How to Build the Influencer Marketing Capability for your Mobile App
A few years ago, “Influencer Marketing” was limited to some celebrities and dedicated bloggers. From the brand perspective, it was fairly easy to contact each influencer or their agency manager and create specific campaign posts. Now we almost have more social media influencers than actual customers and it is impossible to manage influencer marketing with human power.
At Hepsiburada, we aimed to build an influencer marketing platform at scale to manage changing business needs. We wanted to include more influencers in our network and enable our influencers to be able to create new campaign links 7/24, without ever contacting the Hepsiburada Marketing team.
We built the new platform in three steps;
Step 1: The Links
We specified possible screens to be used in a marketing context and enabled the link sharing capability on those screens. We preferred to do this only on our mobile app with a hard-coded share / copy feature. But you could also do this on web page URLs.
The links should have two identifiers for the affiliate system to work;
1.a The campaign details: When a user shares and / or copies the URL of the screen, the URL should have the necessary parameters to track the affiliate campaign. Depending on your internal affiliate tracking platform, this could be the universal UTM parameters like source, medium, campaign etc. In our case, we use the AppsFlyer tool for campaign attribution, so we used AppsFlyer parameters such as af_ad, af_adset etc. Tools such as AppsFlyer or Adjust will allow you to build automatic reports easily for attribution while the UTM format is universal and will allow you to track cross-device transactions easier. You can include both UTM and AppsFlyer parameters in the same link as they do not affect each other and will give you a tracking and reporting advantage together.
1.b The user details: Any user can share and / or copy URLs. We should be able to separate the actual influencer users from other users. At Hepsiburada, our influencers are also our mobile app users. So first of all we tagged the influencer users in our CRM system. When any campaign link is copied from the app, we automatically include the user in the URL as a parameter. We also include the tag if it is an influencer. We also support tracking URLs for non-influencer users to be able to report potential top performers and acquire them as influencers.
After the URL is created from the mobile app, the influencers can share it in any social media platform. When a customer clicks on the post to visit the link, we take the campaign and user parameters from the URL and redirect the customer to the specific campaign page.
Step 2: Tracking
In order to attribute the clicks to the influencers, we use AppsFlyer for mobile app visits and Webtrekk with the UTM format for web visits. We record each click, session, purchase of customers and attribute these to the campaign link they are coming from. We also attribute app install and uninstall counts to the influencers. The most common use case is to pay for each purchase in the e-commerce domain or the specific conversion goal of your app. But depending on your business needs, sometimes you might want to reward new app installs whereas you may also be willing to reward visits without purchase to increase brand awareness. It is important to track all the data to be used at certain times.
At this point you can use your internal tools to report weekly / monthly attributions for each influencer. In order to automatize the process, we used the Data Locker feature of AppsFlyer to dump all tracking data from the AppsFlyer dashboard to our internal data lake. This feature allows us to continuously import new customer transactions from social media clicks to our data lake.
Step 3: Accounting
We defined a rule set for the influencer rewarding system. Each attribution is rewarded according to its business value as in different margins for visits, purchases etc. Also if a certain product category is more important for Hepsiburada during a certain campaign period, we can change the reward margins dynamically. When we want to reward app installs, we can adjust the rules accordingly.
We take the tracking data from the data lake and use the rule set to calculate the status of each influencer and send them daily reports. Some influencers may work solo while some prefer their agencies to keep track. So our system allows redirection of reports. For influencers to be more efficient in designing new campaign posts, the calculation rules and campaign attribution reports should be transparent and easy to follow.
You can set the accounting period depending on your business needs. In the e-commerce context, refund of a purchase is an important factor to calculate the actual business value of a campaign. Since the refund period is 14 days, we wait for a certain time and pay our influencers monthly. We exclude refunded purchases and app uninstalls from the total reward. This means the daily reports’ total may not always match the monthly total.
Since the influencer marketing capability serves a financial purpose, each step of the process should be double-checked for errors. Especially the mobile app development phase of AppsFlyer and / or UTM tracking needs a store release so any error in a specific app version cannot be updated very quickly.
Moreover, the influencers will have many questions along the way, so it is best to provide an FAQ beforehand and display a specific contact address for queries.
