Measuring influencer ROI requires tracking both engagement metrics and tangible business outcomes to evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. The first step is defining clear objectives, whether the goal is brand awareness, website traffic, or direct sales. From there, engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, shares, story interactions, and saves, reveal how well influencer-driven content resonates with the audience. Reach and impressions quantify visibility, while follower growth shows long-term community impact. Here’s more about what to track and how to track it.
What to Track: Key Metrics for ROI
When measuring influencer ROI, it’s critical to track both engagement metrics and business outcomes, depending on your campaign goals. Here’s a breakdown:
Engagement: This is the number of likes, comments, shares, saves, and story interactions the content receives in your social media channels. It indicates content resonance and audience activity
Reach and impressions: These terms refer to the total number of unique viewers exposed to the social media content and the total number of times the content was displayed. These figures help assess visibility and brand awareness.
Audience or follower growth: This refers to the number of new social media followers your brand gains during and after the campaign, and it’s useful for long-term community building as well as tracking awareness.
Website traffic: This “click count” can be generated via a unique UTM code that tracks how many clicks were generated from a specific influencer's content. This code might be used in QR codes or links provided by the influencer to their audience.
Click-through rate: This represents direct traffic driven by influencer content through links in their bio, swipe-ups on content, or trackable URLs.
Sales and conversions: This is the number of sales generated from influencer involvement. This can be tracked via promo codes (unique to the influencer), affiliate links, or custom landing page actions. It’s the most direct measure of ROI.
Brand mentions and sentiment: These metrics track how your brand is being discussed, and how often it’s mentioned, in comments and captions.
User-generated content: Keep tabs on how many people created content inspired by the influencer's unboxing and shared it using your campaign hashtag.
Engagement Benchmarks for Major Platforms
Benchmarks for engagement rates vary significantly by platform, industry, and influencer tier. Generally, the smaller the influencer's audience, the higher the engagement rate tends to be. The following are general benchmarks for a "good" engagement rate, but remember to look at your specific industry for more accurate data.
Instagram
- Nano-Influencers (1K-10K followers): 4-8%
- Micro-Influencers (10K-100K followers): 2-4%
- Mid-Tier Influencers (100K-500K followers): 1.5-3%
- Macro-Influencers (500K+ followers): 1-2%
TikTok
- TikTok's algorithm favors high engagement, so benchmarks are generally higher than Instagram. A good engagement rate is often 3-5% or more.
- Since TikTok content is discovery-focused, a high engagement rate often leads to a post "going viral," which can drastically increase reach and impressions.
YouTube
- YouTube engagement is measured by likes, comments, and, most importantly, watch time. A video with a high average watch time is considered highly engaging by YouTube's algorithm.
- A good engagement rate (likes and comments relative to views) is generally around 1-3%.
Engagement Benchmarks Across Categories
In addition to influencer tier, content performance is heavily influenced by the category or niche; here’s how engagement commonly shakes out:
- Beauty and fashion: This category often has high engagement on platforms like Instagram and TikTok due to its visual nature. Content includes tutorials, hauls, and styling tips.
- Food and lifestyle: Content around food is highly shareable. Recipes, restaurant reviews, and cooking tutorials can drive high engagement. The success of this category is often measured by saves and shares.
- Gaming and tech: This category thrives on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Discord. Performance is often measured by watch time and unique website clicks or downloads, rather than just likes and comments. The audience is highly technical and values authentic reviews.
- Travel: This content is very visually appealing, leading to high impressions. Engagement is driven by audience aspiration. Key metrics include likes and shares, but also long-term brand lift and destination interest.
How to Calculate ROI: Formulas
To provide a complete view of your influencer kit's ROI, it's essential to look at the earned media value, cost per engagement, and customer acquisition cost. Here are the key formulas for each.
Earned Media Value (EMV)
EMV assigns a monetary value to the organic exposure your brand receives from influencer content. It helps you understand what you would have had to pay for that same reach and engagement through traditional paid advertising.
Impressions-Based Formula:
EMV=(Impressions/1000) × CPM
- Impressions: The total number of times the content was seen. This is provided in the influencer's analytics.
- CPM (Cost Per Mille/1000 Impressions): The average cost you would pay for 1,000 impressions on a paid ad platform (e.g., Instagram or TikTok ads). You can get this from your own ad campaigns or industry benchmarks. A common practice is to add a premium (e.g., 50%) to your paid CPM, as organic influencer content is often considered more trustworthy and valuable.
Engagement-Based Formula:
EMV=(Total Engagements)×CPE
- Total Engagements: The sum of likes, comments, shares, and saves.
- CPE (Cost Per Engagement): The average cost you would pay for a single engagement on a paid ad platform. This formula can be a more accurate reflection of a post's true value, as it focuses on active interactions rather than passive views.
Cost Per Engagement (CPE)
CPE measures how much you are paying for each like, comment, or share the content generates. It is a powerful metric for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of your influencer partnerships.
CPE Formula:
CPE=Total Investment/Total Engagements
- Total Investment: This should include the cost of the product, the influencer's fee (if any), shipping, and any other associated expenses.
- Total Engagements: The sum of all likes, comments, shares, and saves on the influencer's post.
A low CPE indicates a highly efficient campaign where you are getting a lot of engagement for your money. You can use this metric to compare the effectiveness of different influencers and decide who to work with in the future.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC measures the total cost it takes to acquire a single paying customer from a specific marketing channel, for example, a pop-up shop driven by influencer marketing. This is the ultimate bottom-line metric.
