Influencer Marketing Program and How Brands Can Measure ROI

Published on 06.10.2026 by Chizoba T

No matter the social media marketing campaign you are running, it can be hard to determine if it's working or not if you are not tracking success. According to a Sprout Social study, most brands make $6.5 for every dollar they spend. However, many brands don't even know if they are getting results in their influencer marketing because they do not track.

Even the brands that track end up tracking the wrong metrics. They feel that since they received many likes and comments on their post, their campaign was successful. That is not a good reflection of influencer marketing ROI. Join us in this article as we guide you through measuring your ROI from influencer marketing.

Understanding ROI of influencer marketing

ROI on Influencer marketing tracks the value of your campaign compared to its cost. ROI helps to connect the influencer content, such as videos, carousels, and static posts, to some tangible results, such as email sign-ups, product sales, website traffic, and app downloads.

Unless you are tracking the efficiency of your marketing program, it can be hard to tell if it worked. For instance, you might find out that a post received 50,000 views, but most of those views weren't from your customers. Did the customer cost $10 or $100 each?

Which of the segments of influencers brought the best results? Where are the niche experts, macro creators, or brand ambassadors? Without the data, you make your budget allocation based on guesswork, and it becomes harder to use audience insights to create better content.

However, tracking the ROI doesn't mean generating high revenue. If the goal of your campaign was tracking brand awareness, some of the ROI metrics to track include search behavior, reach, impressions, or social mentions, rather than sales. If you are running a program with the goal of content production, you can consider your ROI as the cost of the video compared to what you would have paid for an in-studio production. Therefore, the first step should be to determine your goal to get a better idea of the matching metric.

Why It's Important To Track Influence Marketing ROI

Here are some reasons to consider tracking ROI on influencer marketing:

Track the Program’s Performance

ROI on influencer marketing can be an important performance indicator that can help you track success and provide important insights into whether you are running an influencer marketing program.

Determine the Right Creator Influencer Type

In addition to helping you track your campaign's overall success, it can enable you to track the success of different types and strategies. For instance, it becomes easier to determine if they are getting the best results with micro-influencers or mega-influencers, or even celebrity endorsement. It can also enable them to track the performance of Instagram content. Therefore, brands can improve decisions on which campaign they should focus on that yields the desired result and which ones to ignore.

Secure Buy-Ins From Top Management

Many top management leaders may not be fully convinced of the influencer marketing benefits, as it is a fairly new concept. Therefore, marketers need to prove the program is worth investing in, especially for metrics like brand awareness or engagement that are often hard to show short-term impact. That means it is essential to better understand ROI on influencer marketing for different goals and the best ways to present it to show impact.

Why It’s Hard to Track Influencer Marketing Programs

There are several challenges in tracking influencer marketing program results, such as:

Attribution Challenges

You can imagine a situation where someone comes across an influencer's video advertising your brand. After that, they go to Google to search for your products. After that, they go to your website and complete the purchase. In the creators' analytics, the sale will appear nowhere, an indication of the challenge associated with multi-point attribution.

The good news is that you can layer different tracking methods to enable you to generate conversions, no matter how the user found you. Metrics such as saves, story views, and the reach of the influencer's post can only be seen from the account and not yours. Therefore, for you to see this data, you will need to request it.

To help solve the problem, you can build requests for metrics when creating an influencer brief, complete with the metrics you will require, like reach, saves, impressions, and shares. Make sure you include a deadline for getting these metrics after the posting. The goal should be to include the deliverables as a deliverable rather than an afterthought.

Understand the Whole Customer Journey

When people hear about ROI, they often associate it with sales, meaning that it is often considered a bottom-of-the-funnel metric, such as conversion and downloads. However, the ROI of influencer marketing can be tracked across the different stages of the sales journey. Influencers can help to drive brand awareness, respond to inquiries, convert customers to buy, and also be the brand advocate.

According to various studies, influencer marketing content often drives higher engagement than branded content. According to one report, 80% of buyers suggest that they would be willing to purchase from a brand partnering with influencers on top of the social media content.

Inability of Brand Awareness to Convert

When running a brand awareness campaign, it's important to note that these will not instantly produce an outright CPA number, even though they are trackable. To track the impact, you can track whether there was an increase in your business name searches during the program or even after, or the possible value of the created content.

