Everything you need to know about influencer marketing analytics

To drive a solid return on investment from your influencer marketing campaigns, you need detailed insights into the performance of each influencer and their content. Without influencer marketing analytics, you run the risk of basing your campaigns on total guesswork and pumping money into something that may or may not work.

So, whether we like it or not, analytics are a critical part of the influencer marketing machine. We need them to understand how our campaigns measure up to our expectations (or, sometimes not!) and to produce insights we can use to guide us to improvements.

Why are influencer marketing analytics important?

You can have the best influencer marketing plan in place, but if you've failed to define your metrics and how you're going to track and analyze them, you’re basically throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

While 70% of brands track their influencer marketing campaigns, 30% of companies don't, leaving them in the dark about how effective their marketing spending is.

Here’s why influencer marketing analytics are so important:

• Improve future campaigns. By analyzing the data from your influencer marketing campaigns, you can calculate the ROI, gain insights to improve future campaigns, and form hypotheses about what to test next.

• Make data-based decisions for your business. Opinions and guessing can divide a team. Analytics are a source of truth and help you make objective decisions.

• Unlock insights. Data forms the building blocks of analysis, and there is far more data available now than ever before.

• Understand where conversions are coming from. Tracking attribution can give you a better understanding of how your influencer marketing campaigns are driving conversions and revenue so you can do more of the right things.

• Select the best-fit influencers. Choosing the right influencers is essential. Data analysis can help you identify influencers who are most likely to resonate with your target audience and drive engagement. Plus, after the campaign you can invite the best performers to become ambassadors or affiliates.

Think of your influencer marketing strategy as a continual learning process. You’re not going to nail it on the first try (no one does!), and your ticket to learning what works and what doesn’t is through analyzing key data points after every execution.

Pre-campaign analytics

Before you start discovering influencers, start with a predicted-ROI analysis to ensure you understand how influencer marketing will result in a pay off. This analysis starts before the campaign.

If you’ve ever heard marketers bemoaning that “influencer marketing doesn’t work,” they either don’t know how it works or they haven’t analyzed the costs and returns they need to generate a positive ROI.

It’s easy to make bad assumptions such as: All of the invited influencers will post about my brand, multiple times, on every platform. Content will go viral. Organic content without links will lead to lots of sales.

It’s easy to dream big when you see what’s possible with influencer marketing. But if you don’t know what you’re aiming for or how it works, this can lead to wasted budgets and disheartened teams.

Tip: Virality is an outlier—don’t count on it. Instead, do some research and understand how to achieve your goals without relying on virality.

Use industry benchmarks as a bar for what you can expect and build assumptions into your ROI model. If your campaign isn’t projecting a positive ROI, you’ll need to make some adjustments to either reduce your costs or increase your returns––or both.

On the cost side, find ways to reduce the cost of your product gift, packaging, shipping, or influencer marketing software. Downsize to nano- or micro-influencers instead of those with larger followings.

On the return side, plan to start-up or build your affiliate program to generate sales. And, once you have the valuable influencer content, consider funneling the creatives into a paid ads campaign where authentic content (that looks like it is generated by users) generally outperforms high-production or in-house produced content.

In these early stages, it’s important to predict the ROI of influencer marketing activities before you begin the campaign. Predictions will require you to make and document your assumptions. If you have no history with influencer marketing, look to industry experts and case studies to base your assumptions. Below are the assumptions Kynship.co uses for product seeding based on their vast seeding experience. It’s a good idea to be conservative when you’re first starting out–to allow for a learning curve.

Once the campaign is over, you can compare your assumptions to your actual results data to refine your future influencer marketing programs. Think of every influencer execution as a learning opportunity:

• What was the biggest lesson?

• What surprised you?

• What didn’t work?

• What worked really well?

• What will you implement based on your learnings?

• What will you test the next time?

Individual influencer analytics

You want to make sure the influencers you choose help you meet your goals. Your goals, therefore, will help inform the criteria used to evaluate influencers. Here are some considerations for selecting influencers:

• Do they reach an audience of potential buyers for your brand?

• Is their audience based in the geographic market where you sell––and more specifically, the market you are responsible for growing?

