Analytics will fuel any of your marketing campaigns, and this is especially true regarding influencer marketing over Instagram, TikTok, or any social media.
Understanding analytics and using them correctly is something that every marketer should do. Still, since so many of them exist, it is not easy to clearly understand what they are and when they matter. That is why we at CreatorDB put together a list of all the analytics you can find on social media and clearly explained their function.
This list divides into three categories:
- About the Influencer: for all those analytics to tell you if an influencer is going to be a good fit for your campaign
- About the Audience: these are the most common analytics to evaluate an audience
- For Marketers: these analytics will help you to make a cost-benefit analysis and understand the efficacy of a campaign from a more monetary point of view
About the Influencer
In this section, you will find all the metrics that relate to the influencer themselves that you can use to understand if they are a good fit for you and your campaign. I will also explain how some of these metrics can be tricky and what you should be aware of to not fall into traps.
Reach
Reach can indicate two things: the actual reach, the number of unique users that see a post from an influencer, or the potential reach, more like the expected number of people that would see a post. In the first case, social media provide influencers reach data telling them how many people have seen or interacted with a post. Higher numbers generally translate into higher engagement (see below). The second interpretation of reach is, crudely, just the number of followers an influencer has since you can expect that number of users to see their post.
Impressions
Impressions indicate the number of times a particular post is shown in the users’ timeline. If the same user sees the post multiple times, it counts for multiple impressions. Impressions are much higher than reach and reflect how relevant that content is for the users.
Engagement
Engagement is an essential analytic for evaluating an influencer. It combines likes, comments, shares, and clicks. By this metric, you can understand if an influencer’s audience is paying attention to the content.
Engagement is also one of the metrics you should carefully analyze when evaluating an influencer. While subscribers can be bought relatively cheaply and present the reach of any given influencer as massive, engagement is much more challenging to be continuously faked.
Therefore an influencer with a large following but very few comments and likes should be approached with caution.
Growth Rate
Growth rate captures the pace at which an influencer following is growing and is generally calculated monthly but could also be done yearly or any other time frame.
The formula is
A high growth rate can be highly beneficial to a marketing campaign since it means that even while partnering with the same influencer, the people seeing your sponsored content grew over time.
Conversions
Conversions are the most direct way to track ROI in influencer marketing. Conversions represent the number of people that bought your product directly from a given influencer or clicked on the link promoted. Conversions can be easily tracked by providing each influencer with personalized trackable links.
Source: Vecteezy.com
About the Audience
But it is not all about the influencer themselves. Who they are talking to is as important, if not more. In this section, we will go through the most used metrics to understand if the audience of a given influencer is the one you are looking for. These metrics are handy when your campaign has a specific consumer persona in mind, and you are looking for an influencer audience that matches such a persona.
Gender
Very simply, which percentage of the audience is male, and which ratio is female. Since in many online communities, males are the significant majority, gender can be expressed as % of females. If your products are explicitly targeting one gender, this is a critical metric to keep in mind.
Location
Where the audience is located. If your product requires shipping or localized versions, this is very important to keep in mind.
Age Groups
Ths is often presented as a bar graph and show the distribution of an influencer audience by age. Generally, age groups are 13-18, 19-24, 25-30, 31-40, 41-50, 50-65, and 65+. With these kinds of data, we can understand if an influencer audience is a good choice for our product.
Source: Vecteezy.com
For Marketers
Finally, what matters for the people working on the campaign and checking the budget. These analytics are not as flashy as the previous ones but allow to know if the efforts are paying off or if there is a need to update the strategy.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM)
CPM refers to the cost of a thousand impressions. You can have it as a flat rate for the payment of your influencers or derivate it by dividing how much has been spent on a post by how many thousand impressions it received. While impressions don’t directly translate into sales, they work toward brand awareness and visibility.
Earned Media Value
Earned Media Value (EVM) estimates word of mouth generated by any influencer post. It starts from engagement and quantifies the value of the content created in your brand community.
EVM calculates with the formula
The adjustable variable is going to be what you are tracking: Impressions, Likes, Comments, and so on.
Brand mentions
Brand mentions are the amount of time a company gets referred online. It can be as direct tagging but also mentions in comments, reviews, articles, and posts. Periodically checking on mentions is vital to keep in touch with how the public perceives the company since they allow you to get out of the bubble you may have built around yourself with sponsored content.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
To calculate CTRs, your campaign needs to be including a clickable link since CTR considers the number of impressions on a given post divided by the number of clicks gives you a sense of which percentage of the people who have been exposed to the ad decided to engage with it.
The CTR formula is
Congratulations! Now you know all you need to select the right influencers and effectively plan your next steps in the influencer marketing realms.