However, it is important to note that these metrics will only give you a rough idea rather than the absolute result. But they are still better than saying you received many impressions.

Steps in Tracking Influencer Marketing Programs

Now that you understand what an influencer marketing program is and its importance, here are the steps to follow when conducting an influencer marketing program:

Determine Your Goals

Goals and the tracking metrics are two sides of the same coin. Without one, you cannot have the other. Additionally, the results will also depend on the goal. If you are using influencer marketing for brand awareness, the results will be different from another program optimized for conversion. The result of your campaign will therefore depend on the goal you choose.

Let us look at some of the different ROI for different goals:

Conversions/Sales

The main reason why you are running a marketing campaign is to increase sales. When driving sales, your strategy will matter in one way or another, whether the aim is brand awareness, conversion, or brand advocacy. This is why the sales ROI should include all purchases attributable to influencer marketing. As noted earlier, some of the top tools for tracking sales or conversions include analytics tools and promo codes.

Tracking sales can be a good option for brands:

Whose purchase point is lower?
Have a short buying journey, such as a fashion brand.
Are well established on top social media platforms.
Already have driven brand awareness amongst their audience.
Ready to offer some exclusive discounts via the influencer.

Before your influencer program goes live, you will need to implement a tracking method. Some of the tools to use to track the performance of an influencer marketing program include:

UTM parameter. This refers to a custom trackable link that tracks the source of the visit, leveraging Google Analytics as well as other tracking software. Make sure every influencer has a UTM parameter that will help you see which influencer is bringing the most traffic directly from Google Analytics. Without UTMs, attribution can be a challenge.
Promo code. This is a unique code personalized to the needs of the influencer. If you are running conversion campaigns with several influencers, you can provide them with a discount code so that they can track their conversion. This can help you capture sales missed by the UTM link. For instance, if someone views the post by the influencer and fails to click but later types in the code, this can help to track it later.
Affiliate links. If you are using a performance-based campaign, you can use the affiliate links to measure the conversions and clicks for each influencer instantly. This can work well when promo codes are also used to enhance the attribution model.

Some brands usually track influencer marketing sales using the top influencer marketing platform.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness tracks your audience’s familiarity with your brand. Unlike what some creators think, brand awareness isn't only applicable to a household-name brand. Even a small brand focusing on a small community can track the level of brand awareness within that community.

When calculating the ROI of a brand awareness program, you should track how many potential customers learn about your brand after the influencer marketing program. You can track different metrics like impressions, branded search, and reach. For instance, if more people are searching for your business after a creator campaign, it's an indication that your campaign really worked.

Brand awareness can be a good metric for:

Brands joining a new regional market.
Tiny brands operating in a crowded market.
Brands that need high consideration before purchase, such as furniture and expensive tech items.
Brands that require a time-based or long sales cycle, such as newborn baby products or flu remedies.

For brands outside these categories, your focus should be more on brand affinity and engagement. You should, therefore, track different metrics, such as:

Impressions. Refers to how many times users see your social media content.
Reach. Tracks how many unique people are seeing your post.
Volume of branded search. Tracks how many people are searching for the brand name.
Traffic. The number of people who visited your site, and how many visited from social media.
Social media mentions. How many times has your brand been mentioned on social media?
Sale/conversion. If you are running a campaign with the goal of increasing sales, you should track the revenue attributed, CPA, and ROAS. These are the top ROI metrics, as you can directly associate spend with revenue using promo codes & UTM tracking.
Content production. If you wanted the influencer to help with content production, a good idea would be to track the cost of each asset compared with the alternative production cost. For instance, if the influencer charges you $5000 to produce 10 videos, compare that cost with shooting the same 10 videos in the studio to determine your ROI.

If your brand is collaborating with micro and nano influencers, you're more likely to focus on content and conversion goals. This will provide you with more volume of content for each dollar spent and additional data optimization points.

Drive Engagement

While you want your target audience to know about your brand, you also need them to engage with your brand. Once they start engaging, it's a sign that they will be willing to buy from you in the future. When tracking brand engagement, you track how many people take action on top social media or websites. You can track this using the cost-per-engagement method, such as comments, likes, saves, retweets, and clicks. As we noted with brand awareness, you don't have to be a big name to start driving brand awareness.

