In the marketing landscape trends are constantly emerging and subsiding. Influencer marketing has been a trend for so long that it is set to become a must-have marketing method in all marketing strategies. Every month there are more and more businesses redrafting their marketing plans to include it and put it in action.

Why? Because it delivers results. In fact, according to a study, for every dollar spent on paid media, an average influencer marketing campaign generated almost $7 in earned media value. The numbers do seem attractive and influencer marketing can definitely drive ROI. The only thing that remains is to find out methods for measuring influencer marketing ROI. Let’s get going!

Develop Isolated Marketing Strategy

Finding the right marketing strategy is sometimes the hardest thing to do. An isolated marketing strategy the easiest way to measure the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign. If you are completely new to this, we suggest you give it a go. It is very convenient, because it will let you measure the impact influencer marketing has on your sales, both those that take place online and those that are made in your brick-and-mortar stores.

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All you have to do is choose one of your products or services and make it a test subject of your marketing campaign. During the promotion period, you should only use influencer marketing to put the word about it out there. You will be able to track the sales through the entire funnel and get a complete picture of influencer marketing ROI.

Track Purchases with Promotional Codes

If you want to be precise with the numbers when running a campaign, you should give your chosen influencer promotional codes to work with. This is considered to be the most accurate way to measure the impact of an influencer campaign. Promotional codes will also help you track all the sales driven by the influencer, even if they happen days, weeks and months after the campaign.

While affiliate links are also a viable method, as you are going to see in the following paragraphs, they will help you identify just one part of your ROI. Promotional codes, in fact, help you turn influencer marketing into a completely isolated marketing strategy that promotes your entire brand, not just a specific service or product. On top of that, they are very easy to use, as most of the ecommerce platforms support them. Some even have a built-in promo code generator.

Affiliate Links Work too

This method might be slightly harder to put into action, especially if you are unfamiliar with affiliate marketing. The synergy of affiliate and influencer marketing is very easily quantifiable. Why? Because you will create affiliate links for your influencer, which they will then put on their social media profiles and in blog posts.

You will be able to see exactly how many people have clicked the link and how many of those that did completed the purchase. The metrics from affiliate marketing put to action in this way will also help you assess the ROI of your efforts. The metrics you want to look at are average order value, number of sales and number of clicks.

Don’t forget that affiliate links are time-limited. This means that after some time you won’t be able to track customer behaviour. This time frame varies, and can be anywhere from 15 to 30 days. And if a customer completes a purchase by clicking an old affiliate link, you won’t be able to register it as the result of the influencer marketing campaign”

Start Using Google Analytics

When it comes to influencer marketing and online sales, you can’t get any better than Google Analytics. This is a free, yet very powerful tool that you can integrate with your online shop, whether it’s a standalone ecommerce website or incorporated in your official website.

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How to leverage Google Analytics to get a reliable assessment of ROI on online sales? It’s quite simple, you have to set the Event goal. After doing so, you will be able to see exactly who visited your website and where that visit originates from.

You can filter out the ones coming from social media profiles and blogs of your influencer, and check how many of those leads have converted into customers. While this practice requires some technical knowledge, it’s very reliable in terms of measuring influencer marketing ROI.

Measure Influencer Marketing ROI per Channel

While influencer marketing can certainly engage the audience and increase your website traffic, you want to make sure that everything is working as intended. You should be more interested in discovering the channel that generates the most leads. This way you can cooperate with your influencer and instruct him to focus more on a specific platform in order to generate more ROI.

But how do you measure the influencer marketing channel ROI? Google Analytics is, yet again, your best friend. You simply have to click on Acquisition and then select Overview to open the tab that contains the list of traffic channels.

If you click on Social, you will see exactly which social channel generates the most traffic for your website. By quantifying the social leads you can assess the influencer marketing ROI and devise different strategy with your influencer on the go.

An influencer marketing campaign can be assessed in many ways. The ones that we have mentioned in this article will help you in measuring influencer marketing ROI. Using promotional codes and affiliate links will help you measure the impact this campaign has on your direct sales.