EBG Webconference – What are the right Influencer Marketing KPIs for your Social Media strategy?

As Quentin Bordage, CEO and founder of Kolsquare, points out, the definition of KPIs is complex and disparate, from one sector to another. It is essential to ask yourself a few key questions before defining your KPIs: according to what strategic objectives have you decided to activate the Influencer Marketing lever? What are the challenges you want to address? These key points will then allow you to more precisely define the contours of your Influencer Marketing strategy.

Quentin reminds us that there are two main categories of objectives:

• Acquisition stakes: simpler to evaluate but very disparate depending on the platform (for example, a view on Youtube will be counted after 30 seconds, whereas on Tiktok, it will be counted after only one second).  The calculation of engagement can also be different depending on the interaction (some take into account the number of views, others the comments, still others the reach…)
• Awareness issues, which are more difficult to evaluate: these are very qualitative elements that are difficult to measure.

The definition of clear and realistic objectives is THE first essential step in setting up an Influencer Marketing campaign. From this, the choice of influencers, the devices to put in place, the cost of a campaign, and the performance indicators of these campaigns will then follow.

Quantitative KPIs

Easier to evaluate because they are more measurable, quantitative KPIs make it possible to measure acquisition and conversion objectives.

For Tiphaine Neveu, Head of Influence, Social media & PR EMEA from Club Med, the most important one is the tracked link, which they require their influencers to place in their stories. This GAP (Google Analytics Premium) link allows them to have a fairly detailed reading, without knowing the exact number of conversions (nobody buys a Club Med holiday from a story!).

Nevertheless, she notes that they are nevertheless able to analyse the attractiveness of their KOLs’ stories, the appetite of their audiences for the product and even the number of hot prospects (how many people touched by the campaign reach the online quote process).

At Bel, and we’ll come back to this later in more detail, Malaïka Coco explains that the decision was made to create a repository of KPIs for the influencer marketing lever in-house, thus integrating so-called “classic” or quantitative KPIs such as reach and engagement rate.

Quentin Bordage stresses the importance of EMV (or Earned Media Value), which allows for a valuation of the engagements generated by a campaign. We value each click, each view according to the platform used.

We are seeing more and more convergence between e-commerce and influencer marketing and this is why we are going to use performance indicators specific to e-commerce, in particular with affiliation technologies: we are going to integrate the measurement of sales (average basket, traffic generated on the site, sales) through tracked links or promotional codes.

With this in mind, Kolsquare has also entered into a partnership with Affilae in 2021, an affiliation platform, integrated into the Kolsquare solution.

Qualitative KPIs

More difficult to measure than their counterparts, the so-called “qualitative” KPIs are just as important and allow for a more accurate reading of the impact of influencer campaigns.

For Tiphaine Neveu, Head of Influence, Social media & PR at Club Med, the qualitative assessment has become one of the essential performance indicators they use for their influencer marketing campaigns: their KOLs share with them screenshots of private messages (PM) from their community explaining that following their stories, they have just booked a stay on the Club Med website. Even better, it can be a direct sale: influencers ask them for a privileged contact so that their friends can be advised – in this case, they get a direct view on the ROI.

According to her, this KPI is not to be underestimated because influencer marketing may be pushed online in the first place, it could have a considerable impact offline. The challenge will therefore be to track this offline acquisition (affiliation, business referral contracts, etc.).

On the Bel side, the analysis of qualitative KPIs involves the deployment of Brandwatch, a social listening tool, which can extract verbatims and tonality KPIs.

For Quentin Bordage, CEO of Kolsquare, today there are fewer things that allow for qualitative analysis of influencer campaigns, but there are technical solutions for social listening, such as “sentiment analysis”, which allow for initial insights.

Another element that is also difficult to automate is the measurement of the impact of an influencer campaign on assisted awareness and brand preference.

Common influencer KPIs repository

The influencer marketing market is becoming more structured with an enlarged ecosystem, many social platforms are emerging, the number of content creators is rising, new features on the platforms are available and thus, we are facing an influx of data, as Mailaïka Coco, Communication and Influencer Manager at Bel, points out.

It is therefore complicated to have a harmonised repository of influencer KPIs.

Quentin Bordage also agrees, specifying that there are working groups such as the IAB or the Union des Marques, which are working in this direction, but there is a great deal of heterogeneity: the platforms’ indicators are disparate and the calculation of engagement differs from one agency to another (some take into account views and comments, others reach, etc.)

At Bel, the decision in 2021 was therefore to model a reference grid of basic in-house KPIs: for example, it was decided to count views only on the first panels of Instagram stories, instead of taking into account all cumulative views.

Faced with this observation of a great heterogeneity in the practices of market players, even within the same brand, Kolsquare is working to harmonise KPIs with its clients but also with the industry in general, notably via the IAB and other bodies such as the SCRP.

The experts of the influencer platform recommend to all the brands they support to implement these KPIs quickly, and especially to make the effort to have harmonized KPIs at the level of the whole company (all countries, all brands) in order to build a common reference system.