If you have been planning to execute your first influencer marketing campaign but are not sure the influencer analytics you should be accurately? Well, you’ve landed in the right place.

In this article, we’ll guide you on how to analyze the influencer data the right way and identify authentic influencers. 

Key Metrics at Each Campaign Stage

Different campaign stages require different influencer metrics. But what do these metrics look like? Here are a few influencer marketing metrics you must track at different campaign stages:

Planning Stage Metrics

At this stage, your focus is on setting up your influencer marketing success. To measure the success of your planning stage, here are three influencer marketing metrics you must track:

• Audience demographics: By tracking audience demographics, you can know the age, location, gender, and interests of your influencers’ followers—this can help you identify the right influencers to collaborate with. 
• Engagement rate: By tracking this metric, you’ll know the influencer’s engagement rate which will help you identify the authenticity of the influencer’s follower base. 
• Content relevance: By tracking his metric, you’ll get to know the type of content influencers produce—which will help you understand whether the content influencer creates aligns with your brand or not. 

Execution Stage Metrics

At this stage, you’ll focus on how your campaign is actively performing. A few metrics you must track here include:

• Engagement metrics: By tracking this metric, you'll understand the level of engagement—comments, shares, and saves each influencer is receiving on their campaign posts. 
• Reach: By tracking this metric, you'll know the audience size the campaign is reaching and the impact of your partnerships with influencers—which is a great deciding factor to collaborate with the influencer again or not. 
• Impression: By tracking this metric, you'll know how many people are seeing ads within a particular channel and how successful channel A is in accomplishing your influencer goals compared to the other. 

Post-Campaign Analysis Metrics

At this stage, you’ll focus on how your campaign has performed—after the campaign has been completed. A few metrics you’ll track here include:

• Clickthrough rate: By tracking this metric, you'll know the conversion-based engagement that comes via influencer content like how many people clicked a specific CTA. 
• Sentiment analysis: By tracking sentiment analysis, you'll know how your target audience feels about this campaign—positive, negative, or neutral—which further tells you the campaign’s effectiveness.
• Conversion rate: By tracking this metric, you'll know how successful the influencer campaign was and how you can optimize it for better future outcomes. 
• ROI: By tracking this metric, you can make informed decisions, allocate resources and budget efficiently, and optimize future influencer collaborations for maximum profitability. 

Analyzing Influencer Campaigns

To track influencer marketing campaigns, you need a step-by-step in place to analyze the data.

Step 1: Define Campaign Goals and KPIs

Do you want to increase brand awareness for your client with this campaign? Do you want to increase their sales? Or maybe you want to generate high-quality leads. Understand what your campaign goal is.

Once you've done this, identify the KPIs to align with your goal. 

Step 2: Implement Tracking mechanisms

Next, set the tracking processes for your influencers to monitor the traffic and conversions you get from each influencer. 

But the question is, how will you track the conversion rate from your influencer campaigns when these conversions happen indirectly through the influencers? Whether you're working with new influencers or the ones you've collaborated with in the past, you can track the conversions with two common attribution practices: 

UTMs

When influencers include UTMs in their campaign content, you can track the traffic and conversions you get from each influencer's content. 

Doing so, you can understand which social media channel drives more traffic and conversions for the campaign. Plus, you'll be able to understand the kind of content that resonates with the audience. 

For example, if an influencer collaborated with a SaaS productivity tool and wants to increase feature adoption with the campaign—they'll add a UTM link to the specific feature when sharing with their audience.

Use link tracking tools like Bit.ly or Cut.ly to generate UTM links. Make sure to focus on parameters such as source, medium, campaign, and content to generate the links, and use the link shortener to shorten your links (since the UTM links are quite long). 

Here’s an example of how a creator tracked engagement on their collaboration post using Cut.ly. 

Promo Codes

When influencers use unique promo codes in their sponsored content, you can track which specific influencers are bringing conversions for the campaign. Doing so, you can allocate the resources and budget by focusing on and collaborating with influencers who generate the highest ROI. 

For example, Shelby Vanhoy, a home decor influencer shares a promo code ‘PRETTYINTHEPINES10’ for her followers to use when they purchase the rug from the brand, Ruggable that she talks about in her post. 

Bonus tip: Create UTM links and promo codes right inside InsightIQ—without using another link tracking tool. 

