Influencer marketing is more than just a trend in 2024. With more than 67% of marketers planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets this year, influencer marketing can rightly be a crucial component of a successful marketing strategy.

However, the real magic of influencer marketing lies in its ability to be data-driven. By harnessing the power of data, brands can fine-tune their campaigns, track performance, and optimize for better results. In fact, 89% of marketers say that the ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. 

However, you need an effective way to gather, analyze, and act on data to truly capitalize on the benefits of influencer marketing. This is where building a robust influencer marketing dashboard comes in. In this guide, we will walk you through the essential steps to create an influencer marketing dashboard so that you can leverage the power of data to elevate your influencer marketing efforts! Let’s dive in!

What is an Influencer Marketing Dashboard? 

An influencer marketing dashboard is a centralized platform that consolidates all essential metrics, data, and insights from influencer marketing campaigns. 

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It enables marketers to monitor, analyze, and optimize their influencer campaigns for greater ROI and gauge the effectiveness of each influencer partnership for their brands in real time. An influencer marketing dashboard evaluates an influencer's performance by showcasing their efforts to promote your brand’s products or services on your behalf and the degree to which they succeeded in improving brand awareness, demand, or sales.

Why Do You Need an Influencer Marketing Dashboard?

Knowing who is harming and who is helping your brand's efforts to attract new customers is important if you are paying influencers to advertise it.

Using influencer marketing dashboards, you can centralize creator data, track campaign performance, and measure ROI for every individual partnership. Once you zero in on the creators generating a positive return on your investment, you may dedicate more of your funding to them, thus, increasing your brand’s reach, trust, and revenue. Visualizing metrics and KPIs on an influencer marketing dashboard can enable better decision-making and optimization, ultimately enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your influencer marketing efforts.

Now, let’s examine some of the benefits of using a dashboard for influencer campaign management and analysis, as highlighted below.

Benefits of Using a Dashboard for Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Some crucial benefits of using an influencer marketing dashboard include: 

Streamlined Data Management

Managing data from multiple influencers and social media platforms can be overwhelming. An influencer marketing dashboard consolidates data from various sources into one unified view. 

This means you can track metrics such as engagement rates, follower growth, and conversion rates without navigating through different tools or manually compiling reports. 

For instance, you can integrate data from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok into a single dashboard, giving you a comprehensive overview of your campaign performance in one place. This streamlined approach saves time and reduces the risk of data discrepancies.

Enhanced Performance Tracking

Real-time analytics provided by dashboards allow marketers to monitor the performance of their influencer campaigns continuously. 

This includes tracking metrics such as likes, comments, clicks, and shares. 

Dashboards visualize this data through charts and graphs, making it easier to identify which influencers and content pieces drive the most engagement. For example, if you notice a particular post receiving high engagement, you can amplify it with additional support or a bigger budget. 

Time and Cost Efficiency

Automating data collection and reporting processes through a dashboard can significantly reduce the time and effort required to manage influencer campaigns. Instead of manually compiling data from various platforms, the dashboard automatically updates metrics in real time. 

This automation saves hours of manual work and reduces the likelihood of human error. It allows marketers to allocate more time to creative tasks, strategic planning, and building relationships with influencers, ultimately leading to more impactful campaigns.

Enhanced Collaboration and Transparency

Collaborating with several influencers simultaneously can make it difficult to keep track of conversations and campaign data. Using a centralized dashboard that acts as a single source of truth can help marketers foster better collaboration. It ensures everyone involved in the campaign—from marketers to social media coordinators—can access the same information. 

This alignment helps coordinate efforts, share insights, and make informed decisions collectively. For example, if a campaign is underperforming, team members can quickly identify the issue and brainstorm solutions together. Enhanced transparency also builds trust with stakeholders, as they can easily access and review campaign performance data.

How To Build Influencer Marketing Dashboard

Building an influencer marketing dashboard requires two steps: identifying key metrics and choosing the right tools.

Let’s discuss both of these in detail below.

Identifying Key Metrics 

Identifying key metrics that will provide the most valuable insights into your campaign performance is crucial to measuring the success of your influencer marketing efforts. These metrics should align with your overall marketing goals and objectives. 

Here are some critical metrics to consider:

1. Reach: It is the total number of unique viewers of an influencer's content. The greater the reach, the greater your chances of increasing brand recognition, traffic, and revenue. 

