Influencer Marketing
Measuring influencer marketing honestly
Influencer marketing has a measurement problem it partly created, by reporting the numbers that were easy instead of the ones that were asked for.
- Written by
- FullCharcha Performance
- Performance team
- Published
- Reading time
- 8 minutes
Two failures dominate. The first is reporting reach and engagement as though they were outcomes. The second is over-claiming conversions on the basis of last-click data that credits whoever happened to be last. Both are avoidable, and avoiding them is mostly a matter of deciding what the campaign is for before it runs.
Three layers, stated separately
- Delivery: did the campaign happen as planned. Posts live, on time, to the brief. Necessary, never sufficient.
- Attention: did anyone watch. Reach, completion, saves, shares, comment quality, measured against each creator's own median.
- Outcome: did the business number move. Sales, installs, sign-ups, footfall, search lift, whatever was named at the start.
Reporting all three, clearly separated, is what makes a report credible. Collapsing them into one figure is what makes a finance team stop believing the channel.
Attribution, and what it cannot do
Creator content is usually seen on one device, remembered, and acted on later somewhere else. No tracking model handles that cleanly. Codes and links capture a fraction; platform-reported conversions apply their own attribution windows; last-click credits the search that closed the loop.
- Use codes and links where they fit naturally, and expect them to under-report.
- Watch branded search volume, which is one of the more honest signals of influence.
- Run a geographic or audience holdout where the budget allows one. It is the only method that answers the question directly.
Benchmark against yourself
Category engagement benchmarks are close to useless because they average across audience sizes, formats and countries. The comparison that means something is the same creator's own median, the brand's own previous campaign, and the same period last year.
Report on a cadence that allows decisions
A single end-of-campaign report is an autopsy. Weekly reads during the campaign let budget move toward what is working, which is where most of the available gain actually sits.