• Is their audience the right gender and age?

• Are their followers real?

• Do they engage with their audience?

• Is their engagement real, not automated or pod-generated?

• Are they on the social media platform(s) you’re prioritizing?

• Do they create the content format you’re seeking (e.g., Reels? Stories? Posts?)

Let’s take a look at how influencer marketing expert Lily Comba evaluates influencers.

This is based on her discussion with Cody Wittick and Taylor Lagace on The Influencer Marketing Blueprint Podcast.

"Age, gender, customer profile fit, and location (US or internationally) are some considerations. It's also worth knowing if their audience is largely based out of the US or internationally. If it's a female influencer, it's preferable if the majority of their followers are female. You should be trying to assess through the process whether they merely have followers or an active community.

The number of followers doesn't necessarily matter. An influencer could have 200,000 followers or 200 million. The odds are the influencer with 200,000 followers will convert better and want to work with your brand than the one with 200 million. Always look at engagement scores and base payment on it. Payments can also be based on a sliding scale that corresponds to their audience size and/or other performance metrics."

There are two types of analytics for evaluating influencers.

1. Audience based analytics

Does the influencer's audience align with your brand's potential buyers? Look at their followers' demographics, such as location, gender, and age, to ensure they match your ideal customer profile.

With MightyScout, you can get an overview of an influencer’s audience, engagement, and follower analytics to aid your selection process.

2. Performance-based analytics

An influencer's impact goes beyond their follower count; it's about their ability to engage their audience.

Look at metrics like engagement rates, average likes, comments, and shares to assess the level of interaction and impact an influencer generates.

High engagement rates suggest that an influencer has a loyal and active following, increasing the likelihood of their content being seen and acted upon.

Analyze the authenticity of the influencer's followers, too. Today, with 45% of Instagram accounts showing signs of being fake, it's hard to tell who has or hasn’t paid to inflate their follower count. This is another good reason to prioritize engagement metrics instead of follower count.

Use engagement insights to dig into the authenticity of an influencer. If they have a high number of followers but they only have a handful of likes and comments on each post, it could indicate something fishy. In this case, you can take a look at their follower growth graph to see if they have spikes of follower growth which could indicate they’ve purchased followers.

Additionally, consider the quality and relevance of the readers' comments. Do they provide valuable insights into the audience's perception and reception of the influencer's content?

Traditional social media campaign analytics

The historical model for influencer marketing goes something like this: you get a bunch of relevant influencers talking about you on social media, they share their unique discount codes and affiliate links, and consumers buy the products. This model relies on traditional (and visible) metrics like impressions, reach, and engagement that don’t always give a clear picture of business impact.

1. Impressions

Impressions refer to the total number of times someone viewed the influencer's content, regardless of whether they clicked. The number of impressions includes multiple views from the same person. Most social media platforms supply insights into how many people saw a specific post. But some require you to request information from the influencer’s side and you might need to reach out and ask them to share the data.

2. Reach

Reach is the unique number of users who have seen your content. This gives you an idea of your influencer marketing campaign's overall visibility and exposure. To understand more about an influencer's reach you can:

• Ask the influencer to share reports showcasing their reach.

• Use an influencer marketing platform like MightyScout where you can get an overview of key analytics for each piece of content.

Again, most social media platforms record this data in their analytics section. For example, on Instagram, simply click the “accounts reached” section in your insights.

3. Engagement

Engagement measures how many times someone interacts with the content. It includes likes, comments, reposts, tags, shares, and saves. A high engagement rate indicates that the content resonates with the influencer's audience.

To understand more about the engagement rate of an influencer:

• Calculate the engagement rate using this formula: (Total Engagements per Post / Total Followers) x 100

• Use a tool like MightyScout’s engagement calculator (you need a free account but it offers more features than most engagement calculators, including a built-in indicator that tells you if an influencer has a “good” or “very good” engagement rate based on their follower count)

4. Follower growth on your social media platform

Follower growth is one of the easiest metrics to track—simply log how many new followers you get each month or during the period your influencer marketing campaigns are running. You can either manually keep track of it or use the built-in insights on each social media platform which will give you a percentage increase.