Custom Landing Pages

Designing landing pages for each influencer helps you track the leads and sales each influencer brings. This will also help you understand the direct results each influencer collaboration brings to your brand. 

Step 4: Collect Data

With the help of specific influencer marketing tools, collect the relevant data. Here are the different types of data you need to track:

• Engagement data: Comments, social media shares, and saves the specific influencer receives on their sponsored content
• Traffic data: Number of visitors, session duration, bounce rates, number of demos booked, and average time on site
• Conversion data: Number of conversions, number of signups, number of demos booked, and average order value

For example, when SquareSpace collaborated with YouTube influencers, the brand focused on two types of data—engagement and conversion. 

• Engagement data—34M views and 58M+ likes
• Conversion data—Increased signups

Step 5: Analyze the Data and Evaluate Influencer Performance

To analyze the data, you can leverage two ways:

1. Benchmarking: Compare the performance based on industry standards and goals. For example, 
2. Trend analysis: Look for patterns and trends in the data to identify what worked well and what didn't. 

Engagement

How many comments has the influencer received on the post? What is the level of engagement audiences have on the influencer's post? Is it just a one-word comment, or have the followers shared detailed comments? Has the influencer responded to the comments? Was the content shared or saved (or both) by the followers? Determine the quality of engagement and then calculate the engagement rate. 

To calculate the engagement rate, divide the total engagement (i.e., shares, comments, and reactions) by total followers and multiplied by 100.

Engagement rate = (Total engagement) / (Total followers) * 100

Traffic

Did the visitor watch the demo on your website? Did they spend more time on the pricing page? Did they spend more time in the resources section (maybe they read the blog posts or case studies in the resource section)? Did they add the product to the cart? Check the website traffic to see which influencers drove more traffic and how the visitors interacted on landing on the website. 

Conversion

How many conversions did each influencer bring? What are the user actions taken? Clicked on the link, visited the website, booked a demo, or added the product to the cart? Calculate the conversions you receive from each influencer.

Step 6: Gather Qualitative Feedback

Once you’ve analyzed the influencer marketing data and influencers’ performance, understand how to improve your future campaigns. For this, understand your audience’s sentiment and get feedback from influencers. 

• Audience sentiment: Analyze comments to understand the audience’s sentiment towards the campaign—understand the emotions and how they feel about this campaign. 
• Influencer feedback: Get feedback from influencers on the campaign—what worked, what didn’t, and what are the types of questions their audience asked them on DMs. 

Step 7: Create a Comprehensive Report

Once you have analyzed all the data, create the influencer marketing report—either manually or using influencer tools like InsightIQ. Make sure your report has the following essentials:

• Performance metrics
• Campaign results
• Content insights
• Influencer performance and insights
• Social platform performance
• Key learnings and next steps

Step 8: Try A/B Testing

Based on the report generated, make tweaks in your strategy—refining your influencer selection, content strategies used, times of posting, or using better tracking mechanisms. Implement the changes in your campaign and track results. Keep on analyzing the results and optimizing the campaigns for better results. 

Tools for Effective Analysis 

The best way to analyze influencer campaigns is by using an influencer marketing platform. Here are three tools you can use to track the data. 

InsightIQ

InsightIQ is an influencer discovery platform that helps you find influencers, track influencer campaigns, and measure ROI from each campaign and influencer.

• With the Campaign Tracking feature, you can measure the ROAS and identify purchase intent in real-time.
• With the ROI measurement feature, you can get advanced insights into how influencer collaboration impacts your complete marketing funnel.

MightyScout

MightyScout is an all-in-one influencer marketing tool that lets you track collaborations and overall ROI. 

• With the Influencer tracking feature, you can track both paid and unpaid influencer campaigns.
• With the Analytics feature, you can get insights on the influencer’s followers, track conversions, and measure ROI.

Modash

Modash is another influencer marketing tool that lets you find brand-fit influencers and analyze your campaigns. With the Influencer campaign tracking feature, you can:

• Capture influencer content
• Get alerts on missing ad disclosures
• Track the campaign’s content performance. 

The Role of Influencer Analytics for Brands

How many sales did you generate on your Shopify store? How are people perceiving and talking about your brand? Is your website getting enough traffic? All these questions are crucial for your brand, and to determine the answers—you need influencer analytics. 

Let's understand why, as a brand, you need influencer analytics—in detail. 

