Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, Snapchat, TikTok, and others, allowed users around the world to share their creativity and talent with everyone. Calculating sales lift is the best way to measure performance. 

Anything from Drum Covers channels, Slime Makers, to Gamers streaming mobile games. 

Fame has always been a commodity - and the more famous you were, the more influence you had over consumers.

The availability of social platforms facilitated an explosion of creativity. YouTube alone has over 70,000 channels that have more than 1,000 subscribers. There are over 3,700,000 channels on Twitch. TikTok has over 3,000,000 influencers on its platform.

Some influencers have full representation by managers, agents and publicists, while the most learn to manage their online activity as a business by themselves, or by influencer videos about “how to become an influencer”. 

Some channels are so very specific - that discovery of the right channel and the right VALUE of a channel becomes a huge challenge for advertisers. 

Methods to Measuring Performance over Influencer Marketing 

Proxies (“LINK IN DESCRIPTION!”)

If you ever went on a YouTube binge that starts on “TED Talk” and ends at “Funny Cat Videos” - you may have noticed that some videos have the narrator/star say something like: “Click the Link in the description” when talking about a product or service they are all hyped out about.

This tracking URL and the influencer “call to action” message is an attempt to use attribution mechanics to track users who watched the video > clicked a URL > converted.

While the influencer may do their job of influencing - only part of the users (thus: Proxy) will actually bother and use the link, while many would use alternative means to find the product/service - by searching for it, or by clicking a display or video ad they see of the product later.

While Proxies are useful to get a partial picture of users that actually used the link - it does not fully represent the impact of the influencer over sales.

Delta Reporting

This is probably the most common method used to attribute the value of influencer campaigns. 

A Delta is a very simple way of subtracting the additional value gained against a supposed base line.

Marketers monitor the sales uplift and attribute this to the spend with influencers.

The major limitations and cons to this approach are:

• Marketers may ignore any additional influencing factors which may impact the performance of trackable media as well as organics.
• 70% of Marketers reported* that they make no changes to any other campaigns while running influencer activities to allow a “clean test”

Incrementality Testing

Incrementality testing provides operational insights for optimization. This method uses the changes in marketing activity (i.e. new vendor activity started, a new campaign was launched, a change in creatives, etc…) to continuously provide insights over the value of the change. 

This method works across platforms and can provide valuable insights at the granularity of campaign, demographics, media vendor, and medium.

Incrementality testing has been a holy grail in marketing , but only very few invested the resources required to evaluate it. 

With the current market conditions eliminating identifiable data companies are forced to make the effort of researching incrementality as the best alternative to measurement.

 

INCRMNTAL is an incrementality measurement platform allowing advertisers to know the value of their marketing activities across all channels. Influencer Marketing is a growth channel and it requires measurement.

If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!