Measuring success and ROI

To successfully scale your influencer marketing program, tracking your campaigns' performance is essential. This will provide valuable information for decision-making and budget allocation. Here are some tips on how to track performance and return on investment (ROI) with influencer marketing:

1. Set clear goals and objectives

Before you begin your influencer marketing campaign, defining your goals and objectives is important. This could be conversions, brand awareness, social following, or generating content. This section will focus on conversions as we want to explain how to turn your influencer marketing program into a performance marketing channel.  

There are two ways to track your influencer marketing performance:

1). Affiliate links: UTM links can be used to track clicks and conversions, and cookies can assign sales to an influencer even if the customer places an order at a later stage. This is the most effective way to track performance. 

2). Discount/coupon codes: Personalized discount codes can also be used to track performance by looking at how often they are used and for which orders to determine the conversion value. 

All of this is automated in our CRM, where you can create discount codes and affiliate links with a click of a button on the deal page. Check the instructions here

2. Expect some unattributed sales

As with every other digital marketing channel, you can never attribute/track 100% of your performance. A good rule of thumb is that around ⅓ of your influencer marketing sales are unattributed. 

Understand how attribution/tracking gets lost: Your affiliate link and discount code can only track performance if they are being used. One major way conversion gets lost if the influencers tag your social media account instead of using their affiliate link or using both their affiliate link and tagging your social media page. It is always good to step back and think about how traffic behaves. If the influencer tags your social media account, a lot of the traffic will check out your social media page first, e.g., on Instagram, then click the link in your bio to access your store. If you then also have a coupon code in your website header or somewhere else on your website and the customer might not use the discount code of the influencer hence attribution/tracking gets lost. 

This is why we usually recommend not adding a coupon/discount code to your website. It also prevents the influencer from getting upset if you work on an affiliate partnership. They know that their personal discount code is being used to track referrals, so if they see that you offer the same discount on your website, it reduces the trust in the affiliate partnership. 

When preparing budgets, it is important to keep these tips in mind. If you are working with fixed fees, it is usually best to use the performance from previous posts and add around 30% for unattributed sales to determine what amount you can allocate to achieve your desired ROAS/CAC.