Enhancing Campaign Effectiveness with Data Insights

When you analyze data from previous influencer marketing campaigns, you can assess:

• Which content formats and influencers generate the highest ROI? 
• Which social media platforms are getting more traction vs. others?
• How do different audiences respond to different messaging styles?
• How does the campaign impact the brand’s perception?
• How to allocate marketing budgets more efficiently?

By finding answers to these questions from your past campaigns, you can optimize your future campaigns for maximum impact. 

Targeting the Right Audience

By analyzing influencer analytics, you can gather detailed insights on your audience demographics—age, gender, location, and language. This is helpful when selecting influencers with similar audience demographics, as influencers with the same audiences are likely to generate massive impact.

Accurate ROI Measurement 

What is the total sales generated with the influencer campaign? What is the total creator cost? And, what’s the total ROI generated? With influencer analytics, brands can find answers to all these questions and allocate the budgets for their next campaign accurately.  

Bonus tip: Connect your Shopify store with InsightIQ and measure the ROI

Navigating Key Metrics in Influencer Analytics

Now that you know how crucial influencers analytics are for your brand, let's understand the most important analytics that you should be tracking and how. 

Understanding Engagement Rates

To understand the influencer's engagement rate, you need to uncover different aspects of the engagement—levels of engagement, sentiment analysis and the engagement received on different social media platforms. 

Let's understand each of these in detail.

• Type of engagement: Are the influencer’s followers commenting, sharing, saving, and sending the posts to their friends? Or, are they just passively liking the content?
• Sentiment analysis: Are the comments positive, neutral, or negative? Understand the tone of comments to find out whether the followers are genuinely engaging or if it is bots that are writing spammy comments. 
• Engagement per platform: Check the social media platforms your selected influencers have the highest engagement. For example, influencer A may have a higher engagement on LinkedIn but lesser engagement on Twitter.

Analyzing Audience Demographics and Behavior 

When you know the influencer’s audience demographics—age, gender, location, and interests—you can identify whether the influencer has the same audience demographics you’re targeting or not. This saved you enough resources and you’re able to choose the right influencer. Plus, when the influencer’s demographics align with yours, the sponsored content the influencer produces aligns with the audience well.

Imagine selecting a fashion influencer whose audience demographics are majorly females between 18-25 in the UK but you want to target females in the USA. Since the influencer’s audience is primarily in the UK, the content they produce won’t reach the audience you’re targeted. So, anticipate the influencer’s audience demographics. 

Impact of Conversion Tracking on Sales

By tracking conversions, you can understand the direct impact of influencer marketing campaigns on sales. 

Some of the metrics that help in identifying the impact of conversion tracking include the number of signups, number of webinars registered, and the purchases made. 

Let's say you've executed an influencer marketing campaign for a haircare brand that is running a sale on its products and wants to double down on the sales. When an influencer shares about the sale on their posts and stories, and their followers make the purchase—the campaign’s goal is accomplished. The number of sales generated and the ROI generated from the specific influencer are the two metrics that you will focus on. 

Identifying Authentic Influencer Accounts

Here’s the thing: not every influencer you see on social media is authentic—some even buy fake followers. In many cases, influencers are not aware but they have bot followers. Because of bots and fake followers, neither the engagement that the influencers receive on their content is genuine, nor it can bring any conversions. 

So, how can you spot influencers with fake followers or fake accounts?

Spotting fake accounts manually can take you loads of time. Instead, you can use InsightIQ’s Instagram Fake Follower Checker to identify fake, bot, and inactive followers. All you have to do is enter the influencer’s Instagram account. 

Here’s a simple process to do the same:

Step 1: Enter the creator’s Instagram profile and hit ‘Check followers’.

Step 2: InsightIQ will analyze the profile and generate the results which includes real followers, fake followers, mass followers and the engagement rate.

Enhance Influencer Tracking and Analytics With InsightIQ

If you’re looking for an influencer marketing tool that lets you track influencer analytics and social data—all in one place—try InsightIQ.

With InsightIQ, you can:

• Access influencer data with data points like audience demographics, real vs fake followers, engagement trends, and past performance.
• Track content across different channels—including IG stories.
• Use 80+ attributes to understand the tonality of social conversations to help understand what's working and what's not.
• Create UTM links and promo codes for influencers, and get detailed insights on the sales conversions received from each influencer collaboration 
• Get instant reporting—measure ROI, identify top-performing influencers, and get insights on monetary metrics. 

Curious to try out InsightIQ for yourself? Book a demo.