Street banners, radio jingles, and TV commercials have long competed with each other and led people to advertising blindness. That’s what they call the effect when the brain blocks anything that tries to sell something to it.

Marketers have found a loophole in advertising from opinion leaders and bloggers.

But how do you know how effective they are, whose followers are real and how much it costs to advertise on a particular account?

Effectiveness Of Bloggers’ Advertising

No blogger has a perfect audience. Open accounts inevitably get subscribed by just anyone. To understand the audience behind a nice number of subscribers, you need to click on accounts and calculate the percentage of E-commerce shops and bots with strange names.

It is possible to manually check 20-30 profiles in real life, but such analysis would be useless. That is why it is easier to trust the key indicators.

No advertising campaign is effective without tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are quantifiable goals that help you to track, analyze, and measure the success of campaigns, and influencer marketing is no exception here.

KPIs When Working With Bloggers/Influencers

Coverage

For the initial evaluation of the effectiveness of an advertising campaign and other b2b marketing strategies with a blogger, you need to measure the extent to which the content reaches the audience, namely, reach – the number of unique users.

But it’s worth bearing in mind that bloggers’ audiences may overlap. For example, if a campaign involves five bloggers with 5,000 subscribers, that doesn’t necessarily mean the reach will be 25,000, as the audiences are very likely not unique.

CPM

CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions/Cost-Per-Mille) is the price per 1000 impressions. It is measured by dividing the budget spent by the reach figure.

Here you’ll find that the more subscribers a blogger has, the lower the cost per 1,000 impressions. But don’t target bloggers with a million subscribers. It’s likely that a blogger with 10,000 subscribers and a high CPM will bring a campaign more results.

It is necessary to start with how many views the blogger’s posts get on average. So if a blogger who has fewer subscribers gets more views, his post will cost more even with the same CPM.

Engagement (ER)

Engagement rate is another form of simple but useful metric for advertising campaigns with bloggers.

What we assess to measure engagement:

• The number of comments. In the case where a blogger posts more than one advertisement for the same campaign, we calculate the number of comments.
• The number of likes is the total amount of likes for all the posts respectively.
• The number of shares. The number of people who shared the blogger’s post. Shares are a kind of multipliers of the audience, so when creating content you need to focus on whether it makes a user want to “share”.

The sum of likes, shares, and comments divided by the number of views and multiplied by 100% is ER (engagement rate) in percent.

Clicks

To understand how many people clicked on a link and got to the site you need a UTM tag (a snippet of text attached to the end of a URL in order to track a campaign, source, or medium).

For example, in an Instagram post, you know you can’t post links to third-party resources. Instead, it’s better to focus on visits to the brand’s profile.

On Instagram, the blogger will be able to mention the brand in the post, and from there (the profile header) you can get to the website. It’s also possible to link to the site in stories if the blogger has more than 10,000 subscribers in his profile.

Site Traffic

Using UTM tags, you can go deeper into analysis and find out who is visiting your page:

• The number of new users. This metric gives an indication of how quickly your audience expands and how well your advertising campaign encourages them to visit your site. 
• The number of sessions. This helps to understand how many times the user went to the page and how much he is interested in you. 
• Time on the site. Another important factor to pay attention to. It is believed that the longer the dwell time, the more interesting the site for the visitor, the higher quality and informative content.

Sales

To track the number and amount of sales in an advertising campaign with a blogger, you can use:

• Discount coupons. Use specific promo codes to determine what sales are coming from a particular campaign. This will also provide insight into which audience is more likely to buy your products.
• UTM code. As explained earlier, this code can be attached to a custom URL to track the source, medium, and campaign name. This will allow analytics systems to report where customers came from.

Conclusion

The KPIs we’ve mentioned will help measure the success of a marketing campaign involving bloggers. But we want to point out that the most important indicators are determined by the goals and strategy of the specific campaign.

If the goal is to increase brand awareness, then focus on reach and video views. If the goal is to drive traffic to your site, look at click-through rates; and if the campaign is about sales, your main KPI is conversions.