industry average attribution rate in influencer marketing is around 70%.This means that influencers impact each stage of the consumer journey, and their sales will most likely be 30% more than the tracked ones, as many sales get lost along the way.
For example, a follower may see the influencer’s post and, if they tag the brand, they may visit the brand’s social media profile first to take a look and then access the website through the brand's page instead of using the influencer’s custom link. Additionally, they might do some research before finally deciding to purchase, but the initial message was indeed referred to by the influencer.
The Return On Investment (ROI) gained from influencer campaigns measures how effective and profitable your campaign was by calculating the financial return on your total investment. It includes several metrics such as generated sales, enhanced brand awareness, and improved social media engagement.
Measuring ROI involves setting clear goals, tracking campaign costs and performance metrics, to calculate the overall impact and value of your marketing efforts.Therefore, ROI is an essential value that should be included in your report as it justifies your investment. You can read more about how to maximize ROI here.
ROI= {Net Profit (Revenue Generated - Total Investments) / Total Investment} × 100
If you are manually tracking the influencer’s performance, you can use platforms like Google Analytics or social media insights. For example, if you’re working on an Instagram campaign, you should ask the influencer to share their content metrics from Instagram Insights so you can see all their post's performance data, such as impressions, reach, and interactions.
However, the most effective and less time-consuming way of tracking your influencer’s performance is by using an influencer marketing software. Influencer Hero, for instance, integrates the capability to create affiliate links and discount codes within your e-commerce to track conversions and clicks, providing real-time reports.
After providing a general overview of the campaign's overall results, include in your report a breakdown of the best performing content or creators on each platform with their respective metrics. This will provide insights on what type of content works better for each platform, to keep in mind for future strategies. Is it stories, tutorials, full reviews or Reels?
For example, a kitchenware company could learn that a full video review does great on YouTube while an organic integration on a cooking recipe tutorial works best on Instagram.
Including snapshots of your top performing posts can also have a positive visual impact as it can highlight the quality content which was created and that the brand can use organically on their own social media or reuse for paid ads. UGC is one the main benefits in influencer marketing, as brands can reutilize this material for their own purposes.
You could also include a comparison table which summarizes and compares your creator’s performance. Include metrics like number of posts, engagement, views, reach, impressions and clicks. This will help you determine which are the creators that show potential for building long-term relationships. Focus on the metrics that are more important for you according to your campaign’s goals in order to see which type of influencers are better suited to help you achieve them.
Compare KPIs on each platform to get insights specific to what platform works better for you. It’s key to gather these insights to try to create a unique strategy for each platform!
Some qualitative benefits of influencer marketing cannot be completely measured, such as authenticity and trust, but they will have a long-term impact on your brand.
In an influencer marketing report, it's essential to focus not only on conversions and bottom-of-the-funnel KPIs but also on the top-of-the-funnel benefits, as influencers bring additional value which is sometimes underestimated.
So if you’re a marketer looking to showcase the results you’ve achieved with influencer partnerships, make sure to highlight the long term value strategically!
Influencers serve as a word-of mouth resource establishing conversation about your brand. This may influence the way your audience feels and thinks about your brand.
To get a sense of your brand sentiment, you can analyze brand mentions, comments, reviews, or survey responses. You can use a software for doing this automatically (such as Brand 24 or Reputation), or you can manually search through the influencer’s posts to see any comments about your brand and general reactions to the branded posts. This is also called social listening and is crucial to understand how the audience is reacting to the content.
Influencers can help sustain brand growth, which means an increase in a brand’s market presence, customer base, and overall value over time. This is achieved through customer loyalty and brand recognition, increasing awareness, and positive perception of the brand among consumers.
We can also consider the increase in social following on the brand’s social media platforms during the time they’ve been working with influencers.
This is probably one of the main reasons we decide to work with influencers: their capability to influence their audience’s opinions and behavior. Trust, credibility, and authenticity cannot be measured but are the main values influencers bring to the table.
By leveraging social proof in influencer marketing, brands can enhance their reputation, build trust with potential customers, and ultimately drive more sales and engagement through the influencer’s authentic recommendations.
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Provide context on campaign objectives, target audience, types of influencers you have partnered with, types of influencer collaborations (e.g:requested deliverables), and platforms you have worked on. Additionally, include your campaign’s overall performance, highlighting the main KPIs. In further sections, provide a breakdown of these KPIs for each influencer.
As we have seen so far, there are endless KPIs that you can include in a report. But you don’t need to go crazy! There’s no need to report on every metric and make reports more complicated. Try to understand your campaign’s specific objectives and identify the main KPIs that help you measure how close you got to achieving them. Select the essential KPIs or any others that may bring additional value and help you showcase positive outcomes.
As you probably wish to show good results to justify your work, if you see that any metric doesn’t look good, for example, conversions, try to focus on other numbers which look better. Always try to communicate results strategically, as influencer marketing can impact each funnel of the consumer’s journey.
A good approach, in that case, is to highlight brand awareness and the number of collected posts, by showcasing the ones of higher quality and their engagements.
All tracked data should be deeply analyzed. For example, if you mention that you collected 50 posts in the last month and onboarded 20 influencers, you should explain that a specific amount of them posted twice or made additional posts beyond what had been agreed upon. This demonstrates additional value and potential for building long-term relationships.
Additionally, avoid presenting data in an isolated way. Try to provide context and insights to help stakeholders better understand the results.
You probably know your target audience, so use this to your advantage to create an engaging narrative. It’s very different to write a report for your marketing colleagues than to write one for stakeholders who probably know little about technical marketing. Thus, try to adjust the language and tone accordingly. You should also keep the report simple and short to avoid overwhelming readers with complex data.
Data visualization is key to creating an engaging report. You should present your results in an easy, clear and attractive way so they can be understood by the people who will be reading it.
There are endless formats available, and it depends on your brand’s key visuals, but here are a few resources and things to keep in mind regarding design:
It's crucial to end your report with a slide gathering the main takeaways from all the data you’ve shared. What has worked and what has not? What strategies could you implement for your future campaigns?
Include a few bullet points outlining the next steps and what things you would like to test to improve your next results. These should be actionable and measurable recommendations, rather than vague ideas.For example, if you have already launched a campaign on Instagram, you could suggest exploring other platforms like TikTok or YouTube.
Remember, influencer marketing is a constantly evolving world, and we need to continue innovating. This means constant testing, measuring, and learning in order to keep up with the changing landscape.
Influencer marketing reporting is an essential step of your campaign. Not only does it enable you to measure how successful your campaign was towards your objectives, but it also provides insights for improvements.
Creating an effective report can be challenging as there are multiple KPIs we can measure in influencer marketing. Effective reporting doesn't only include setting up clear objectives and establishing the ideal KPIs to measure them, but also skills to communicate results strategically, since there are many benefits in influencer marketing that cannot be quantified.
By implementing the tips shared in this article, you’ll be able to showcase the overall results and efforts of your influencer marketing program in an effective way to justify your investments.
Additionally, design and how to showcase results visually also play a crucial role for creating an engaging report. Remember to access our influencer templates to assist you in creating a fantastic report!
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