HOW TO MEASURE INFLUENCE
INFLUENCER MARKETING: YOU GET WHAT YOU MEASURE
It’s been said a thousand different ways, but the key point here when it comes to influencer marketing is that you need to have a strong way to measure the success of your campaigns. Which begs the question:
WHAT IS THE RIGHT WAY TO MEASURE INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS?
We're glad you asked.
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Reporting matters. Data and analytics matter. Insights and analytics drive decisions. Brands rightfully demand more than views or likes to determine campaign success.
But before we dive into answering this question specifically, it’s wise to understand your situation and how your brand is structurally setup to run and measure campaign effectiveness.
Is your brand siloed into an acquisition team (or performance, direct response, growth, or new customer) and a branding (or creative) team? If yes, how can you collaborate across teams to run campaigns that deliver value across the full marketing funnel of awareness, consideration, and acquisition?
No matter how you’re setup as an organization, to run measurable and successful influencer campaigns effectively you need to have the ability to recognize value created across the entire marketing funnel -- and not just the metrics that fall into one team’s hands. It would be silly to throw away the value associated with conversion or awareness. Yes -- you can and should absolutely setup campaigns to target different parts of the marketing funnel -- but it’s still critical to measure across the funnel.
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HERE'S HOW YOU CAN DO IT:
UNDERSTAND THE KEY METRICS & ANALYTICS FOR MEASURING INFLUENCER ACROSS THE DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF THE MARKETING FUNNEL
We all like pretty pictures (If you don’t -- it’s time to look in the mirror & reevaluate things), so we’ve outlined the key metrics for YouTube below. The same principles apply to any marketing platform and we’re happy to talk through this more.
DEVELOP YOUR CAMPAIGN KPIs
It’s important to define "what good looks like” before we launch a campaign. We can help you to understand industry benchmarks and understand the answers to critical questions like the following:
-- What's a good click through rate for a YouTube
video?
-- What’s a good click through rate for a Twitch
lives stream?
-- What’s a good click through rate for an
Instagram post or story?
-- What should I expect from paid Influencer
content on TikTok?
-- How will influencer conversion rates compare to
“general” web traffic?
-- How valuable is an impression?
-- How valuable is a view?
-- Should I optimize for branding?
-- How should I handle an influencer marketing
campaign if we’re a direct response
organization?
-- What’s the time period I should use to evaluate
analytics of an influencer campaign?
-- How will I factor in the LTV of an influencer
acquisition?
-- How valuable is an educated and informed
customer on my brand’s website?
UNDERSTAND HOW YOU'LL MEASURE THE CAMPAIGN
Once you understand your objectives, it’s critical to agree on the specific metrics & analytics that you’ll use to measure a campaign. We work with brands to be sure that we capture the right metrics for every situation, but here are some no brainer metrics to consider when evaluating a YouTube marketing campaign:
-- CPM/CPV -- what are you paying for a view
-- Click-Through Rate -- what percentage of people that watch a YouTube video are choosing to click on a
link and then visit your website?
-- Quality of Site Traffic -- How long do visitors stay on your site? How many pages do they visit? What
is the bounce rate?
-- Sales -- On a per unit of ad spend basis, how many sales did the marketing campaign deliver?
-- Sales -- How does the LTV of the customer compare with other acquisition channels?
UNDERSTAND THE REAL IMPACT
Too many brands stop at the attributable traffic associated with an influencer campaign. It’s easy to just track the people who used a specific link & be done with it. But that’s not the whole story. Not even close actually. We know this because we commissioned a fancy-dan click-stream data study to determine how many people see an influencer ad and then visit the brand website or make a purchase without using the vanity URL. While you’d probably learn a lot from reading the paper, here’s the short version:
-- Of the traffic influencer ads generate for your brand, only about 1 of 6 website session is captured
using the “attributable” vanity URL
-- Of the purchases influencer ads generate for your brand, only about 1 of 4 customer purchases is
captured using the “attributable” vanity URL
AT THE OUTLOUD GROUP WE'RE BIG ON DATA, ANALYTICS, AND EVEN BIGGER ON INSIGHTS
For marketing campaigns, we believe it’s important to impact people’s heart and minds. We spend a lot of time analyzing the things that can impact consumer’s minds (read: “data!”), but we also do a qualitative analysis to show how campaigns are impacting individual consumers and impacting sentiment. We’ll show the qualitative impact of campaigns in a visual way that connects with the heart (unless, of course, you’re heartless but then we can’t help anyhow).
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OTHER KEY TOOLS:
ATTRIBUTION STUDY
CAMPAIGN CALCULATOR
We’ve got a proprietary tool that will forecast the value of your influencer marketing campaign before you start running the campaign. Interested in checking it out? Just shoot us a note & let us know.
We commissioned a clickstream data study to understand the true impact of running influencer marketing campaigns. This is groundbreaking stuff in the influencer world (not quite as cool as the wheel, but we still like it) and will help marketers to truly understand the value of their campaigns in a way that will resonate with your CMO and CFO.