Table of Contents
- Affiliate Marketing Influencer Marketing
How To Track Influencer Campaigns For Affiliate Marketing Success
Affiliate Marketing Influencer Marketing
Today’s brands are well aware of the impact of influencer marketing as a marketing channel. Take your pick — brand awareness, improved sales, pumped-up customer trust. But arguably most enticing is the $1 spend that turns into $5.20 on average — a whopping 520% ROI (according to blackcoreaffiliate.com). That’s why blackcoreaffiliate.com dedicates precious budget dollars to influencer marketing.
How To Track Influencer Campaigns For Affiliate Marketing Success
Align your influencer campaigns to your business goals
Which metric is most important? Many say ROI, which is notoriously the hardest to measure. Still, the way you track influencer campaigns is just as important as the actual items you track. How do you ensure influencer marketing success? For starters, an affiliate tracking software helps keep things organized, like Tapfiliate (more on that later). We’ll walk through a few tips and tricks to help you track influencer campaigns like a pro.
How To Track Influencer Campaigns For Affiliate Marketing Success
Set your campaign objectives
Take an individual influencer in your entire affiliate marketing program. They might have their own flair and reach that made you pick them. Still, every type of influencer and subsequent campaign should have a clear link to your business goals.
How To Track Influencer Campaigns For Affiliate Marketing Success
Let’s say your B2B business goal this year is more leads — comments and engagement won’t be as vital as actual conversions. Of course, comments, likes, and reach are vital to track if you want to improve brand awareness. Does that mean you sacrifice one for the other? Not quite. You should still track both sales and vanity metrics to create two unique yet valuable buckets of data to drive decision-making.
How To Track Influencer Campaigns For Affiliate Marketing Success
Arguably the most important business goal is improved sales, which you can certainly track in your influencer campaigns. So, how do you pinpoint your affiliate program’s most successful influencer campaigns? You might align them with one of the most common business goals: improving sales. Indeed, track influencer campaign sales from coupon codes (promo codes) and referral links, and emails. Tapfiliate can help with influencer tracking on all three fronts, even newsletter signups that turn into sales. Our platform shows you:
How To Track Influencer Campaigns For Affiliate Marketing Success
- Number of purchases for each influencer discount code
Still, sales, leads, and awareness feel vague. Underneath those overarching goals are your campaign objectives.
Analyze the traffic coming from each influencer campaign
Aligned your campaign with your business goals? It’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of KPIs and objectives. KPIs are key performance indicators you can assess through influencer marketing metrics. Here are some common influencer campaign key metrics and specific examples to measure true impact:
- Measure all your data first — this gives you a baseline to compare your campaign results and influencer marketing performance.
Once you think of specific objectives, selecting certain KPIs for your campaigns becomes easier. If this month’s campaign is to build brand awareness, you might pick the million-dollar-follower reigning Twitter. Just remember to set clear expectations for each influencer. Remember, you might have different objectives for different influencers. ROI by influencer might shift, but you have to assess other KPIs too. For example, a peppy lifestyle Instagram influencer might garner tons of conversions with her product how-to videos. Similarly, a more soft-spoken yet high-follower count could seamlessly garner more clicks and traffic.
Track sales with unique coupon codes
Did you know over 50% of small businesses don’t get any organic traffic? It might mean your SEO needs some work. Still, referral traffic from affiliates can help you mitigate your poor Google standing. How? Influencers mentioning your site brings you precious backlinks, which help your Google rankings. But most importantly? They’re a more direct path for a warm lead to move down the funnel.
Remember, you won’t score endless sales or signups from every influencer — but they’re valuable traffic sources for your business. Still, you need to know how much traffic you’re gaining and where it comes from. You can assess traffic in two ways:
- Google Analytics: Analytic tools like GA can help. You’ll want to focus on referral traffic and note which sites (influencers) are bringing you clicks. We like using Google Analytics to look at demographic info for every web visitor.
- Tapfiliate: With an influencer marketing tracking tool like Tapfiliate, you can track your influencer marketing campaign goals easily. Our personalized dashboard and traffic tracking show you exactly which influencers bring you clicks, sales, and signups. You can compare results for different influencers, assessing performance quickly and seamlessly. We’ll even show you which landing pages your visitors arrive on — figure out your bounce rate and you’ll know whether they need some TLC.
Tip: Create co-branded personalized landing pages
Your foodie TikTok micro-influencers might turn into Gordon Ramsay someday (the second-most followed British TikToker). No matter their reach, customers need to make their way back to you, and you can achieve that with coupon codes. Influencers share a unique code you give them in their campaign, allowing you to track any sales from those codes easily.
Influencers also attend in-person events like conferences and industry socials. These are great places to share coupon codes as well, allowing for offline tracking.
