How to plan and analyse KPIs for social media influencers?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are necessary to set before you launch a collaboration with influencers. Without KPIs, how could you measure the results of what’s being done? How could you find out if the price was reasonable? Setting clear KPIs can also assist you while creating benchmarks for further campaigns.

All in all, it’s crucial to communicate the KPIs to the influencer before launching a campaign. Often, influencers will have to report the statistics or the particular metrics to you so that you can draw the conclusions.

Campaign total reach

The total reach of the campaign is, plainly speaking, how many people have seen it. For YouTube, you can check up the number of views and this will be the total reach. For other social media platforms, ask the influencer to share their account statistics (reach and impressions) to get an insight of the total reach.

This metric is important because it is about brand awareness. Even when people are not ordering your services directly after seeing the influencer’s post, they learn to know your brand and are becoming more likely to use this knowledge later.

Engagement rate

Every time people like, share, save, comment a post or click the link provided in it, they engage. Measuring the engagement level helps you to understand if the content was appealing to the audience. You can calculate the total number of engagements adding up the following data:

• “Likes” (also the “thumb-downs” on YouTube);
• Comments (positive or negative);
• Share actions;
• Video-view or a post-click;
• Link-click.

Engagement rate = total engagements / total reach. The higher the engagement rate, the better this particular collaboration was for the brand. Low engagement rate may mean that the influencer audience doesn’t match the target audience of the brand.

Conversion rates

Via Google Analytics, you can measure how many people came to your website in course of and thanks to the influencer marketing campaign. You can even see the particular channel new traffic is coming from — this all in case you wanted more people seeing your website.

Via Google Console and App Store Connect, you can measure the growth of the Impressions of your app in the Stores. Depending on the exact app event you intend to stimulate with an influencer marketing campaign, you can also track the results in the App Events tab of Facebook Analytics.

Although this metric is especially important to understand if your website gets more visitors, you can also put it into the perspective of the app promotion by comparing the Impressions data and the number of downloads with the total reach and the engagement rate.

Trackable links and promo codes

Apart from the Google Analytics data, you can use UTM-links to see where people are coming from to your website. If an influencer places an UTM-link in their post (and each influencer can have an own trackable link), you will know exactly which campaign has driven the most visitors to the website. You can create UTM-links quite easily and for free (consider Bitly service) or connect them to your Google Analytics when created through Google Campaign URL builder.

Promotional codes are very effective because they create the feeling of a limited offer — and they can be used for the same purpose as UTM-links 😎 This is why influencer marketing goes perfectly together with a referral campaign. Generate a unique promo code for each influencer and track the results of each post. Thanks to the referral program analytics of OnDe, you’ll get very detailed insights into the results of each influencer promotion.

How to analyse the KPIs for influencer marketing campaign?

To be able to analyse the KPIs, make sure you have clear expectations. It is strongly advised to have both negative and positive effects planned.

The analysis of primary results will depend on the platform the influencers work with and the KPI you consider the most important for your campaign according to its goals.

An influencer marketing campaign for promoting mobile app can have several objectives:

• Raise brand awareness;
• Attract new target audience (with new or the same characteristics);
• Grow the number of social media followers;
• Grow the number of conversions (very average statistics for tap-through rate growth are 0,3-5%, average conversion rate is 20-50%).

Raising the brand awareness is a typical goal for the launch phase. At this phase, total reach of the campaign is an important KPI. Because it’s only logical to want to have an engaged audience, keep an eye on the engagement rates here, too.

Attracting new target audience and and growing the number of social media followers of a brand is something companies strive to do when they intend to expand the business reach. In case it’s the key-objective right now, track the total reach of the campaign and the particular demographic characteristics of the new followers/clients. Additionally, check out the conversion rates for this new audience attracted.

Growing the number of conversions is actually quite a natural goal for mobile app promotion at any stage. To see if it’s going the right way, monitor the changes in the Downloads via Google Console and App Store Connect, and track app events statistics via Facebook Analytics. Promo codes statistics can also be of use here.

The time-spans actual for analysing the results of an influencer marketing campaign vary per platform:

• YouTube: 14 days from posting;
• Instagram, Twitter: 3 days from posting;
• Snapchat: 1 day from posting.

YouTube can be tricky, but in a good way: because bloggers almost never delete their content, ads videos continue attracting viewers (and indexing in Search) even after the campaign is finished. Additionally, a well-made video always has a chance to go viral and gain a way more views than expected. Well, in both cases, just relax, enjoy the unexpectancies 🎁

While reporting on the influencer marketing campaign results, make sure you include all the data needed for planning future campaigns. In a report, it’s much better to put the numbers in the perspective as soon as possible. Do all the calculations to get real business-oriented data, such as:

• Campaign total reach;
• Views that became clicks;
• Clicks that became installs;
• Installs that became actions.

Lesson takeaways

Well-planned key performance indicators are essential for a company to evaluate the effects of an influencer marketing campaign. Setting clear KPIs and communicating them to an influencer before launching a campaign allows you to:

• Measure the actual results;
• Control the investments in the campaign in case of cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition payment method;
• Evaluate a collaboration with this particular blogger;
• Compare campaigns launched by different bloggers;
• Create benchmarks for future campaigns.

The 4 KPIs extremely important for influencer-driven app promotion:

• Campaign total reach;
• Engagement rate;
• Conversion rate (CR);
• Trackable links and promo codes statistics.

Some KPIs can be tracked via Google Console, App Store Connect and Facebook Analytics. Other data you will need to calculate based on the statistics influencers will provide you after posting the content.