This article features 6 easy ways influencers can track his/her marketing performance

Many business owners and social media managers would agree that influencer marketing has one of the best ROIs as far as paid advertising is concerned. You align yourself with a social media influencer, take advantage of their already well-established audience, and generate a new layer of interest in your products and services. 

However, tracking the success of this form of advertising is not as straightforward as others, and it can require a different approach with the use of custom URLs and discount codes to begin measuring conversions and engagement rates. 

With all the right features and technologies in place, you can then rely on some of the following metrics to measure your new advertising method's performance.    

Reach and Impressions

Reach refers to the number of people who saw a post your chosen influencer put up, whereas impressions describe how many times the content was shown, even if the same person saw it more than once.   

Many business owners struggle with their reach and impressions online, especially through standard social media ads. However, influencer marketing can produce some surprising results in this respect. 

Generally, audiences associated with an influencer are already engaged in their content, which means when you create a working relationship with them, you're able to benefit from their reach and impressions rather than trying to build your own. 

Audience Engagement and Growth

It can take a long time to find the 'perfect' influencer for your business, and when you do, it's essential to keep a close eye on their audience engagement and growth to ensure they meet your expectations. 

On most social media platforms like Instagram, audience engagement is a crucial metric. However, you don't simply need to view how many people have engaged with a post or video. Instead, you just need to analyze how the engagement compares to their audience size. 

Of equal importance is your chosen influencer's audience growth rate. This is trackable once your influencer starts posting, and some of the most satisfying data to see is growth spikes in line with their posts about your business. 

Social Media Traffic

As previously mentioned, tracking the success of your new advertising method is not always as straightforward as other methods. Generally, you need to provide a call-to-action (CTA) that drives traffic from social media to your website so that you have data to analyze to gauge the success of that advertising avenue. 

When you provide that CTA and analyze the traffic, you can learn whether your brand partnership is working how you had hoped. You'll be able to notice how receptive your influencer's audience is and whether they've followed through with a purchase. 

If you have multiple social media promotions running, you can use software to measure which sites, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, are producing the most traffic. 

Brand Mentions

We all know that word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of advertising, but influencer marketing makes it possible for word-of-mouth advertising to take place in the digital sphere, not just in real life. 

This happens when an influencer mentions your brand, and their audience engages with it and talks about it on other parts of the social media platform. There are many tools available that help you build connections between an influencer post you've just organized and a dramatic increase in your brand being talked about. 

If you want to make it as easy as possible to notice that your brand is being mentioned more, ask your influencer to use a specific hashtag or keyword. You can then quickly identify the number of social media users who have searched for it or used it themselves. 

Conversion From Social Media

One of the most important metrics to measure to determine the success of influencer marketing for your business is social media conversions. This refers to the data showing traffic moving from your influencer's social media to your website and completing your desired goal. That goal might be to fill out a form, contact you, or purchase a product or service. 

Using trackable links can help make this process much easier while also allowing you to tinker with your influencer marketing campaigns if they aren't having the desired effect. You may also see the value of creating dedicated landing pages unique to your influencer audience to potentially drive up that conversion rate. 

Earnings From Influencer Marketing

If you're paying an influencer to advertise your products and services, it's only natural to expect and wish to make money from your expenditure. Fortunately, there are analytics tools available to help you identify whether you have – and how much. 

You can measure the ROI on all social media platforms you're signed up with when you make use of the many different tracking options, like discount codes unique to each influencer and tracking URLs. 

While there are many different advertising methods out there that can prove valuable for your business, influencer marketing is most certainly gaining traction. However, before you start contacting potential influencers to work with, make sure you're aware of the many different ways to track your performance. You may then be able to form new campaigns with much more confidence.