Here at Tapfiliate, we call that cross-device compatibility — the beautiful feature of tracking sales without needing click cookies. Now, these codes are public to each influencer’s followers and sometimes the public. Meaning? You might wonder what happens if another person markets that same code on their own profile. Our take? That’s a win-win. Your affiliate still gets the commission, so there’s no need to take care of influencer payments to anyone else. And most importantly? You still get your conversion and sale. To get started, you’ll need to go to your eCommerce platform (for example, Shopify) admin panel to set up the coupon code and then assign it to your chosen influencer in the Tapfiliate dashboard. You can do this in the “Affiliates” section of Tapfiliate. Your influencers get their own account where they can log in and see their coupon codes and their performance. They can find their coupons in their Assets section, next to their referral link: Ready to get started? Check out all of Tapfiliate’s coupon code tracking features.
Coupon codes are only one way to track influencer performance — another common route is affiliate links. Our advice? Leverage both as a catch-all for your target audience.
Track the conversion rates of each individual influencer
Engagement and conversions look good each month, so it’s natural to skim the details. But an individual influencer isn’t a minor detail. They represent your brand every day to your audience. If that influencer audience isn’t converting, perhaps the influencer needs more training, or it’s not a great fit. So, tracking individual influencer clicks and conversions is essential for future campaigns. Compare each influencer’s conversion rate to your campaign as a whole — notice any discrepancies? Do this for all conversions, including newsletter signups, ebook downloads, or transactions.
If you are a lead-gen business, track leads. Remember how we mentioned how vital new traffic is? Conversions are ideal, but a new web visitor might dip their toes in your pool of products with an email list signup. We call that a lead. (In some circles this is called a micro-conversion, aka a secondary action that means that they might buy later.) Your new email recipient might not purchase a product immediately, but your influencer affiliate puts you on their radar. They can now hear about your latest offerings and get comfortable with your brand. Make sure your content is on point — this is your chance to wine and dine your new lead! Trial signups for SaaS businesses should also track new leads. At Tapfiliate, we’ll help you track who signs up for free trials (another micro-conversion), which influencers lead them there, and which ones turn into paying customers. You get to choose your conversion events. On top of that, you can use Tapfiliate to compare influencer performance.
Are some influencers bringing clicks but no signups? What about campaigns that bring small traffic but more signups? These valuable insights help you dissect each campaign and determine what’s working and what isn’t. Curious to see for yourself? Get started with Tapfiliate today!
Track vanity metrics
Ready for your closeup? Vanity metrics are the influencer’s mirror facing your brand. Don’t be fooled — engagement and impressions are just as important as leads and sign-ups.
A closer look, and you’ll calculate engagement and click-through rates. Now, what’s a solid engagement or click-through rate? The thing is that each vanity metric looks different for each influencer, even in the same campaign. A micro-influencer might receive fewer impressions than a mega-influencer. However, micro-influencers tend to have higher engagement rates (approximately 3.86% to be exact) since they have an easier time interacting with followers.
Tip: Create co-branded personalized landing pages
Special landing pages are the final allure of the sales funnel. Ideally, your influencer affiliates will lead potential customers there through their social posts, stories, or other types of content. You might also link to a dedicated landing page from your Google ads or other SEO tactics. We know the drill — clear CTA, impeccable branding, and personalization for your user. Imagine your usual sales tactics paired with the loyalty and trust a customer might already feel with an influencer? Co-branded landing pages with your top affiliates offer extra charm. Sked Social strategist Marl Ankucic describes co-branded landing pages as a way to extend your top affiliates’ voices into your marketing. The result? Improved conversion rates, customer trust, and data collection through Google Ads. Co-branded, special landing pages are a fantastic way to increase conversion rates. Plus, they help you track demographic data in Google Ads.
How to ensure great campaign performance
To ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign there are three key cornerstones to success:
- Have a start and end date for your campaign: Having a start and end date for your campaign ensures you can track campaign goals and milestones more easily. It is essential for you to track campaign performance at the end date to work out your influencer marketing ROI to see if it is worth working with this influencer again.
- Ensure content quality: If you work with the wrong influencers, it can seem inauthentic when they promote you to their audience. Content quality is essential to ensure your influencer program success.
- Clarity is key: Having a promotional plan clearly laid out so you understand exactly which social media platforms your influencer will promote you on can ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign for your brand. If there is no clarity, things can go south quickly.
Influencer Marketing
We know — influencer campaigns have tons of moving parts. You have vanity metrics to track and the nuances of different influencer strengths and weaknesses. Add in sales, campaign periods, conversions, and influencer relationships — you’ll need an entire team to manage your influencer marketing strategy. You don’t have time to count every impression and attribute every conversion to each of your affiliates. If you tunnel-vision yourself into the details, you won’t have time to focus on what really matters: scaling your business.
The solution? A reliable, accurate (real-time) affiliate tracking solution to take care of the data for you. Tapfiliate’s innovative platform helps you streamline social media assets and types of content to visualize performance for each of your social channels and affiliates. You can easily calculate influencer marketing ROI. Plus, your social media influencers will have their own login where they can see their results independently.
Ready to track influencer campaigns and influencer sales like a pro?
Start tracking your influencer marketing campaigns today
Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called Blackcoreaffiliate.com. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories. When she isn’t writing about the latest tech and marketing content, you’ll find her traveling, cooking, or watching horror movies.