Open Instagram, and you’ll be bombarded with hundreds of sponsored posts.

Your favorite influencer wearing the newest Nike collection, lifestyle blogger showcasing the latest Apple gadgets, or home decor content creator showing off cozy furniture from IKEA–all this is set to entice users to buy. And the best part–it works!

Look at these stats:

• Businesses earn up to $18 per dollar spent on influencer marketing.
• 60% of marketers find influencer marketing to deliver better ROI over traditional ads

You get the point. No wonder the influencer marketing industry is growing by 28.6% every year, and 7annually, 5% of brands are dedicating precious budgets to it.

But the challenging part is tracking the result. Since influencer marketing funnels are intertwined with multiple customer journey elements, measuring the campaign result is more complex.

Let us help you detangle it with this comprehensive guide to tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your influencer marketing funnel. But first:

What Is an Influencer Marketing Funnel?

The influencer marketing funnel is a popular strategy brands leverage to promote their products and services. Here, businesses partner/collaborate with social media creators to guide prospects through the buying journey.

Similar to a traditional marketing funnel, this can also be equated to a customer journey’s different stages:

Awareness Stage focuses on increasing your brand awareness amongst potential customers. It’s usually done through influencers’ stories and posts, who introduce your product/service or brand to their followers.   

Interest Stage is when prospects start showing curiosity about your brand/product. Here, an influencer can be the channel to provide more detail about your value, product features, and benefits. 

The Consideration Stage starts when customers evaluate your brand’s offering against competitors and their preferences. Influencers sharing their personal (positive) experience organically through tutorials and reviews can thus push prospects to conversion. 

Conversion Stage ends with the final purchase decision. By offering exclusive follower discounts, promotions, or limited-time offers, influencers help drive this phase of the customer journey. 

But, integrating influencers into these different stages of the customer journey is only half the battle. Accurately tracking the impact and conversion of your campaign is the other half.   

6 Ways to Track Your Influencer Marketing Funnel

Tracking influencer marketing can be simple–if you want. It can also be sophisticated–if you need it. The choice is yours. Depending on your budget, needs, and skills, you can track the effectiveness of your influencer marketing funnel in different ways. Let’s take a look at 6 of the most popular ways of going about this: 

Define Your Goals

This first method is non-negotiable. Every successful project should include the goals to be met.

Tracking the effectiveness of your influencer marketing funnel starts with mapping a clear goal. Then, analyze whether your campaign is aligned with your core business goals. Finally, get into the nitty-gritty of objectives and KPIs. 

The goals will vary depending on your unique business objectives, but here are three most common ones: 

Brand Awareness

85% of businesses seek influencer marketing primarily to boost brand awareness. If this is also your goal, track these KPIs:

• Follower growth (set a benchmark before the influencer campaign to measure the conversion accurately.)
• Brand search volume
• Views, impressions, and reach on the influencer’s content mentioning you
• Session/ number of referrals the influencer is driving to your website (click-through rates on sponsored content)
• Average dwell time (this helps determine the quality of leads influencers are bringing in)
• Bounce rate

Engagement

Engagement offers insights into how actively the audience interacts with the influencer’s content. It can look like subscribing to your email or text messaging list or simply adding products to their cart–any action that shows their interest in making a purchase (micro-conversion).

Tracking the following KPIs will help you track this:

• Engagement Rate (likes, comments, saves, shares, clicks, etc, as a percentage of followers, views, or impressions on the content)
• Average time on content, site, and pages they visit
• Video views and watch time
• The follower growth rate of the influencer (it indirectly reflects the overall appeal and engagement level of their content)

Sales

Ultimately, all marketing efforts boil down to sales, making it an undeniably crucial goal. Tracking these metrics can help you measure the real bucks your influencer campaign is fueling in the business:

• Revenue: give your influencer trackable links with unique shows which influencer is driving the most value per transaction (this is landing pages and discount/promo codes–more on this later)
• The Average Order Value: show which influencer is driving the most value per transaction (especially important for micro-influencers).
• Sales Conversion Rate: reveal how well your products and offers match the influencer’s audience’s demographics, interests, and purchasing behavior.
• Content Cost: draw a comparison with the total ROI

With that said, here’s what your goals can look like:

• Reach: score 30,000 views per post
• Follower count: Reach 20K followers by Q4 (or gain 10k more followers in the next three months)
• Website traffic and clicks: get 200 web page visitors per campaign post
• Engagement: 100 comments on posts, 10,000 likes of collaboration posts, and an average of 15 weekly DMs.
• Signups: 50 newsletter signups on the brand newsletter per week. 
• Downloads: Gain 20 lead magnet downloads every time a creator shares it
• Sales: Achieve ten sales per influencer per day.

