Finally, You Can Measure Influencer Marketing Performance

No, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Kim Kardashian did not create the influencer. Just ask Coco Chanel, who became the modern era’s most impactful fashion influencer nearly two centuries after English potter Josiah Wedgwood used the endorsement of Britain’s top influencer Queen Charlotte to create the world’s first luxury brand. Nevertheless ​​— and even with the play-by-play coverage of the Kardashian clan’s breakneck ascension to untouchable star status — the corporate titans are only now starting to truly take notice (and emulate). 

It’s about time, since all you need is one influencer to appreciably amplify the reach of your branding, content and other digital marketing efforts. Take the metaverse, for example — whether it lasts as long as Earth or not, the companies connecting with high-profile gaming, cryptology, NFT, AR and VR influencers will be better prepared to leverage whatever growth opportunities may arise in this alternative reality. For those still walking with real feet on real grass and concrete, the cosigns of influencers also carry heavy weight. 

Nearly 90% of Gen Zers and millennials initially learn about things they want to purchase on social media — and four in 10 teens trust influencers more than their friends. This is why nearly nine in 10 companies plan on working with a social media star in the next year, 71% intend to increase their influencer marketing budget, and almost 20% expect to dedicate more than half of their entire marketing budget to influencer marketing. Unfortunately, though, this is also why nearly half of all influencers artificially inflate their follower counts and companies spend more than a billion dollars each year on influencers with fake followings. 

Influencer marketing and partnership platforms like #paid, Grin, impact, Klear, Linquia, Upfluence and CreatorIQ have helped; same with influencer marketing agencies (by 2020, there were 1,360 dedicated entirely to influencer marketing). Of course, without the right benchmarks and KPIs, or standardization across platforms and devices, digital marketing leaders have struggled to measure influencer marketing performance. Until now.

Revealed: The ANA Influencer Marketing Measurement Guidelines

Brands and their marketers have long used universal guidelines for measuring their digital marketing, customer success and even employee experience performance. What’s been missing? Measurement standards for newer digital marketing strategies, tactics and platforms. On social media, for instance, we’ve been able to track engagement and click-through rates, but not how effective our influencers have been in improving our engagement or click-through rates. This didn’t work for CreatorIQ, the self-proclaimed influencer marketing cloud helping the world’s largest enterprises disrupt the creator economy.

It wasn’t working for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), either. In 2020, the ANA formed its Influencer Marketing Advisory Board “to address this challenge and other industrywide issues in influencer marketing” — and, that December, the ANA conducted an influencer marketing member survey; 79% said the biggest of their influencer marketing challenges was measurement! Here’s why:

• Lack of measurement standardization for social media platforms. “For example, one platform considers a video auto-playing in-feed as an engagement whereas another only counts actions such as likes, comments, or shares.”
• Lack of campaign measurement consistency for influencer marketing agencies. “Agencies often use proprietary measurement algorithms, which make it challenging for brands to know how different campaigns led by different agencies are performing… [and] which agencies are truly delivering the highest-performing campaigns.”

Then, throughout 2021 and much of 2022, ANA Influencer Marketing Advisory Board members from Adobe, Bayer, Cigna, Hilton, Mastercard, Nationwide, Procter & Gamble, PUMA, Reckitt Benckiser, SAP, Sephora, Target, Unilever and Wells Fargo: 

1. Met with dozens of digital marketing agencies that “execute influencer marketing campaigns” to learn which metrics and KPIs they use to measure awareness, engagement, and conversions
2. Met with each of the leading social media platforms used for influencer marketing — including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube — to learn how they define engagement and calculate engagement rate and video views
3. Unified all the resulting data and creating recommendations for standard metric definitions

Finally, on June 13, 2022, the ANA issued the first-ever official guidelines for measuring organic influencer marketing, “reflect[ing] the current state of organic influencer measurement,” “designed to facilitate more consistency in measurement and reporting industrywide,” and subject to updates “to reflect industry changes, marketers' input after their implementation, and greater platform transparency and access to data.”

The ANA’s Influencer Marketing Measurement Guidelines (A Chart)

Influencer Marketing Measurement: The ANA’s Recommended Next Steps for Marketers

• Use these guidelines as a starting point to understand the differences across social platforms in measurement definitions and calculations. Communicate with your platform points of contact that you will be using the Guidelines’ definitions and calculations moving forward and express the need for greater data transparency, especially in organic exposure.
• Share the guidelines with your internal marketing teams. Consider including not just the leaders executing the influencer campaigns but also communications and PR, data and analytics, social and digital, media, and content marketing teams. 
• Share the guidelines with your agency partners and align on the use of the guidelines’ definitions and calculations for organic campaign measurement and reporting.

Mastering Influencer Marketing: Philip Mandelbaum’s Recommended Next Steps

Keep reading…

1. Why Fake Follower Counts Can’t Curb Influencer Marketing
2. Why You Only Need One Influencer to Amplify Your Message
3. Case Study: Royal Caribbean Makes a Splash with TikTok Influencer Mikayla Nogueira
4. How to Attract New Customers on Social Media

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/3ngFVZVU_LE
2. Photo by Fleur on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/dQf7RZhMOJU
3. Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/8pOTAtyd_Mc