Full-funnel influencer marketing: which activations and KPIs work at each stage based on 2026 report

Key takeaways

• Nearly every type of creator campaign gets used mid-funnel. Only sponsored posts, gifting and influencer content in paid ads are top-of-funnel plays.
• Discount codes are the only campaign that is most used at the bottom of the funnel. Affiliate marketing, often stuck under conversions, also peaks mid-funnel.
• Engagement rate is the most-relied-on KPI overall, despite being a mid-funnel metric.
• Marketers are most confident in top-of-funnel KPIs, such as views, and least confident in messaging metrics, such as sentiment and EMV.
• The UK is Europe's most commercially minded market, yet only 11% of UK brands call their strategy fully integrated.

Full-funnel influencer marketing strategy becomes the norm

Influencer marketing began as an awareness tactic. But it has now matured into a full-funnel strategy.

A full-funnel influencer marketing strategy should span the entire funnel. It should assign the most relevant type of creator activations and KPI for each stage. It should not apply a single metric or campaign type across the board.

These campaigns allow shoppers to take the entire customer journey on a single platform, creating a seamless customer experience. And proving that influencer campaigns truly impact performance helps teams secure larger budgets. But while full-funnel influencer marketing may be the goal, for many marketers, it is not yet the reality.

The gap between goals and metrics

Most brands rely on metrics for the entire funnel, but few have the infrastructure to understand performance or sentiment. This analysis is based on data from Kolsquare’s Future of Influencer Marketing 2026/2027 report, which surveyed 1,123 marketing decision-makers across seven European markets between May and June 2026.

The report will be published on 15 September 2026. It found that brands struggle to track the mid- and bottom-funnel.

The report found that the top five metrics marketers say they rely on most when evaluating campaigns are:

• Engagement rate: 37%
• Views: 34%
• Sales: 32%
• Engagement volume: 31%
• ROI: 30%

These metrics span the entire funnel. But brands lack confidence when tracking data in these areas.

Only 9% of brands link influencer marketing to performance, down from 22% the year before. The integration of influencer activations with the marketing mix is also low. In 2026, one-third (30%) still run influencer marketing as a stand-alone activity, disconnected from the rest of the marketing mix.

But marketers aren’t stepping away from tracking performance because they don’t believe in influencer campaigns. Most brands (79%) call influencer marketing a core growth driver or an important supporting channel. The lack of integration is more likely caused by a lack of knowledge and infrastructure. The channel is maturing, but brands can’t keep up.

Fanie Genovese, Head of Social Media at Better&Stronger, explains: "Investment is advancing faster than vision, because it remains hard to connect individual influencer activations to broad, cross-cutting objectives: affiliation and conversion, awareness, consideration. Until influence is built into a full-funnel logic, with objectives and measurement aligned with the rest of the marketing mix, strategic maturity will keep running behind budgets."

Which activations work at each funnel stage

To understand how brands are activating creators, let’s look at how campaigns are used at each stage of the influencer marketing funnel.

Here’s the data about where types of activation fit into the funnel:

Note: Respondents could select more than one funnel stage per activation, which is why each row adds to more than 100%.

Most marketers run mid-funnel influencer campaigns, with almost every activation used by at least 50% of respondents at the consideration stage. Top-of-funnel plays are rarer, with only five campaign types being used by over half of marketers to develop awareness.

But the bottom of the funnel is where activations are really thin. There isn’t a single tactic that is used by 50% of marketers here. Only discount codes, UGC and affiliate marketing are used by more than 40% of marketers. This reveals a mismatch between intent and designation.

UGC is the widest-spanning activation of all, at 46% top, 63% mid and 41% bottom. It's the closest thing to a full-funnel asset in the data.

Which KPIs belong at each stage

Brands are running more mid-funnel activations, but how are they tracking results? KPIs are a strong indicator of understanding.

Here are the metrics that are tracked at each stage of the funnel:

As with the activation table above, respondents could cite more than one stage per KPI.

Some of the KPIs are in the right place. Reach, for example, is overwhelmingly used as a top-of-funnel metric. Engagement rate is tracked mid-funnel, and ROAS is overwhelmingly bottom-funnel.

