Advertisers have identified a few ways to measure influencer marketing campaigns, but they’re not without shortcomings.
As brands increase their creator marketing investments, they are scrutinizing their returns more than ever. Many advertisers are struggling to prove out the return on their steadily growing investment in influencers due to the continued absence of a standardized approach to measuring influencer campaign performance.
With influencer budgets up 74% year-over-year in 2024, according to CreatorIQ, marketers need reliable frameworks to justify and sustain this growth.
More than half (53%) of the 200 U.S. marketers surveyed for influencer marketing agency Linqia’s October 2024 State of Influencer Marketing report said “determining the ROI” of their influencer campaigns was the biggest challenge impacting their influencer marketing strategies. Among the surveyed marketers, measuring ROI was a larger hurdle than identifying influencer partners (43%), maintaining their influencer budgets (38%) or ensuring brand safety in their influencer work (32%).
“As [influencer] budgets continue to increase, so does the pressure to effectively measure its performance,” the Linqia report stated. The growing need for accurate metrics isn’t just about evaluating past campaigns; it’s crucial for shaping the industry’s future.
But being able to point to metrics that demonstrate the value of that rising investment in influencers “will be a necessary part of the industry’s sustained growth,” the Linqia report added.
Also read: Inside creator-brand contracts
Creator agencies commonly employ brand lift studies, which quantify a campaign’s ability to boost the perception of a brand by surveying consumers exposed to the creative, to calculate the effectiveness of their work.
While these are effective at capturing awareness of creator-backed product launches, brand lift surveys fail to delve into mid-funnel metrics such as watch time, which is relevant for tracking how well a brand is integrating into a creator’s community, said Sosti Ropaitis, principal at MediaLink.
“The middle of the funnel is the hardest to approach because that’s where the always-on approach is,” he said. “Brand lift studies are a great metric, but they are a snapshot based on a statistical sample.”
Despite the shortcomings of brand lift studies, creator marketing and talent management company Whalar Group conducts “plenty” of them because of their ability to gauge the impact of influencer campaigns on brand awareness, consideration and favorability, said Neil Waller, its co-founder and co-CEO. Whalar also leverages media mix modeling, a form of analysis that helps identify which marketing channels are most effective in driving conversions or sales, he said.
Media mix modeling is also “a measurement framework that brands already accept and understand,” rather than a “newfangled” performance metric or “vanity metric” such as likes, comments or shares, Waller said. However, he acknowledged that media mix modeling can only be applied to “scaled creator work,” not just a handful of sponsored posts.
These models require a minimum number of impressions to provide accurate reporting on a specific channel, said Freddy Dabaghi, chief transformation officer at Crispin. Without enough impressions, models don’t reach statistical significance, meaning they can’t assert the difference in conversion rates between a given variation and the baseline isn’t due to random chance. Given their basis in TV reporting, where impressions have typically been much higher than creator content, mixed media models from companies like Nielsen often fail to provide accurate reports for creator efforts.
“When you look at influencer, especially if you’re not amplifying the content, the impressions are never going to be anywhere in the ballpark that you’re going to see from TV,” he said. “A lot of times these media mix models almost can’t report on influencer or can’t report accurately.”
The agency has used digital-first models from marketing investment measurement companies Keen and Bera, which better measure creator marketing performance by adding dimensions such as watch time and view-through rates to reports.
At the start of the year, Crispin hired 11 creators to promote the partnership between clothing company Boss and the NFL ahead of Super Bowl LVIII. The agency used text attribution and sentiment analysis on creator post comments to find 35% purchase intent for the brand's Super Bowl clothing collection.
Media mix modeling may struggle to keep up with evolving platform changes, Dabaghi added.
“They can crunch a lot of data and try to predict what future states are going to look like, but it’s all predictive,” he said. “We know consumers are going to change and platforms are changing …that’s why they’re never going to be perfect.”
Diana Haussling, senior VP and general manager of consumer experience and growth at Diana Haussling, senior VP and general manager of consumer experience and growth at Colgate-Palmolive, said the company also struggles to apply media mixed modeling to creator campaigns because the model “was not built for the modern age” and “typically always attributes a high value to things like linear TV.”
The shortcomings of mixed media modeling in the creator space “makes it very challenging for marketers, especially marketers who have grown up in a more traditional mindset, to be able to understand the value of social,” she said during a session at the Creator Upfronts hosted by Forbes and Walmart in October. “A lot of it, honestly, is a push within the organization to help [executives] understand the different KPIs you have to look at … So, introducing new KPIs like looking at how long we actually got somebody to watch the ad, [and] being able to actually translate that to sales.”
Read more: How creators pitched themselves to brands
To address ROI concerns, some brands are shifting to CPM (cost per thousand impressions) models for influencer partnerships. Instead of flat fees, these contracts tie creator compensation directly to performance metrics.
Austin Mayster, a partner and talent manager at Underscore Talent, said that shift to a CPM payment model among a growing group of advertisers is largely a risk mitigation strategy.
“Everybody’s answering to somebody, right? So, a lot of times it’s an agency that will have an overall deal with a brand … and the agency, in order to win that business, is most likely guaranteeing that they’re going to have X amount of impressions or X amount of this,” he said. “And in order to hit that, and to mitigate their risk, they’re requiring in these talent contracts that those [metrics] that they need to report back to the brand are hit.”
Half of the marketers surveyed by Linqia cited reach or CPM as one of the most important metrics in measuring influencer marketing performance. Engagement rate and conversions followed closely behind at 48% and 46%, respectively, while 44% cited sales.
Measurement tools such as Traackr’s VIT (visibility, impact, trust) framework are gaining traction, combining visibility (reach), impact (engagement) and trust (brand recall and lift) to evaluate campaign effectiveness. Companies such as Unilever have adopted this approach to gauge ROI beyond “vanity metrics” like likes and shares.
Ropaitis emphasized integrating creator efforts into broader paid media strategies to ensure campaigns capture signals of culture, brand love and fandom.
“This allows the addition of monitoring for signals around culture, brand love and fandom that provide a holistic view of the campaign and uncover valuable insights for optimizing a brand’s always-on approach to creators,” he said.
