MEASUREMENT MATTERS
A THREE AND A HALF YEAR REVIEW OF INFLUENCER CAMPAIGN VIEW & ENGAGEMENT DATA -- WHY MEASUREMENT TIMING IS KEY [JANUARY 2022 - JUNE 2025]
///
INTRODUCTION
You don’t work in influencer marketing if you have never been asked to estimate the views or CPM¹ [dollars paid per 1,000 impressions on a piece of content] for a campaign or a specific creator. That being said, there are SO MANY metrics to track in an influencer campaign depending on what part of the funnel you’re looking to measure [views, engagements, click through rates, conversion rates, comment sentiment, etc.].
However, one aspect that is often overlooked is the window of time in which you’re measuring. While there are certain social media mediums that naturally constrain the time frame you measure, like a 24-hour Instagram story or a Twitch livestream, so much creator content is evergreen in nature. Sure, sometimes there are time-sensitive campaigns associated with a new product release, seasonal campaign, etc. but brands still, by and large, tend to undervalue performance after the first few weeks or just one month.
Now, you might be saying to yourself: yes, there should be some form of defined time frame in which to measure, benchmark, and predict top performers. The sooner you do this, the faster you can pivot strategy in as close to real time as possible to maximize performance. We would agree but how do you establish your measurement window?
With nearly 20 years of experience running and measuring influencer marketing campaigns, we’ve got some tips and tricks to help establish your time frame and the data to back it up. To start, it’s important to understand the platform your campaign will live on. For the purpose of this example, we’re going to look at sponsored² YouTube videos posted between January 1, 2022 and March 31, 2025³.
///
VIEW COUNT PERFORMANCE OVER TIME
Figure 1 below shows a table of 15 anonymized brand partners⁴, sorted by highest to lowest lifetime campaign views between January 1, 2022 and March 31, 2025 [39 months of data]. In the right-side columns, you’ll see a time-stamped percentage of the total views to date after 7, 30, 45, 60, and 90 days relative to each campaign’s lifetime views. These are all large-scale YouTube campaigns, garnering well over one billion views collectively.
| Brand | Total Views | 7 Day | 30 Day | 45 Day | 60 Day | 90 Day |
|---|
Figure #1 highlights a couple of the initial variables to consider when establishing your time frame of measurement. The first being that, at least for YouTube, view performance continues to have a significant tail after the first 7-day, and even 30-day, window. The second being that each campaign has a different view tail. So, even though these are all YouTube campaigns in the form of integrations, their results can vary significantly over time.
When sorting Brands 1 through 15 by 90-day percentage from highest to lowest shown in Figure #2, you’ll see that Brand 8 has the highest percentage of 90.2% of total views achieved 90-days from posting. On the other hand, Brand 6 only achieved 65.4% of total campaign views 90-days from posting. The 90-day average is 70.0% and the 90-day median is 80.8% [coming from Brand 4].
| Brand # | Total Views | 7 Day | 30 Day | 45 Day | 60 Day | 90 Day |
|---|
///
ENGAGEMENT COUNT PERFORMANCE OVER TIME
Figure 3 below shows a table of 15 anonymized brand partners⁵, sorted from highest to lowest lifetime campaign engagements⁶ between January 1, 2022 and March 31, 2025 [39 months of data]. In the right-side columns, you’ll see a time-stamped percentage of the total engagements to date after 7, 30, 45, 60, and 90 days relative to each campaign’s lifetime engagements. These are all large scale campaigns, garnering millions of engagements collectively.
| Brand | Total Views | 7 Day | 30 Day | 45 Day | 60 Day | 90 Day |
|---|
Our engagement data in Figure #3 reveals a couple of notable callouts similar to those in Figure #1. It demonstrates that each brand campaign has a different time window of when engagements are accrued and not all engagements happen within the first 7-days of a campaign. However, the spread at the 90-day mark is much tighter for engagements in Figure 3 [77.4% to 96.8%] than for views in Figure 1 [65.4% to 90.2%] — a 5.4-point narrower gap between the highest and lowest percentages of total engagements achieved within 90 days.