Use UTM to Track Sessions and Sales

UTM codes are the little extra texts added to a link that tell Google Analytics (plus your other tracking tools) more about your traffic. They include four bits of information: medium, source, content, and campaign, thus helping you track behavior in these categories.  

Here’s an example URL tagged with UTMs:

www.utmexample.com?utm_source=TikTok&utm_medium=influencer&utm_campaign=@spirng-collection-aprilchallenge&utm_content=newsfeed

Use UTM to create your trackable URLs for every influencer marketing funnel with Google’s Campaign URL Builder. 

Give Your Influencer Unique Promo Codes

Unique promo codes allow you to track the purchases the creators influence. 

It’s an excellent option for social platforms that don’t allow links in their posts (ahem, Instagram). Yes, you can add links in the bio to gain traffic, but you can’t really depend on social media users to leave the platform and copy and paste the link on the browser. 

However, with a unique promo code (and irresistible discounts), the users will be enticed to at least check out the product and maybe even buy it. 

Now, let’s talk about optimization–using asynchronous collaboration tools to further streamline the tracking process. It’ll allow you to assign the promo codes while maintaining a clear view of their impact. Even better, let the influencer in on the tool. This transparency will keep the creators posted on their content’s actua impact and conversion and allow them to modify the posts in real time as needed.  

Create Custom Landing Pages

While creating unique landing pages will take a bit more effort than UTM, it will offer your users (the influencer’s audience) a more personalized experience. Plus, it will help you track traffic by the entrance page. 

It isolates the traffic coming from the creator, thus easing the measurement of traffic, clicks, and sales in Google Analytics. Customer landing pages are also helpful for brands with large product catalogs. 

Say you partner with a beauty influencer to create a party makeup look with your exclusive products on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Here, creating a landing page with all the products used in the tutorials can help the customers buy the entire look on one page. 

Use Affiliate Programs (& Links) to Simplify Tracking

For brands whose budgets do not support special discounts or are already successful with email marketing and want to scale their efforts–an affiliate program is the answer to your tracking challenges.

Besides being a viable payment option, an affiliate marketing program also helps you track all the visitors from that specific affiliate link. 

Plus, unlike UTM links or promo codes, it doesn’t vary with campaign or influencer. You only need to create the affiliate link and assign an ID to each influencer to create their unique links.

Integrating resource allocation software with your affiliate program will further help streamline the management of affiliate programs. It’ll optimize resource management, influencer management, product assignments, conversion tracking, and performance analysis. 

A streamlined affiliate program management. It will while it will need some work upfront, it can be a great tracking tool when done right. Based on your model, you can track the following with the link:

• Clicks
• Leads
• Sales
• Installs

Leverage Monitoring Tools to Track Content

Whether it’s your first influencer marketing campaign or fifteenth, monitoring every sponsored content’s engagement and conversion can consume a lot of your precious time. Every sponsored content’s engagement and conversion can be consumed. Here are a few things you must track:

• Have all the influencers posted the content (and on the agreed-upon day)?
• Are they using the right hashtags with the correct spelling?
• Do the influencers adhere to the brand’s guidelines, tonality, and ad disclosure requirements?
• Exactly how much engagement (likes, comments, shares, and saves) are the sponsored posts getting? 

Add these elements for all the creators, and you’ve got weeks of work cut out for you.

Fortunately, you no longer need to monitor them yourself. Leveraging automated content tracking and monitoring tools, you can quickly get reports of the influencer marketing campaign. Moreover, a tracking tool will help you track all the sponsored/collaborated posts so that you can quickly check the progress and results of your campaign on a centralized platform. 

Kickstart the Tracking Process–The Right Way

The above-listed ways are just the beginning. Since influencer marketing is a full-funnel channel, you’ll need more monitoring and tracking strategies as it grows. But don’t let that overwhelm you now.

Just start with one or two tracking methods. Next, select 10-20 influencers and get the ball rolling. From there, analyze which aligns best with your already-present software, resources, and strategies–it’s all about trial and error.

Influencer marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It can transform your business, especially when synced with other channels (earned, paid, or owned). Take each step wisely, and the results will start pouring in.