But other KPIs are misplaced. ROI is tracked by 34% of brands at the top of the funnel, then equally across the mid- and bottom-funnel, making it hard to pin down.

Engagement rate and volume are some of the most popular metrics at every step. The data suggests that these easy-to-grab metrics are being over-relied on.

The confidence problem revealed

The data reveals that brands are most confident in the thinnest metrics, which track only awareness.

The five metrics marketers are most confident tracking are:

• Views: 56%
• Impressions: 50%
• CPM: 48%
• Engagement volume: 47%
• Social media mentions: 47%

Engagement rate, the single most-relied-on KPI in the whole study, only reaches 41% confidence.

The KPIs marketers are least confident measuring suggest that KPIs covering sentiment and performance are difficult to grab.

The five metrics with the lowest confidence scores are:

• Sentiment: 22%
• EMV: 21%
• Conversions/lead gen: 14%
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): 14%
• Share of voice: 14%

Only views and engagement volume sit in the top five for both reliance and confidence. Everything else marketers say they rely on most, including sales and ROI, doesn’t make the top.

Clo Willaerts, Steering Committee Member at the Influencer Marketing Alliance, explains why the gap exists:

"Reach and engagement rates are easily accessible via platform dashboards, creating an illusion of control, while true ROI remains notoriously difficult to isolate. Marketers cling to these metrics because they have to justify budgets to leadership, even if they secretly doubt the depth of the data. We need to shift the conversation from superficial clicks to actual conversion and attribution models."

What this looks like in the UK

The UK is a commercially minded influencer market that shows a large gap between activations and tracking.

Commercial conviction is high. Over a third (38%) of UK brands call influencer marketing a core growth driver, well above the European average of 31%. The UK is also the least likely region to use influencer marketing as a supporting channel, at 37% compared with 48% Europe-wide.

UK brands rely on bottom-of-funnel KPIs more than the rest of Europe:

• ROI: Europe 30% vs UK 38%
• Conversions and lead generation: Europe 21% vs UK 30%
• Website visits: Europe 30% vs UK 35%
• Sentiment: Europe 15% vs UK 9%
• EMV: Europe 14% vs UK 11%

This shows that the UK is focused on demonstrating sales impact rather than on messaging.

While it’s ahead of other European markets, only 11% of UK brands describe their strategy as fully integrated across the marketing mix. This shows serious challenges converting influencer campaigns into fully integrated channels, even when marketers rely on bottom-of-funnel metrics. The market that grades itself hardest on outcomes and leads Europe in commercial ambition gets to only roughly one in nine brands whose strategy is properly joined up.

Jamie Love, CEO and Founder of Monumental Marketing, sums up the direction of travel:

"The biggest shift needs to be from awareness-first thinking to commerce-first thinking. As attribution improves, influencer marketing will move from being viewed as a media channel to becoming a genuine revenue channel."

Building the mapping into a 2027 plan

Here’s how to use the data to run a full-funnel campaign next year:

• Assign a stage and a KPI before the brief goes out: Give every activation one primary funnel stage and one primary KPI during planning.
• Stop reporting engagement rate on awareness activations: It's a mid-funnel metric that should help you understand how influenced audiences are by your content.
• Treat influencer content in paid ads as a bridge: Paid ads can help boost performance and support tracking.
• Wire the tracking before launch: Where sales or ROI is the objective, get the tracking in place before the campaign goes live. You can use discount codes to pin influencers to purchases.
• Match confidence to consequence: If a KPI needs to be presented, make sure you have the confidence to track it accurately.
• Review the same campaign at multiple stages: UGC appears across all three funnel stages in this data. Reporting it only against conversion undersells what it's actually doing.

How to run a full-funnel campaign, and track it accurately

To mature on this channel, you need to set objectives, activations, and metrics that align with each stage.

Want to learn more about how to run 2027 influencer campaigns?

Pre-register for The Future of Influencer Marketing 2026/2027, publishing on 15 September, to get the full-funnel and spend data as soon as it's live.