You can calculate reach by dividing the total impressions i.e., the number of times viewers have seen the influencer's content, by the frequency i.e., the number of times each viewer sees it.

2. Engagement Rate: It is the percentage of likes, comments, shares, and other engagements that an influencer's content receives. Engagement levels indicate how interested individuals are in what influencers are saying and doing. 

You can calculate the engagement rate by adding up the likes, comments, shares, and other interactions and dividing it by reach (discussed above).

3. Click-Through Rate (CTR): It is the proportion of content viewers who click on a link within an influencer's post. Higher click-through rates indicate that an influencer’s content about your brand effectively engages their target audience and persuades them to visit your website or follow you on social media. 

You can calculate CTR by dividing the number of clicks received by the total number of impressions and multiplying that by 100.

4. Conversion Rate: It is the percentage of individuals that complete a desired activity (such as a purchase or a sign-up) after clicking on your sponsored link in an influencer's content. Higher conversion rates indicate an influencer’s power over their community and show how well their content can turn interest into actions like generating leads and converting sales.

You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks on your brand’s sponsored link and multiplying that by 100.

5. Return on Investment (ROI): It is a measure of the financial returns generated from influencer marketing campaigns. Assessing ROI is key to determining whether influencer marketing is paying off for your brand. 

To measure the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign, subtract the total cost from the total revenue it generated, divide that by the total cost, and then multiply it by 100.

6. Brand Mentions: These are the tags that your brand receives on social media and other platforms. Attributing brand mentions accurately to individual influencers’ posts can be difficult; however, a spike can indicate an increase in brand awareness and provide insights into how your brand is being perceived by your target prospects.

You can calculate brand mentions across social networks using social listening tools.

7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): It is the cost of acquiring a new customer through your influencer marketing campaign. CPA helps you understand the cost-effectiveness of your campaign, and setting a benchmark for this metric can help you optimize your influencer marketing efforts without breaking the bank.

You can calculate cost per acquisition by dividing the total cost of your campaign by the number of conversions.

Choosing the Right Tools

Building an effective influencer marketing dashboard also requires choosing the right tools to automate KPI reporting, monitor and manage campaigns, and record analytics data for further optimization.

You could track all of this data manually with a spreadsheet, but automated solutions can help you save time and run campaigns on a large scale, even for small teams.

Here are some tools that must be part of your influencer marketing dashboard:

• Data Collection Tools: These include social media analytics software like Instagram Insights and YouTube Analytics, social media listening tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, and influencer marketing platform such as InsightIQ for tracking campaign performance
• Data Integration Tools: These include social media APIs like those from InsightIQ (discussed below) and Zapier to connect different apps and automate workflows
• Data Storage Tools: These include database systems like SQL, NoSQL, and MongoDB and cloud storage services like Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS
• Data Visualization Tools: These include dashboard software like Powe Bi and Google Data Studio and custom dashboard tools like those offered by InsightIQ that use JavaScript libraries like D3.js and Chart.js for more tailored visualizations
• Project Management Tools: These include task management tools like Trello, Asana, or Jira and communication tools like Google Meet, Slack, and Microsoft Teams

Designing Your Influencer Marketing Dashboard (A Step-By-Step Guide)

Now that you know what an influencer marketing dashboard is, its purpose, its benefits, and how you can plan it, let’s check out the steps to designing one:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

This first step to building your influencer marketing dashboard the right way involves establishing clear and measurable influencer marketing goals that align with your overall influencer marketing strategy.

Without this step, your dashboard might include pointless or excessive information, making it more difficult to interpret and use your data.

Are you attempting to increase brand recognition? Or are you trying to boost sales? Establishing a target facilitates the next step of this process, which is ranking and identifying metrics that are key performance indicators (KPIs), i.e., the information you must monitor to assess whether your influencer marketing campaign is successful.

Step 2: Determine Your KPIs

The second step of designing your influencer marketing dashboard is selecting which KPIs to monitor in accordance with your influencer marketing goals. These metrics will be employed to determine a campaign's level of success. 

It should be simple for team members and customers to understand your dashboard and act on the information displayed. Therefore, you should limit your KPIs after you've selected them. You should choose three to five high-impact KPIs for any influencer campaign you run.

For instance, for a brand awareness influencer marketing campaign, some key metrics could be reach, engagement rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), and brand mentions. On the other hand, for a conversion-focused campaign, your KPIs could be reach, engagement rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and return on investment. If increasing sales or conversions is your goal, you should closely focus on your click-through and conversion rates for your content published by influencers on social media channels. You should also monitor the ROI of your campaigns to gauge whether your influencer marketing efforts are yielding a profit.

