31 Powerful Influencer and Ambassador KPIs to Track During Your Next Campaign

Are you ready to harness the power and influencer or ambassador marketing but not sure how to track the success of your campaign?

Or, perhaps you have started buffing out your influencer strategy, but you're having difficulties tracking growth and seeing if you are generating a positive ROI.

That is where KPIs come into play. KPIs, or key performance indicators, are metrics that help you track and calculate your campaign's successes and shortcomings.

KPIs that will help you evaluate your program's success go beyond vanity metrics, such as likes and followers. Properly implementing KPIs at the start of each influencer campaign will help you measure your reach, growth, and conversions.

So let's talk about influencer and ambassador marketing KPIs. Today, we will show you which KPIs your brand should track to measure your influencer marketing strategy's success and areas of improvement.

Influencer vs. Ambassador - What's the difference?

Sometimes, the terms ambassador and influencer get conflated. It makes sense because influencers and ambassadors have similarities in how they work and support a brand. Both use social channels to help spread the word about a brand's products in exchange for compensation, whether in points, cash, free products, or rewards.

But there are a few key differences between influencers and brand ambassadors. Let's discuss.

What's an Influencer?

An influencer typically has a large following with a dedicated fan base found on their social media channels, a blog, or both. Most ambassadors will utilize UGC to show the product and discuss its benefits. Additionally, many influencers have a tailored niche and will often use a brand's products to create content around their niche.

Influencers will often create sponsored posts for a brand and get paid to do so, and they will use their influence to convince their followers that your products are quality and worth a buy.

Influencers fall into three main categories:

• Mega-influencers - think of celebrities, or people with a prominent influencer, typically with over one million followers or subscribers.
• Macro-influencers - these influencers have under one million followers and typically have hundreds of thousands of followers. They have a powerful influence and a close relationship with their followers.
• Micro-influencers - these influencers have a following in the thousands/tens of thousands. While their influencer and reach might be smaller, they tend to have a higher engagement rate and a tight relationship with their followers, making them a favorite amongst brands to work with!

Influencers can be either a raving fan of your product or new to your brand when creating content with your product. Often, influencers will partner with new brands they might not have heard of before and create content with specific talking points set by the brand.

What's an Ambassador?

Ambassadors differ from influencers because they are typically your number one fans and have been using your products for a long time.

Ambassadors use word-of-mouth to spread the word about your brand. Brand ambassadors are passionate about your product and often embody the ethos and values of your brand.

They are willing to go online and spread the word about your brand because they're committed to the growth of your brand.

Typically ambassadors join an ambassador program and participate in gamified activities in exchange for rewards. While some might charge for their posts, most are willing to spread the word in exchange for free products, points, or smaller amounts of cash, making ambassadors a less expensive yet powerful option for brands.

Differences Between Influencers and Ambassadors

Some of the critical differences between influencers and ambassadors include:

• Typically, brand relationships with influencers can be short-lived, where they need to complete either a single post or a handful of sponsored posts to fulfill their contract. In contrast, ambassador relationships are long-term and can last for several years.
• Influencer contracts are typically more expensive, as brands will often need to provide the product and payment for each post. In contrast, ambassadors will create content in exchange for points and rewards.
• Influencers don't necessarily need to know your product or have a close relationship with your product to create content for it. In contrast, ambassadors know, love, and are passionate about your product.
• Brands go into influencer relationships because of their reach, following, and influence, whereas working with ambassadors, a brand might not necessarily require a huge following and influence to be part of the program.

One of the most important things to remember is that an ambassador can ALSO be an influencer and vice versa! So they aren't mutually exclusive.

Why Are KPIs Important in Influencer Marketing?

To measure the success or weak points of your program, planning out and measuring KPIs and metrics for your influencer and ambassador strategy is essential for yielding a positive return.

Approaching ambassador and influencer marketing with a goal-oriented mindset will help you achieve both short-term and long-term success with each campaign.

KPIs will help give you insights into the parts of your campaign to see what performs best and resonates with your target audience. KPIs can be either campaign-specific or industry standard-specific, and it will be up to your brand to plan that out before starting an influencer campaign.

Influencer and ambassador marketing can yield excellent results, but only with a smart strategy and solid metrics and KPIs. Without them, you will be throwing posts at a wall until one of them sticks without having clarity as to why it stuck.

Objective, KPIs, and Metrics, What's the Difference?

If you are new to planning out KPIs, you will need to understand the difference between an objective, a KPI, and a metric. Each of these terms plays an essential role in the planning, executing, and measuring of any campaign you do.

• What is an objective? A broad goal for the campaign that might or might not be 100% fleshed out. Typically, an objective gives you the key goal you want to set for the campaign that will help you plan your KPIs and measure your metrics.
• What is a KPI? A KPI is what helps you flesh out your marketing goal. They will be specific key data points that you can measure with numbers that help give you insight into how you perform on a campaign.
• What is a metric? Metrics are the numbers attached to a KPI that help measure its success or weak point. For example, the KPI is increasing your engagement rate, and the engagement rate metric will be the percent you either increased or decreased.

