Measuring ROI in Influencer Marketing: Metrics that Matter

Influencer marketing is one of the biggest trends in SEO today, and for good reason. A poll from influencer marketplace Tomoson has marketers claiming that they make $6.50 per dollar spent on influencer marketing. That’s a significant return on investment!

With ROI like that, one sees why more and more brands are considering adding influencer marketing to their portfolios. However, it’s worth noting that it’s the average – different campaigns will naturally have different ROIs. 

Indeed, that’s our topic for today: how to measure influencer marketing ROI. Knowing this can help you better figure out whether or not your influencer marketing is working as it should or needs to be tweaked, which is key to making the most of your marketing budget.

What are the key metrics when measuring influencer marketing ROI?

There are some key metrics here, of course, such as likes, shares, and post views. However, you may also discover some that you never considered tracking below!

1. Engagement

Engagement refers to the metrics we mentioned earlier: likes, shares, views, comments, and so on. Basically, these are all of the ways audiences may engage with your influencer marketing content on a platform!

These are some of the easiest things to track because most platforms do it for you. Likes, shares, upvotes – these are all typically tracked on social media. In most cases, you don’t even need to go to a user dashboard to see them as they’re publicly displayed!

Why bother tracking them, though? Because they help you find out how the content was received. More likes and shares generally mean a more positive reception, for instance, which boosts your brand image and recognition.

You can go a bit deeper into this than the immediate figures too. For instance, to add nuance to the numbers, why not do Sentiment Analysis too on things like the comments to your influencer marketing content?

That way, instead of just counting how many comments you got, you can also evaluate those comments to see how many are positive vs. negative. That’s an excellent way to get an idea of how effective the influencer really is at achieving the brand awareness you want.

2. Conversions

Another of the simpler metrics, but definitely one of the most important for many campaigns! 

Basically, this involves looking at how many people actually took the action you wanted them to take as a result of the influencer content. 

For example, how many of them bought a product on your website in response to it? Or how many signed up for a subscription that the influencer was promoting?

The reason for measuring this is straightforward as well. You just want to figure out how many desired actions (like sales) your marketing resources are driving when allocated to this campaign. It’s a good way to figure out if the investment is paying you back in an appreciable way.

But how do you actually know when a conversion has been driven by an influencer’s content as opposed to some other marketing channel? There are several options available here. The most popular are easily trackable links, exclusive promo or discount codes, and affiliate links. All of these help you find out which conversions are being referred by a given influencer.

3. Marketing cost-efficiency

This just refers to how cost-efficient your influencer marketing is in terms of what it’s costing you. Higher efficiency is better because it means you’re spending less to get the results you want, i.e. you’re getting better ROI for less spend. 

There are several reasons you may want to look at this. For one, it can help you compare different campaigns to each other, to see which one may be better to sustain or pump further resources into, and which one may be better to suspend or rework heavily. 

For another, it can help you compare influencers if you’re trying to work with more than one at once and aren’t sure which one is giving you better returns.

There are several metrics you can take a look at for this. One is cost per engagement, which can be calculated with this: 

It’s a great way to see how good your chosen influencer is at driving interaction and engagement with audiences, especially in a way that benefits you. A lower figure here means higher efficiency for your marketing budget!

Another metric to consider is customer acquisition cost, or what you spend in influencer marketing in order to gain a new customer as indicated by a successful conversion. The formula for this is as follows:

As before, lower is better because it means higher efficiency!

4. Earned media value

Earned media value is roughly the value of your chosen influencer’s content and connections. That’s why you’ll usually see EMV expressed as a dollar value. 

Keep in mind that this is not a direct count of the actual dollar returns from the influencer’s efforts or the rate the influencer should be paid for partnerships!

Rather, this is a figure that essentially tries to express the influencer’s impact. Higher earned media values mean an influencer that can have a more positive impact on your marketing.

EMV can be hard to quantify because it’s measured in different ways by different people. It’s perfectly normal to see two marketers use differing EMV formulae. It’s increasingly common to see variations on this basic one, however: 

What’s the “Variable”? It depends on your goals and campaign, but it’s basically something you want to track, which can be anything from total clicks from a campaign to total shares. It helps you get better relevance when calculating EMV.

conversion.

Get started on your influencer marketing today

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to get an idea of how well your influencer marketing is working for you. As long as you have a grasp of these metrics, you should be able to allocate resources intelligently for your purposes when you start with influencer marketing. 

But of course, not everyone loves doing the maths and monitoring themselves. That’s where we can help. 

Not only can we keep an eye on your influencer marketing ROI but we can also plan and execute just about every aspect of it for you. You can leverage the full potential of influencer marketing with our help. 

If you’re interested, contact us today. We can talk about what it is your brand or business may need.