Using data to measure the ROI of influencer marketing

Data makes it possible to bypass the obstacles of transparency and ROI measurement. It responds to the major challenges of the moment, particularly that of nano-influence, which requires access to a large amount of data to target the right profiles. Data is there at every stage of an influencer campaign, and without it, it is impossible to measure its performance and learn from each campaign.

With metrics such as number of subscribers, engagement rate, audience characteristics (gender, age, location, interests), brands can quickly target the best content creators to achieve their goals, and optimise their ROI.

It gives the opportunity to target the right influencers, to ensure that their community is real, that their engagement is good. Although not everything can be measured – the KOL must also be aligned with the brand’s values and willing to create content for it.

How to measure the ROI of influencer marketing?

Measuring the ROI of your influencer campaigns is above all a matter of having defined the right KPIs beforehand. Different types of indicators can be used to measure the performance of brands:

• REACH: the estimated number of potential customers you can reach with the campaign.
• IMPRESSIONS: the number of views of a post, a story, a video.
• ENGAGEMENTS: the number of comments, likes, shares, in short, interactions with the publication(s). It allows us to measure a cost per engagement.
• ENGAGEMENT RATE: this can then be compared to your brand account or the KOL account.
• TRAFFIC to the brand’s site or account.
• CONVERSIONS GENERATED by the campaign thanks to the influencer.
• AUDIENCE STATISTICS – who interacted with the post, who converted.
• EARNED MEDIA VALUE (EMV): an indicator that measures the success of an influencer campaign in financial terms.

For many brands in the fashion industry, ROI is measured by the number of conversions and therefore sales. It is important in this case to set up a way to measure conversions for each campaign, each influencer: a promotional code or an affiliate link in general. The redirection URLs used in influencer campaigns can be tracked by an adserver such as Google’s Campaign Manager, or by a site centric tool such as Google Analytics, Xiti or Adobe.

Interview with Marc Caillet, Head of Data science at Kolsquare

What is the role of the Data Science team at Kolsquare?

The Data Science team at Kolsquare deals with a multitude of subjects. Mainly :

– Extracting relevant information from data collected from social networks for the informed selection of KOLs that best fit a campaign brief.

– Offering complementary ways of searching for KOLs so that our clients can find the most relevant KOLs, whether they have a clear idea of what they are looking for or whether they have a rather vague idea.

– Define the metrics that measure the fit of a KOL with a customer’s search criteria, and clearly explain these metrics to inform the choice.

– Predict future behaviour on social networks. Example: predict whether a hashtag will go viral or not in the near future.

– Aggregate data for analysis. Applications include the listening tool being developed and marketing research such as the one you are reading right now.

– Conducting research to guide the company’s strategic choices.

Why is data essential in 2021 in the influencer marketing sector?

Without data, there is no way to measure the performance of influencer marketing campaigns! No way to compare with competing brands either!

Data also allows for a more objective and broader selection of KOLs. It allows to go beyond a more subjective approach based on feelings and often restricted to a circle of known KOLs.

It is also crucial for analysing and predicting market trends at any level, whether global or sectoral. Finally, it is essential for our clients to measure the evolution of the performance of their influencer marketing campaigns over a given period of time.

How did you select all the data you used for this report?

This work is done in close collaboration with the marketing team. Together, we define the list of the main actors as well as the lexical field of the studied theme. To each of the actors, we associate their accounts on the various social networks studied. To the lexical field, we associate the most used corresponding hashtags. Armed with these elements, we base all our analyses on the aggregated data of all the publications of the KOLs present in our catalogue that mention one of the main actors or that include one of the hashtags.

What are the KPIs that you consider to be the most essential in an influence campaign? Can we now define the ROI of influence more precisely than before?

There is one measure that seems to win the consensus today. It is the EMV – Earned Media Value – which corresponds to the amount of money that would have been spent on communication in the traditional media to obtain an equivalent impact.

In the case of influencer marketing campaigns that have transformation as their main objective, it is possible to measure their performance to a large extent by means of promotional codes or tracked links.

The impact of an awareness or legitimacy campaign is more difficult to assess. However, we can get an idea by measuring, during the campaign and a little afterwards, the evolution of the number of subscribers to the brand’s accounts, the evolution of the number of visits to its website, the evolution of the number of mentions of the brand on social networks.

Beyond these usual measures, it can be interesting to look more deeply into the results of a campaign in order to determine whether the reactions on social networks are positive or negative, whether the profile of the audience that reacted corresponds to the one targeted by the campaign, what part of the engagements come from the followers, what are the performances of the campaign’s publications compared to the usual performances of the publications of the activated KOLs…