CAC Formula:
CAC=Total Cost of Campaign/Number of New Customers Acquired
- Total Cost of Campaign: This should be a comprehensive number, including the cost of the influencer kits, shipping, the pop-up shop rental, staff salaries, marketing, and any other operational costs related to the pop-up.
- Number of New Customers Acquired: The number of unique, paying customers who can be directly attributed to the influencer marketing campaign. This is tracked through unique discount codes, affiliate links, or post-purchase surveys.
By calculating CAC, you can determine if the revenue generated from new customers is greater than the cost of acquiring them, which is the definition of a profitable campaign. You can also compare this CAC to other marketing channels (e.g., paid social ads, email marketing) to see which is the most efficient way to acquire customers.
How to Track Metrics
Many of the metrics listed above are trackable in-platform, or via a separate analytics tool like Google Analytics. To tie direct business results (i.e., sales) to influencer actions, use trackable links, promo codes, or affiliate links. These tools allow you to measure click-through rates, conversions, and sales attributed to the influencer.
Qualitative analysis is also crucial; monitoring comments and sentiment can reveal how the brand is perceived and whether influencer content aligns with your messaging. Combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights ensures a full picture of influencer ROI, guiding optimization for future campaigns.
Tracking Tools and Platforms
Tracking influencer ROI can be complex, but a variety of tools and platforms exist to help. These range from simple, free options to sophisticated, all-in-one platforms. They can generally be categorized by their primary function: analytics and tracking, influencer discovery and management, and all-in-one solutions.
Analytics and Tracking Tools
These tools focus on the data, helping you measure the performance of an influencer campaign.
- Google Analytics: A free and essential tool for tracking conversions and website traffic from an influencer. By giving each influencer a unique UTM code (a small piece of code added to a URL), you can see exactly how much traffic and revenue they drive to your site. You can also track metrics like session duration and bounce rate from their audience.
- Unique discount codes: This is a simple, no-cost method. By giving each influencer a specific discount code (e.g., "JESSICA20"), you can directly attribute sales to them. It's a clear-cut way to measure both revenue and customer acquisition cost (CAC) for each influencer.
- Social media analytics (in-platform): Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube provide built-in analytics for business accounts. You can view key metrics like reach, impressions, audience demographics, and engagement rates for a sponsored post. This is a great starting point for measuring top-of-funnel success.
Influencer Discovery and Management Platforms
These platforms offer a broader range of features, helping you find influencers and then track their performance within one system.
- CreatorIQ: A robust platform that offers influencer discovery, campaign management, and advanced analytics. It can automate the process of collecting data, providing deep insights into audience demographics, authenticity scores, and detailed ROI reports.
- AspireIQ: This platform is known for its influencer marketplace, where brands can find, vet, and manage their collaborations. It provides tools for campaign workflow automation, content rights management, and ROI tracking, including the ability to calculate earned media value.
- Mavrck: An all-in-one platform that helps brands with influencer discovery, recruitment, and relationship management. Its analytics suite provides comprehensive dashboards to measure campaign performance against specific KPIs and attribute conversions.
Tracking Influencer ROI for Experiential Marketing Events
Attribution for experiential marketing, especially when paired with influencers, presents a unique challenge because it combines the measurable digital world with the less-trackable physical one. Unlike a purely digital campaign where a click can be directly tied to a conversion, a person's decision to attend an event and then make a purchase is often a multi-touchpoint journey that is difficult to isolate. Here are some specific attribution challenges and solutions.
Attribution Challenges
Lack of direct clicks: An influencer's call to action to "come to my event" does not generate a trackable click in the same way a "buy now" link does. The physical action of attending the event breaks the digital tracking chain.
The delayed conversion: A consumer might attend the event, interact with the brand, and then make a purchase a week later online. Without a mechanism to tie that online purchase back to the event, the conversion is lost to the experiential campaign's ROI.
The human factor: People share information verbally. A person may attend an event because of an influencer's post, then tell their friend to buy the product, which results in a conversion that is not tied to the original source.
No single source: Experiential marketing often has multiple marketing channels working simultaneously (influencers, social media ads, email, etc.). It becomes difficult to definitively say which channel drove a person to the event and, subsequently, to a purchase.
Solutions and Strategies
To overcome these challenges, brands must create a "digital breadcrumb trail" that links the physical experience back to a measurable online action.
Unique Event Codes & RSVP Tracking
Each influencer is given a unique event code. Their followers use this code to RSVP for the event on a dedicated landing page. This page collects their email and other data and attributes the RSVP to that specific influencer. The code can also be used as a special discount for a purchase made at the event or online later.
Event-Specific QR Codes
The influencer can post a specific QR code on their social media that leads to an RSVP page, a product page, or a special offer. The brand can also place unique QR codes at the physical event itself (e.g., on a display or a handout) that provide a discount or lead to a social media contest.
Post-Event Surveys & Follow-up
After the event, send a follow-up email to all attendees thanking them for coming and asking, "How did you hear about our event?" The email can include a survey with a dropdown menu listing the influencers and other marketing channels.
Unique Hashtags and Geo-filters
Create a unique campaign hashtag for the event (e.g., #BrandXExperience) and an event-specific social media geo-filter. Encourage influencers and attendees to use them.