31 Ambassador and Influencer KPIs to Track During Your Next Campaign

KPIs to Increase In Brand Awareness

Influencers can help increase brand awareness exponentially, so it's essential to track brand awareness metrics and KPIs each time you start a new campaign.

When kicking off your influencer or ambassador marketing strategy, you can track several KPIs.

Those KPIs include:

• Growth in following: A growth in the following indicates a positive increase in brand awareness
• Growth in content interaction: An increase in content interaction shows how engaged your new audience members are
• Number of impressions and total reach: How many times your content was displayed and how many accounts it reached
• Number of views on video content: How many views and interactions are you seeing from your video content
• Brand mention and hashtag usage: Who is mentioning your brand, and how many more hashtag usages are there

When deciding to work with influencers, you will want to evaluate if they will help you achieve a positive ROI. You will want to review their followers, engagement, and reach, among other things. These metrics will help you decide if the partnership will be mutually beneficial.

Relevant KPIs and metrics to track when looking to form a partnership with an influencer or brand ambassador are:

• Number of followers an influencer has: Audience size indicates the potential reach your brand could see from working with that influencer
• Number of active followers: What percentage of their audience is actively engaged is an even better indicator for potential reach than follower count alone
• Average number of impressions and reach: What is the average number of accounts reached and impressions the influencer's content receives

If you want to check that an influencer's followers are real (and not bots), you can use follower analysis tools to check engagement and critical metrics to decide if the influencer will be a good fit.

KPIs to Track Conversions and Lead Generation

Conversions can take many different forms, depending on the brand; sales, signing up for a newsletter, number of downloads, or new subscriptions.

So when tracking conversion metrics, look at your brand and see what types of conversions will be adding the most value to your brand through your influencer marketing campaign.

Conversion tracking KPIs are the essential metrics in any influencer campaign, as these are the KPIs that directly impact revenue growth.

Tracking and setting realistic conversion goals for your influencer or brand ambassador campaign will be the reason your brand can scale up.

Influencers and ambassadors can help grow conversions and increase sales by arming them with the right tools.

You can turn your influencers into affiliates, and you can track their progress in improving your conversions by monitoring the usage of their:

• Referral codes
• Affiliate codes
• Promo codes
• UTM or affiliate link
• Subscription
• Downloads
• Signups

KPIs to Track Boost in Social Engagement

Working with influencers is a surefire way of seeing more engagement across your social media channels, and social engagement is a powerful metric to track for any brand.

We like to call it the slow burner KPI - maybe someone from the influencer's audience isn't quite ready to buy from you yet, but they followed you on socials to learn more about your brand.

And over a few weeks or months, these new followers see your content and become more familiar with your brand, ethos, and voice until they eventually convert.

We want to move past vanity metrics when we look at social engagement. While likes and followers are necessary to track, in 2021, it's more important to strive for rich engagement and community building.

So tracking these metrics on your social media channels will help you monitor the success of your influencer marketing campaign:

• Likes
• Reactions
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• DMs
• Brand mentions/tagged

You will want to measure your engagement rate, which indicates how many of your followers are actually engaged with your content.

If you want to calculate your engagement rate, use this formula:

(Likes + Comments)/followers + 100 = engagement rate.

The industry standard across all industries is 1.60%.

KPIs to Track an Increased Website Traffic

Influencers can be crazy good website traffic boosters. Therefore, tracking website traffic KPIs will be vital for your influencer marketing campaign. So you will want to monitor how much-increased traffic your website is receiving from working with influencers and brand ambassadors to assess the success of a campaign.

KPIs to track include:

• Visits from referrals
• Click-through rate
• Time on site
• Total pageviews
• Number of new users
• Increase in Google Searches

KPIs to Track Your Overall ROI from Influencer Marketing

With any investment your business makes, you will want to measure to see you are gaining a positive return on your investment from your influencer and ambassador marketing campaigns.

Measuring your ROI will look different for each brand, but some of the best ways that work across the industry to see you are getting a positive ROI include:

• Are you hitting your goals?
• Are you within your budget?
• Is the influencer driving more traffic to your site?

Conclusion

Working with influencers can offer your brand a massive payoff. But to see that pay off, you will need to track KPIs from the start of each campaign properly.

Which KPIs will you track during your next influencer marketing campaign? Let us know your brand's KPIs when working with influencers and brand ambassadors!

Ready to turn your customers into your team of thriving affiliates? If so, check out CrewFire's epic demo video to see how you can drive more referrals, word-of-mouth, and user-generated content for your Shopify store.

Get in touch w/ Rony (CEO - CrewFire)

• Email: Rony@crewfire.com
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