Tracking influencer marketing performance and learning from the data is the foundation of a solid influencer strategy. Too often we only look at reports when a campaign ends or when our boss asks to see the numbers. But (just like influencer collaborations…) measurement works best when it’s an ongoing process and part of our monthly, weekly, or sometimes even daily workflow.
Rather than something that’s done retrospectively, measurement works best when it surfaces the insights we need to help make our next decisions and campaigns even stronger.
Here are six types of reports I recommend influencer marketing managers review on a regular basis:
- Campaign Performance
- Influencer Performance by Brand
- Recommended Influencers By Content & Audience Attributes
- Campaign Efficiency by Influencer
- “Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n Roll” aka Brand Safety
- Competitive Benchmark
Campaign Performance Report
Let’s start with the most commonly used example: the campaign report. A campaign is usually defined by a fixed timeframe and group of influencers that you’ve been actively working with, whether for an event, an organic product send, or a new launch collaboration. Once the campaign’s over, you should look into the high-level KPIs achieved from all of the influencers, as well as the top performing posts.
Other valuable data can be found by looking into how each individual influencer performed during the campaign.
In addition to seeing the overall number of posts each influencer made for your brand, take a deeper into the total engagements they generated, and average engagement rate per post to see who worked best for you.
You can use this information to determine which partners to invest in for your next campaign.
Influencer Performance by Brand
Evaluating individual influencers after a campaign is interesting, but looking at how they perform over a longer period, including their unsolicited, organic posts and how much they’re posting about my competitors, is where this gets really interesting.
One of the first things to look at is how many times each of your influencers has mentioned your brand versus your top competitors. If someone’s been on your mailing list all year, and you see they’ve never posted about your brand, but keep posting about your competitors, you know you should take them off your list!
Filter the report by engagement rate to understand who’s been performing the best, and look at what type of content has been working best for your competitors.
Recommended Influencers By Content & Audience Attributes
Finding and vetting new influencers is an ongoing effort. Setting up search reports help you find creative, up-and-coming partners. Are there influencers who have mentioned your brand, or your competitors lately? Are there influencers who are reviewing relevant products, or mentioning interesting keywords in the last few weeks?
This is important because there is so much potential to have an effective and long-lasting relationship with an influencer when they already love your brand.
Campaign Efficiency by Influencer
We're always trying to tie our influencer marketing campaigns as closely as possible to revenue. When using affiliate links and social commerce capabilities, it becomes possible to run campaign reports to discover which influencers are driving engagement, views, sales. In this way, you can identify which influencer gives your brand the most return on investment.
“Sex, Drug & Rock ‘n Roll” aka Brand Safety
It’s extremely important to vet and monitor influencers’ activity for content that may damage your brand's reputation.
A brand safety report helps you research historical content and stay informed going forward. Each organization will have its own list of "red flag" terms which can be used to surface past content and reveal new content for review.
Competitive Benchmarking
Understand what's working for your competition with competitive influencer marketing benchmark reports. With these reports you can discover what platforms are working best for your competition, what their mix of organic vs paid posts are, and what their average engagement rate is. You can also click into these categories to see which influencers they are investing in, what types of posts are getting the most traction, what trends they are jumping on.
This is a great type of report to share with your leadership team!
With these six reports at your fingertips, you will be equipped to optimize your influencer marketing programs on an ongoing basis. As one of my colleagues like to say, doing influencer marketing without analytics is like putting your makeup on in the dark. Probably not a great idea :)