5. Click-through rates (CTR)

Click-through rates measure how many people click through from a piece of content—whether that’s to a landing page, your website, or a specific product page.

In your website analytics, you’ll be able to see how many people arrived on a specific page, which you can then use to figure out your click-through rate. Divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage figure.

6. Conversion rates

Conversion rates tell you how many people went on to take the desired action (sign up to your email list? Buy a product? Join your loyalty program?).

You can work out the conversion rate of each post (or the campaign as a whole) by dividing the impressions or views by the number of conversions and multiplying the result by 100.

How does content format type impact analytics?

In an episode of The Influencer Marketing Blueprint podcast, Lily Comba suggests choosing content formats that provide you with sales analytics. Comba, who built Seed Health’s million dollar influencer marketing program, has this advice:

“I don’t usually recommend that brands focus on Reels or posts in feed until you have a well-established influencer marketing program, you’re hitting your groove, your goals, and you’re in a good place.”

This is especially applicable to direct response marketing, Comba explains further. You won’t see a return on content without links––such as Reels or posts. If sales is your goal, use a clickable link. For that reason, as you’re getting an influencer marketing program started, and you need to show sales and learn what’s working or not, it’s better to focus on Instagram Stories (with links) and YouTube (with the partnerships link placed above the ‘show more’ fold). Read more of Comba’s advice.

How to track and measure for analytics

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics has several features that make it easy to track the analytics of your influencer campaigns. You’ll need to connect your website to Google Analytics and set up goals to match your desired outcome of each campaign.

Here’s how to do this with Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs):

Step 01: Set up a dedicated Google Analytics property for your website.

Step 02: Next, create custom UTM parameters for each influencer you work with. UTM parameters are tags added to the end of a URL that help you track the source, medium, and campaign associated with that link.

For example, your tagged URL might look like this:

www.yourbrand.com/?utmsource=influencername&utmmedium=social&utmcampaign=summer_sale

In this case, the source is the influencer's name, the medium is social (or you could be more specific, like Instagram or YouTube), and the campaign is the specific promotion they're participating in.

When an influencer shares this unique link with their followers, Google Analytics will attribute any traffic, engagement, or conversions generated from that link to the specific influencer and campaign.

To track conversions, set up specific goals within Google Analytics. Goals can include actions like purchases, email sign-ups, or any other valuable interaction you want to measure.

2. MightyScout

MightyScout is an influencer marketing platform with detailed tracking, analytics, and reporting features. Using a tool that brings all types of data together in one place is beneficial for understanding the big-picture performance of your campaigns. It enables you to compare previous campaigns, previous quarters, or yearly results. Plus you can dig deep into the weeds to analyze how to improve each stage (e.g., discovery, selection, outreach, tracking, analytics, reporting) of your future campaigns.

You can track key metrics like reach, engagement, and conversions across multiple platforms and campaigns, all in one centralized dashboard. You can also see the content influencers create inside the platform and sort it by various metrics. This makes it easier to identify top-performing influencers, content, formats, and social media platforms, optimize your strategies, and allocate your budget more effectively.

With the data available, you can identify trends, understand what content resonates best with your target audience, and refine your approach for future campaigns.

For example, if you notice that influencers in a particular niche consistently drive higher conversion rates, you can focus on partnering with influencers in that space.

To truly maximize the potential of your influencer marketing ROI, aim to collect data that directly ties to your business results. A great example of this is the approach taken by the performance marketing agency Kynship in their campaign for Create Wellness.

The agency identified 1,000 relevant influencers and sent them a no-strings-attached free product. By using MightyScout’s ability to track content for unpaid influencer marketing campaigns, Kynship was able to track and count the number of influencers that participated, how many posted content about the product, and the total number of assets created.

One of MightyScout’s unique capabilities is tracking and capturing influencer content generated by product seeding or gifting campaigns.

Lesser-known ways to analyze your influencer marketing campaigns

There are other models for getting ROI from influencer marketing that aren't widely discussed. While they might not showcase glitzy numbers like the traditional metrics do, you can use them to understand the more nuanced parts of your influencer campaigns—like the correlation between how many influencers received a product and how many ended up posting about it.

