Influencer Marketing has become an extremely popular marketing channel. Getting the right influence to endorse or promote your product can lead to a huge increase in sales, retention and engagement. 

The viral effect influencers can provide is huge - as followers (or “fans”) will support their influencers by trying a product, knowing that the product promoted is helping the influencer with a monetary income. 

Fans feel directly connected to the influencers they follow and support. 

The challenge with influencer marketing is measuring it’s effectiveness. How could one tell if a post by Chiara Ferragni is worth $50,000 or only $5,000 ? or if Loserfruit will be a great fit with an eBank app or better promoting a social game ?

There are just so many influencers, channels and platforms, that measuring the effectiveness becomes a necessity.

We wanted to bring this guide to help you learn how to measure the results from your influencer marketing activities, so that you can unlock the full potential of your spend:

Proxies (“LINK IN DESCRIPTION!”)

If you ever went on a YouTube binge that starts on “TED Talk” and ends at “Funny Cat Videos” - you may have noticed that some videos have the narrator/star say something like: “Click the Link in the description” when talking about a product or service they are all hyped out about.

This tracking URL and the influencer “call to action” message is an attempt to use attribution mechanics to track users who watched the video > clicked a URL > converted.

While the influencer may do their job of influencing - only part of the users (thus: Proxy) will actually bother and use the link, while many would use alternative means to find the product/service - by searching for it, or by clicking a display or video ad they see of the product later.

While Proxies are useful to get a partial picture of users that actually used the link - it does not fully represent the impact of the influencer over sales.

Delta Reporting

This is probably the most common method used to attribute the value of influencer campaigns. 

A Delta is a very simple way of subtracting the additional value gained against a supposed base line.

Marketers monitor the sales uplift and attribute this to the spend with influencers.

The major limitations and cons to this approach are:

• Marketers may ignore any additional influencing factors which may impact the performance of trackable media as well as organics.
• 70% of Marketers reported* that they make no changes to any other campaigns while running influencer activities to allow a “clean test”

Incrementality Testing

Incrementality testing provides operational insights for optimization. This method uses the changes in marketing activity (i.e. new vendor activity started, a new campaign was launched, a change in creatives, etc…) to continuously provide insights over the value of the change. 

This method works across platforms and can provide valuable insights at the granularity of campaign, demographics, media vendor, and medium.

Incrementality testing has been a holy grail in marketing , but only very few invested the resources required to evaluate it. 

With the current market conditions eliminating identifiable data companies are forced to make the effort of researching incrementality as the best alternative to measurement.

INCRMNTAL offers an incrementality measurement platform, allowing Advertisers to unlock the value of their marketing spend. Measuring the effectiveness of digital and “untrackable” activity, providing actionable insights for you to get the most out of your spend.
If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!