Influencer marketing can breath new life into your brand's image and dramatically boost traffic, but that doesn't mean it isn't without its potential pitfalls. If you don't know how to accurately measure success and failure, or outright make some common mistakes, it can quickly spiral into an expensive and disappointing endeavour.

Here's how you can measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign, and avoid making costly mistakes while working with your  influencers

• 1:16 KPIs & Influencer Metrics. Unlike typical ad-buys, influencers and content on platforms such as YouTube last months and even years after a campaign's conclusion, and has to be measured by totally different values. Think of them less as a single buy, more as a  full funnel marketing channel itself, covering the three stages of Awareness, Consideration and Conversion all without further involvement or investment from your brand.
  • Consider both the Number Of Views and Efficiency Of Views to measure success or failure. How much did you pay per view during your campaign? How much have you gotten in coverage since the end of the campaign? Over time, a typically successful YouTube video will continue to get  hits long after the promotion that paid for the content has finished, meaning the efficiency just grows.
  • Avoid indexing success to engagement with the content. People watch content from providers like YouTube differently than how they absorb content from an email or a brand site. Allow the audience to behave naturally, and the traffic will come to you.
• 2:55 Middle Funnel Consideration. This is where things really get interesting and start giving you real metrics you can rely on, rather than just watching the views and likes on a video climb with anticipation.
  • Once the campaign has been up and running, start looking at the clickthrough rate from YouTube or the host site, to your brand. Since it's unlikely anyone else would coincidentally  follow from A (content) to B (your store) the figure this gives you should be very accurate for assessing how well the promotion is doing. You'll be able to start segmenting the audience and customers, and plan for ways to reach others while taking advantage of those who do click through.
  • Understand that not everyone will click the link in the video to visit your site, but still count as a mid-funnel success due to exposure. They may not be buying from you directly from the content (Attributable Traffic), but they will begin to grow a sense of familiarity with your brand that chances are will lead them to your store in time (Unattributable Traffic) through Google or your main url
• 4:15 Three Factors For Measuring Consideration-Success. Rather than trying to view a mid-funnel promotion the same way as you would an email or ad-space buy, look for and consider these factors:
  1. How efficiently have we done this?  
  2. What is the cost per session/view/visit? 
  3. What's the quality of the traffic?
• 4:45 End Funnel Conversion Rate. The bread and butter of a promotion, turning the audience you've spent so much money, time and attention on into paying customers. When measuring the conversion rate for YouTube and other influencer buys, consider;
  • How many viewers ultimately are visiting your site and buying products,? Combine the two previous metrics, views and site conversions with the final goal, how many sales are driven directly through influencer traffic. You won't get all those swayed by the content, but you'll have enough to  gauge a success or a failure, and how to correct next time.
  • What are the quality of these visitors? Are these viewers valuable customers, or are they unreliable as return customers, buying at most once and then never returning or engaging with your brand  through memberships, emails or further purchases.
• 6:00 Stop Burning Good Money Chasing Bad Content. Regardless of how much money you spend on influencers and sites like YouTube, there are some good and bad decisions you can make about what gets published, and more importantly how it gets published.
  • 6:25 Invest in ever-green content that will far outlive your promotion. Don't worry if the subject is entirely unrelated, what matters is the longevity of the promotion. There are many types of videos that have extra long shelf lives due to their content, like science and history videos, that will reach millions of viewers over the many years it's published. That will reduce your cost per view to cents and fractions of a cent, given enough time and a popular enough influencer.
  • 10:35 Don’t force the ad at the start. YouTube and podcast audiences are used to having to skip over ads at the top of the content they watch, and will do so by habit regardless of the ad. Likewise, few viewers stay until the end of a video for any ads there, so make sure your ad is read in the content itself. Most influencers will take a moment after the show's intro to run any promotional copy, forcing the audience to engage with the content and wait through the ad to reach the rest of the video on the other side.
  • 11:25 Give your influencer a landing page on your site. If a viewer follows through from video content to your site, landing on a specific page that continues their engagement with both you and the influencer, chances are a bridging page will keep them moving forward into your store, and allow you even greater access to useable metrics.

Don't focus on traditional metrics, like traffic within the first day, or week, or even month. Learn to play the long game, and look for the building momentum over a long-term investment.

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