Complete guide to influencer marketing KPIs

Setting up an influencer marketing campaign is littered with crucial steps, including choosing your influencers and measuring the campaign’s success.

In this complete guide, we present the different performance indicators (or KPIs) to use to ensure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign. It is therefore essential to know the different KPIs and to define the metrics that will be used in order to monitor the achievement of the set objectives.

What is a KPI?

A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. KPIs are measurable values that allow us to measure and follow the evolution of a marketing strategy or a campaign in order to reach the objectives set beforehand. They allow us to make adjustments, optimizations and confirm successes.

What are the KPIs to use to measure the success of an influencer campaign, according to the marketing objectives?

An influencer marketing campaign can meet various objectives:

  • Increase awareness and visibility
  • Improve brand image
  • Promote a product or service
  • Positioning the brand or product in a new market or with a new target
  • Generate sales or leads
  • Develop a community
  • Engage a community


Establishing your objectives is essential in setting up an influencer marketing campaign and these objectives must be kept in mind at each step of the campaign’s construction.

What are the visibility indicators?

  • Number of impressions:  number of times the publications have been displayed
  • Reach : number of people your publications have reached (some people may see a publication several times)
  • Number of views = number of times a publication in video format has been viewed

What are the engagement indicators?

To analyze the success of a publication or a campaign, we take into account the engagement KPIs that are :

  • Number of reactions : Likes, comments, …
  • Number of shares
  • Number of clicks
  • Engagement rate

The engagement rate is very easy to calculate but the method of calculation depends strongly on each social network.

Engagement can be calculated in several ways:

  • Engagement rate per post = total number of post engagements / number of followers of the influencer
  • Engagement rate per reach = Total number of post engagements / Number of followers of the influencer
  • Evolution of the number of subscribers to the brand’s account over the campaign period

The engagement rate varies according to the size of the audience, but also according to the social network and the sector of activity.

What are the traffic indicators?

If your influencer marketing campaign is meant to send followers to a website, then analyzing the success of your campaign also involves measuring the site’s traffic indicators:

  • Visits from influencer posts
  • New users on your site
  • Session duration
  • Bounce rate: the essential indicator to measure the relevance of the traffic coming to your site from the influencers’ publications. The bounce rate corresponds to the percentage of visitors who entered your site and left directly without opening another page.

What are the conversion indicators: leads and sales?

  • Number of conversions (purchase, form filling, download, registration etc.)
  • Conversions values
  • Average shopping cart
  • Conversion rate: out of the number of visits generated from the influencers’ publications, how many led to a sale?
  • Cost-based measurement: cost of acquisition, cost per lead, etc.

What are the impact and profitability indicators?

ROI (return on investment): the return on investment remains the preferred indicator for measuring the results of a marketing campaign. This KPI leads to determine if a marketing operation has been profitable and therefore a success in terms of financial income. Simply put, the ROI is the money earned in relation to the budget invested.
The EMV (earned media value) corresponds to the equivalent in media or advertising value to achieve this result. More simply, EMV answers the question “How much would I have had to spend on traditional media to achieve these results?”
We also talk about IMV (Influencer Media Value) which reflects the earned media value and the cost of influencers. When looking at the success of a post or an influencer campaign, the EMV or IMV can quantify the personal brand value of that influencer, in monetary value. Be aware, however, that an influencer’s EMV or IMV can vary depending on the budget, the nature of the product or service being promoted and the social network used for the influencer campaign.

How to monitor the indicators?

The most accurate and fastest method is to use an influencer marketing solution to track your campaigns. The Stellar tool tracks all content, regardless of the format and social network, in order to precisely measure the results for each indicator. The measurement of indicators is automated and goes directly into dashboards and reports that can be exported and shared online.

On Stellar, it is also possible to directly track sales or leads generated by using custom promo codes per influencer, or directly with an affiliate link (this is a URL link used by the influencer to redirect to a brand’s offer or product).

You can accompany your influencer marketing solution with a web analytics tool like Google Analytics or AT Internet. They will allow you to dive into the data on your website or application visitors, from the entry on the site to the exit, through the conversion. This tracking system is based on tracking codes such as UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module), which allows you to identify and track traffic from campaigns in the Google Analytics interface. These UTM parameters are placed at the end of the URL and are generally made of 3 main elements (utm source / media / campaign) allowing to categorize the social network, the influencer and the campaign concerned. This way, you can complete your analysis of your influencer marketing strategy with a better understanding of the behavior of visitors coming from your campaigns with influencers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
The main KPIs to follow to measure your influencer campaigns.

Based on your KPIs, you can analyze your influencer campaigns and optimize your strategy to achieve your goals.
Stellar allows you to estimate the results of your KPIs and track actual performances.
You can then measure the impact of your influencers and their content.