Question: Is it easy to measure influencer marketing for eCommerce brands? 

While your initial answer might be yes, we're here to tell you it's not that simple. We've been fortunate enough to with with many of the biggest eCommerce brands in America and we've learned a few things along the way that we're here to share with you.

To start, if you're using last touch attribution, what happened right before they purchased, you're probably missing a tremendous amount of the sales that your Influencer Marketing is driving. Here's an example to show what you're missing.

For one client where we were optimizing the campaign for eCommerce sales, we were able to see that 67% of the sales from the program were from people who were exposed to the influencer's content but did not click through to buy. In fact, only 3% of sales were people who directly clicked through to buy. At the same time, the brand experienced large unexplained increases in their search traffic driving to their site and in their direct traffic driving to the site. This suggests that those people who were exposed to the content were still influenced, but rather than clicking, they went off to Google and other ways to find the website and ultimately purchased the product.

So while this method isn't as clean as you might think, it's still time to go beyond awareness influencer marketing and into really driving sales. The key is setting up your attribution model in advance. For one client, we give 100% credit for those who click though to buy and we give a reduced percentage credit on the "view and then buy" consumers with the assumption being they may have been influenced by other things other than the influencer content. Again, it's important to do this in advance so everyone's expectations are aligned.

Even though eCommerce sales are not as clean and easy to measure for influencer marketing as you might expect, our experience suggests it's definitely worth investing it these types of campaigns. If you need help with your strategy, contact us using the form below.