Gifting 101: How to track the results of your micro-influencer campaigns
Give yourself a pat on the back! You’ve made it to the last step of our Gifting 101 series, which guides you through the process of gifting micro-influencers with free products in exchange for authentic reviews on their social channels.
We’ve already showed you how to find the right influencers for your campaign, how to reach out to those influencers, and how to send products to those influencers.
Now we’ll wrap up with the most important part of any successful marketing campaign: tracking performance.
Let’s get started.
Go back to the initial objective of your gifting campaign
Yes, it’s time to go back to the beginning — but only because you need to revisit the reason you began your influencer marketing campaign in the first place.
After all, you can only measure the progress you’ve made toward your goal if you can identify that goal.
As a refresher, here are some common goals for influencer marketing campaigns:
- Awareness: You want influencers to generate buzz and spread the word about your brand or products.
- Engagement: You want people to engage with your brand or products by commenting on and liking influencers’ posts.
- Conversions: You want to drive sales or sign-ups from your influencer gifting campaign. That is, you want people to see your product on an influencer’s social channel, find that product, and buy it for themselves.
Now that you have your goal you can figure out how to track your results.
Is your goal to generate awareness?
These are the KPIs you want to track:
- Reach: The aggregated number of followers and subscribers from all of the influencers you’ve worked with. You can add these up manually via the spreadsheet you created in Part 2.
- Impressions: The number of people who saw each influencer’s post. This is difficult to track so it’s best to ask influencers themselves, but be aware that some may not provide this information. If it’s the case, you can always look at the number of views a video has to get a better idea, though it will always be higher than the number of impressions.
Is your goal to increase engagement?
These are the KPIs you want to track:
- Engagement rate on Instagram: The aggregated number of likes and comments generated from all influencers’ posts divided by the aggregated reach of those influencers.
For example, say you work with 50 influencers who have an aggregated reach of 500,000 — the number of their followers and subscribers combined. Across all of their posts, you generated 50,000 likes and comments. Your engagement rate is 10%.
- Aggregated views on YouTube: Simply add up the views on influencers’ YouTube videos that feature your content. Don’t forget the comments and the likes a video has. They show how engaged the audience is with the influencer and this content specifically.
At Octoly, we’ve done all the hard work for you. For each review, you’ll be able to see its number of comments, likes or views, as well as its engagement rate. You can also get a performance summary for each product or campaign, so you won’t have to spend hours adding up all the stats. If you wish so, you can also get the number of reviews obtained over a defined time period, with an average number of interactions and an average engagement rate per review.
Is your goal to increase conversions?
We first need to pinpoint the type of conversion you want to track, such as:
- Website traffic
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Sales
- Repeat purchases
The ultimate conversion is, of course, sales. But it’s also the trickiest to track. That’s why we’re going to walk you through what these complications are and how to work past them.
Why it’s tough to track sales
There are four key reasons why it’s difficult to prove the ROI of an influencer marketing campaign:
1 — The customer journey is complicated. Just because someone sees your brand’s message once doesn’t mean that they convert into a buyer immediately. Think about the last time you discovered a new brand on Instagram and thought you might buy one of its products. Even if you were interested, did you make a purchase right away? Probably not. In fact, on average, online consumers need at least 6–8 points of contact with a brand before becoming a viable sales lead.
2 — It’s hard to attribute sales to the right marketing channel. Sure, Google Analytics can track where a website visitor came from (you can learn how to set up “goals” here), but they’ll only report the last place they clicked before heading your site. That means you won’t get to see all those other touchpoints along the customer journey. So you won’t be able to know what worked and optimize accordingly.
3 — It’s not the marketing campaign that is ineffective; it’s your website. Many retailers tend to blame marketers for poor conversions when they should actually blame their e-commerce capabilities. For instance, your ad could be amazing but if your website isn’t optimized for mobile — and your customers largely shop on their smartphones — your sales will suffer.
4 — You’re not only using your website to sell products. If you sell your products on Amazon or sell them offline in Sephora stores, it becomes almost impossible to accurately track sales and calculate the ROI of a digital marketing campaign.
Techniques to help you do it
All hope is not lost! There are tools you can use to jump these hurdles and track ROI.
Use exclusive promo codes. Not only will this give the influencer’s audience an incentive to try your product, but it will also help you track the performance of each influencer’s content.
How do you create unique promo codes? The easiest way is to use a content management system like Shopify through which you can run your e-commerce operation.
Create trackable links. You can ask influencers to include unique short links that redirect to your website. On Instagram, they can include the link in their bio or Instagram Stories. On YouTube, it’s easier to do because influencers can put the link in the description of their video.
How do you create custom short links? Try a free tool like bit.ly. For example, Scentbird co-founder Sergei Gusev created custom links like this one — https://bitly.com/1MsIk99+ — to track each influencer and platform.
Organize giveaways. Offer influencers the opportunity to not only receive a free product but also to launch a giveaway for their audience.
Here’s a quick overview of how this works:
- Invite the influencer’s audience to fill out a survey and participate in the giveaway. (Link to the survey in the bio on Instagram and the video description on YouTube.)
- In the survey, ask the audience to share their emails and accept the opportunity to receive news from your brand.
- Did people fill out the survey? Congrats! You’ve now have new leads in your CRM that you can contact again and eventually convert into customers.
Getting started with influencer gifting
Well, our time has come to an end in the Gifting 101 guide. If you haven’t been following us since the beginning no worries! You can download our Gifting 101 guide where you’ll find how to build the ultimate strategy for working with influencers at scale, generating authentic reviews for your product, and driving conversions.
Now there’s nothing left to do but launch your campaign!
Want to try influencer gifting with Octoly? Request a demo or sign up to our newsletter.
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