Influencer Marketing: The Metrics That Matter Most

In the not-so-distant past, blogger promotions had only one metric: monthly unique visitors. Programs were pitched, approved, created, and executed based only on that one number. Even worse, once the program deployed, there weren’t any additional post-launch metrics to see how the promotion performed. Brands had no clue if their message resonated or how many people actually saw the stellar sponsored content.

Luckily, in the past few years, a handful of companies have started developing technology to help track the performance. Brands can finally see actual page views and engagement numbers. No more guesswork.

So which metrics actually matter?

Sponsored Post for Britax campaign

Unique Visitors per Month: This number is important — but not as much as previously thought. Yes, high UVs means great reach. But it doesn’t necessarily translate into engagement. I regularly see blogs with 10,000 UVs have more engagement on their post than blogs with 1 million UVs. Remember, many of the blogs getting huge numbers are seeing a lot of that come in through search. This means most of that traffic isn’t seeing your post. It’s never smart to use UVs as your only metric when determining success. It’s not the full picture.

Page Views: This is an important number that was previously unknown. Now, technology can track how many people actually visited an particular post. Best part: this number is verified by a trusted third party: Google Analytics. Finally, a true view of who saw your sponsored content.

Engagement Rate: One of the goals of an influencer promotion is to encourage engagement with a brand’s content and product. Technology allows us to track blog post comments, brand URL clicks within a post, Facebook likes & comments, and Twitter tweets, retweets, & brand mentions. We can also monitor activity on Pinterest and Instagram as well.

With these important metrics, brands can see the true impact of their promotion. Like I said before, no more guesswork.

Influencer marketing ROI

One last note: many brands and agencies want a dollar amount to assign to performance. One million page views is great, but what’s the monetary value? Technology has an answer for that too. Using industry content value benchmarks, we’re able to assign  a value per piece of content or engagement ($2/page view, $.50/tweet, etc.) which leads to a Total Media Value for a program. Currently, our clients are seeing a 10-fold return on their initial investment.

Are you interested in talking with us about an influencer promotion? We’d love to talk with you! Contact us today!

[hs_action id=”1535″]