This brings us to the following action…

Step 3: Set Up Tracking Links

The third step to building your influencer marketing dashboard involves precisely tracing your referral traffic to determine the return on investment of your influencer marketing. Using UTMs is the best method for doing this. A tiny bit of code called a UTM parameter is appended to the end of a URL to monitor campaign effectiveness. Here is an example:

Using UTM parameters enables more precise identification of referral traffic sources by web analytics systems like Google Analytics, helping you accurately track the number of website visitors and conversions attributable to a given influencer.

Using discount codes or affiliate links is another method of tracking referrals from your influencer marketing campaigns. While they require more work to set up and maintain, they can be a great way to encourage influencers to produce more content for your brand and encourage call-to-action responses from their audiences.

Step 4: Convert Numbers into Visual Data

The fourth step of designing your influencer marketing dashboard involves making your data easily digestible by visually displaying graphs and charts.

This provides a visual context for your data that clients and marketing teams may use to measure their influencer marketing efforts accurately. Furthermore, it is simpler to take action when reports are easier to read. Here is an example from the InsightIQ influencer marketing platform:

Graphs and charts make your data look less boring and enable you to spot trends that can help you optimize your campaigns for desired results. With InsightIQ, you can customize your dashboard to reflect your brand’s aesthetics, highlight key metrics within a user-friendly layout, and transform as much of your numbers into visual data to facilitate simple understanding and informed decision-making.

Step 5: Automate Your Analytics Reporting

Dashboards are designed to help you assess how well your approach works on various social media platforms. Whether your approach makes use of smaller "micro-influencers" or more in-demand content creators, your investment can mount up quickly, particularly if you are managing several campaigns at once.

You must discover profitable campaigns early to maintain an optimized marketing budget and produce a good return on investment. The primary disadvantage of using a dashboard tool or manually tracking your data in a spreadsheet is that you have to remember to check your data—something that is all too easy to forget about when you have a hectic schedule. This is where automated reporting can help you save time and money.

With an AI-powered influencer marketing platform like InsightIQ, you can fast-track data compilation and generate instant automated campaign reports that provide valuable insights across all social media activities. Whether you want to dig deep into content views, likes, shares, and clicks, explore the impact of aggregated campaigns to decipher the bigger picture, or simply enhance your influencer marketing strategy with transparency, automating your analytics reporting is an important final step to create an effective and efficient influencer marketing dashboard.

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Use InsightIQ To Build Your Influencer Marketing Dashboard!

Creating influencer dashboards can be challenging. Many marketing teams spend too much time and effort building a single dashboard that fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of how a brand’s influencer marketing efforts are contributing to its marketing objectives. 

This is where investing in an influencer marketing analytics tool like InsightIQ can be a game-changer!

‍InsightIQ is an AI-powered influencer marketing platform with features like creator search, campaign management, and ROI measurement that can help you find the top influencers, streamline campaign tracking, and accurately attribute sales driven by influencers. This software provides you with a single dashboard that you can use to —

• Filter and Select the Best Influencers: Find influencers whose voice and personality align with your brand's values by searching and analyzing influencers, their affinities, previous performances, and more using 50+ filters. You can also get in-depth engagement analysis, filter fake followers, and uncover their audiences’ purchase intent from prior sponsored posts with InsightIQ’s dashboard.

• Gain Insights into Target Audience and Campaign Data: Evaluate influencer audience demographics by gaining deep insights into the average age, gender, geography, and interests of a creator's audience. Once you account for these factors, you can launch multiple influencer campaigns and track their performances using the instant and continuous campaign tracking features offered by InsightIQ’s dashboard.

• Integrate APIs for Seamless Functionalities: InsightIQ’s dashboard offers one-click integration with the platform’s APIs, which power functions like creator search, content analysis, ROI and sentiment analysis, brand safety, and more. Using these APIs, you can analyze every sale’s origin and accurately attribute every influencer’s contribution to brand revenue, ensuring you know which creator’s influence generates brand ROI.

Instead of getting involved in the specifics of engineering your influencer dashboard, leveraging an influencer marketing platform like InsightIQ can enable you to pull the required data, simplify it, and display all the information in a single place so that you can start assessing the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns in a glance! Book a demo or try out the dashboard for free to take control of your influencer marketing data today!

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