One of the challenges in influencer marketing is measuring the success of a campaign of a particular product at a multi-product retailer. We recently implemented a campaign of this kind, and in the blog post below we're breaking down our approach to this challenge and how you can apply the solution to your programs.

We started by measuring many of the metrics we traditionally report on, like total estimated minutes of attention, engagements relative to benchmark campaigns to see if this performed above average or below average, true views of the content, and more. But then we did something rather interesting. We took the content that we boosted because it was high-performing, and we measured the conversion from this boosted content.

What this means is we were measuring the actual sales occurring from people who either clicked on the content or were exposed to the content, and didn't click but still bought either within a one-day window, a seven-day window, or a 28-day window. What we were able to do is set up a formula in advance saying how much credit we're going to give to each of those windows (clicked and bought, viewed but didn't click, and bought over a one-day, seven-day, or 28-days).

So we agreed on a formula, giving proportional credit based on how long and whether they had clicked or not. Then we also knew that the retailer has a certain percentage of their sales that occur online pretty consistently, the rest of which occur in stores. So we took those sales that we could measure online and we were able to extrapolate them out to the total sales of the campaign.

Now, is this 100% accurate? No, but if you use a consistent, reasonable methodology of reducing the impact of Facebook to give credit to other ways that these sales were impacted and then extrapolating them out to a larger foot-traffic universe, you can get a reasonable estimate of the success of the campaign, which is interesting in and of itself, but it also sets a benchmark by which you can compare future campaigns.

Measurement is very tricky, which is why we recently hosted a Master Class, Nine Influencer Marketing Metrics to Impress Your C-Suite. But in the meantime, if you sell at retail, consider this methodology for measuring your success from influencer marketing.