Additionally, when re-sorting Brands 1 through 15 by 90-day percentage from highest to lowest [shown in Figure #4], you’ll see that Brand 6 has the highest percentage of 96.8% of total engagements achieved 90-days from posting. On the other hand, Brand 12 only achieved 77.4% of total campaign views 90 days from posting. The 90-day average is 89.3% and the 90-day median is 90.4% [coming from Brand 2].
| Brand | Total Views | 7 Day | 30 Day | 45 Day | 60 Day | 90 Day |
|---|
The engagement count data signals that, on average, a greater percentage of engagement performance is achieved within the first 90-days of a campaign [Figure #4: average of 89.3%] relative to view count performance over that same 90-day time period [Figure #2: average of 70.0%]. This only underscores the need to define your performance metrics and track them. While only ~70% of viewership is garnered at the 90-day mark, it jumps up to ~90% when looking at engagement performance. When you start adding session data, conversion data, or other metrics, additional patterns will emerge, allowing you to define your performance measurement window to better identify the performance patterns needed to scale a successful campaign.
///
CONCLUSION
We’ve established several questions to ask yourself and aspects to consider when determining the time frame to measure your campaign:
Is there a time constraint associated with your campaign? e.g. time-sensitive product launch, seasonal campaign, etc.
What platform and medium will your campaign be run on? e.g. a 24-hour Instagram story versus a YouTube integration
Even when variables like the platform, sponsorship type, and time since posting are held constant, performance results can vary significantly — as shown in Figure #2 [view performance] & Figure #4 [engagement performance]
While establishing a time frame at the start of a campaign is helpful, it’s important to also let your data inform the best measurement window
If you don’t measure and benchmark performance over time, you will lose valuable insights. For example: Brands 6 & 14 from Figure 1 might be working with creators that create content with a long tail for viewership, and thus, those brands might want to extend the window in which they look at all of their campaign KPIs
The above factors are great when you’re measuring the upper funnel and driving awareness but things get more complicated when you layer on lower funnel activity [site traffic, sign-ups, conversions, etc.]. Spoiler alert: just like measuring views & engagements over time, similar patterns will likely be established for any other performance metrics you choose to measure.
It’s important to note that even if you establish a longer time frame to measure, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking at performance earlier and benchmarking along the way. There are still so many insights you can pull just days after content goes live; the sooner you spot them, the sooner you can optimize your campaign. Maybe you establish that lifestyle creators who post on the weekend tend to outperform engagement relative to creators posting during weekdays, or that creators who show the product on screen convert better. We all know that correlation doesn’t imply causation, but campaigns aren’t run in a vacuum and establishing performance patterns is vital to the health of your campaign. By the way, at The Outloud Group, we can measure and report on any of those variables and help you benchmark it over time.
Pro tip: it’s best to establish the goal of your campaign [awareness, consideration, conversion, or some weighted combination], the metrics used to measure success [views, engagements, sessions, sign-ups, conversions, etc.], and the data strategies you’ll use to collect them [UTM parameters, Bitly links, custom coupon codes, time frames, etc.] in order to set yourself up for post campaign reporting success. Setting up the right infrastructure at the start of your campaign is the best way to ensure accurate reporting at the end.
If you’re a brand interested in launching an influencer campaign or find yourself in the midst of scaling and figuring out how to measure one, please email us at hello@outloudgroup.com. We’re always game to chat strategy and measurement, or review our template reporting dashboard together. We’ve got more data like this to help steer your ship — or just have a really good conversation!
///
ABOUT THE OUTLOUD GROUP
The Outloud Group is a full-service influencer marketing agency that creates & executes strategic campaigns to deliver measurable results. We combine art & science to authentically tell brand stories at scale. You can learn more about our work with brands such as Fiverr, AG1, Chomps, KitchenAid, and Acorns at www.OutloudGroup.com.
New media. Old-fashioned relationships.
///
¹ CPM is defined as “Cost Per Mille” or, more simply put, is the monetary compensation a creator receives from a brand per 1,000 views obtained on a sponsored piece of content
² Sponsored refers to any YouTube video where a brand compensated a creator in the form of monetary compensation, product, or services as disclosed by the creator for the FTC
³ The data reviewed goes through June 30th, 2025 but we needed videos to have been live for at least 90 days from posting to measure performance of at least 90 days
⁴ 3,537 unique YouTube integrations garnering 1,207,898,944 views posted between January 1st, 2025 and March 31st, 2025
⁵ 3,537 unique YouTube integrations garnering 48,125,980 engagements posted between January 1st, 2025 and March 31st, 2025
⁶ The sum of total likes and comments on a YouTube video post