1. Product seeding to lower CAC via ads

With this model, "product seeds" or free products are sent to a carefully selected group of influencers without expectations or contractual obligations. The goal is to generate buzz and start relationships with the selected influencers for future profitable collaborations.

To track this, focus on metrics such as:

• The number of influencers invited.

• The opt-in rate for receiving products.

• The number of posts created.

• The total number of creative assets.

The analytics here are different. It's more about how many influencers you invite to take part, how many go on to post, and how many creative assets are created.

If you've invited influencers to sign up for your affiliate program, track that number and also the number who have joined, and those who end up posting (and how often they post).

The ROI in this model, proven by Kynship.co, stems from the ads and affiliates. Even though content is not expected when you send product seeds, some influencers do create and share content. The more unique content you can feed into ads, the lower your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) will be. Bonus: This process is entirely scalable. You can set up your affiliate program to be ROI-positive by refining who you send your product seeds to and the by ensuring payment terms that are profitable.

2. Product gifting/seeding instead of costly photoshoots

Product gifting and seeding are an excellent strategies for generating more brand awareness and content. According to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, 30.8% of brands send free products to influencers in exchange for content.

Start by creating a list and send them products (and sometimes compensation) in exchange for creating content that features your brand or products.

Take this example from Hadeel Elmadhoon, a fashion and lifestyle influencer. It's not an ad or a sponsored post, and if you check the comment section, you will see that people love the fit and are asking about it.

You can use metrics like the number of content assets created, awareness (how many people are talking about your brand), and positive sentiment in the comments to measure the success of your gifting campaigns.

This approach can be more cost-effective than traditional photoshoots, which often involve expensive professional photographers, studio time, model compensation, days offsite, and extensive coordination.

By collaborating with influencers, especially niche models, you can create authentic and diverse content in many more locales at a lower cost than hiring specialized models for photoshoots.

3. Influencer Events and ROI Tracking

When done right, influencer events can attract new customers and put you on the map. Take a page from Topicals' book of influencer marketing.

In 2023, Topicals hosted a fully BIPOC-sponsored brand trip and featured creators with smaller follower counts. The influencer trip resulted in 3 million impressions and an increase of 5,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram.

But how do you track the content from these events and what analytics matter?

Start by using event-specific hashtags and monitoring social media activity during and after the event.

Pay close attention to metrics like:

• Website traffic.
• Number of content assets created.
• Social media reach.
• Social media engagement.
• Sales (if it's a new product launch)

To maximize the ROI of your influencer events, use unique URLs or discount codes specific to each influencer so you can attribute sales and conversions directly to individual influencers and the event itself.

MightyScout is one of the only influencer marketing platforms that specifically tracks content from influencer events. All assets are pulled into your central dashboard so you’ll never miss an influencer's share again while you’re juggling the logistics of an event.

Influencer marketing analytics FAQs

1. How do I find influencer analytics?

To find an influencer’s past performance analytics, you can use influencer marketing platforms like MightyScout, which provides comprehensive data on an influencer's reach, engagement, and audience demographics.

Alternatively, you can ask influencers for their media kit or reports, often including key metrics and insights into their performance.

2. How do you track influencer marketing performance?

Track influencer marketing performance by setting clear goals and KPIs, such as the number of creative assets produced, reach, engagement rate, click-through rate, and conversions.

Use unique tracking links, discount codes, or hashtags for each influencer to attribute results accurately.

Finally, regularly monitor and analyze the data to optimize your campaigns and maximize ROI.

3. What are influencer analytics?

Influencer analytics are the data points and metrics that help you assess an influencer's impact and effectiveness.

It includes follower count, engagement rate, audience demographics, reach, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

Analyzing these metrics allows you to make data-driven decisions to improve your influencer marketing strategy.

Optimize your influencer campaigns with the right analytics

Increasing your influencer marketing ROI is all about tracking the most relevant metrics like the number of assets created, reach, engagement, and conversions.

This way, you can identify top-performing influencers and optimize your campaigns for success.

Remember, partnering with authentic influencers who align with your brand's values and target audience is non-negotiable for driving meaningful results.

If you want to add a partner to the mix, book a demo with our expert team and we’ll show you how we make tracking influencer analytics as easy as pie.