When tracking long-term engagement, brand awareness is a great option to show you that, enabling you to forecast your growth in the long run. You can use different engagement metrics like saves and comments to show the amount of love people have for your business and show your current and new users the existing purchase intent.

The people already engaging with your brand today can buy in the future. Therefore, driving brand awareness is essential for brands seeking growth in the long term. It is also essential for brands intending to launch a product or redefine their image.

When tracking ROI on brand engagement, you can evaluate various metrics like:

Social media engagement. This can include likes, comments, and shares.
Post saves. A measure of how many people are saving your social media posts to revisit them later.
Cost per engagement.
Growth rate for your email subscriptions.
Social media follower growth rate.
Adding to cart. A reflection of the people adding a product or service to the cart.

Remember that you will not only be checking the engagement of the influencer's post. You will need to track the impact of the influencer’s post on your post. For an influencer marketing program to be considered successful, it should drive engagement on different platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. You will want to drive brand conversations whenever any sales happen; therefore, helping you build a loyal audience on Instagram and other platforms.

Influencer-Made Content

One of the most forgotten ways of tracking ROI of an influencer marketing program is influencer-generated content. This refers to the videos, images, and other assets developed by an influencer while partnering with a brand. So, which is the best method of tracking the ROI of your influencer-made content?

You should begin by considering the potential cost of content production, such as writing, photography, location, and talent. You should also consider the content design and licensing. You can track the cost of your previous campaign compared with that of the ad placement and influencer content.

You will also need to consider the impact of the influencer content. Find out which of the content brought the greatest ROI, such as:

Resulted in more followers.
Made people add a product to their carts.
Resulted in more revenue and sales.

You can then compare what you have spent with what you have gained.

Calculate your ROI on Influencer Marketing

Let us now look at the actual formula for calculating your ROI on influencer marketing:

(Value generated-Cost of Campaign/Campaign Cost multiplied by 100.

For instance, let's assume you are running a campaign for nano creators' product seeding. Therefore, you send your product to 5 micro-influencers, with the value of each product at $20, costing you $100. You give each of them a 10% off promo code. That means the cost of the program is as follows:

Influencer cost: 5x$100= $500
Product gifting:5X$20= $100
Internal time management: $20 x $50/hr = $1000
Total cost: $1,600

Let's now look at the value you get in thirty days:

Revenue generated by promo codes: $5,000
Revenue attributed to UTM links: $2,000
Total Direct Revenue: $7,000

To calculate the ROI: ($ 7,000- $ 1,600)/$1600x100 X 100 = 337%.

Determining the Right Influencer Marketing Spend

Many industry benchmarks show that you should aim for a return of $5 or $6 on each dollar spent in the influencer marketing program. However, this isn't set in stone, as many variables still matter. For instance, a nano-creator campaign with an engagement rate of 3% and promo codes can deliver a higher CPA compared to a mega or macro influencer that reaches 10 times more people but has a 0.7% engagement rate.

The more influencers you use, the more opportunities you have to test different audience segments, more varied content, and more optimization data. Therefore, a good idea would be to use influencer marketing platforms for bigger-scale management compared to those already running the big partnerships manually.

A higher ROI is often seen among the long-term influencers. If you work with several influencers for a 3-to-6-month period, you can build an influencer marketing plan that has one influencer driving social media awareness, while the second drives trust, and the third brings conversion. If you give up after running the first campaign because the numbers didn't work, you're unlikely to see results. That is why a better idea is to run 3 rounds before judging.

However, most of these timelines are for consumer products whose consideration window is relatively short. For high-ticket products or B2B items with a 9-month sales cycle, you might struggle to get a good ROAS. Your channel can still drive brand awareness, but ensure that the budget expectation matches your buying cycle. For instance, if you are getting a program that drives an ROI of 2 to 3 times, you aren't doing badly. For brands to see an iteration of 5 times, it should have iterated over several rounds.

FAQs on ROI for influencer marketing Program

Here are some of the frequently asked questions on the best influencer marketing programs:

After how long should I see results with an influencer marketing program?

The results of an influencer marketing program usually happen within 30 to 60 days if your program is focusing on conversion. Brands building brand awareness campaigns can take as long as 3 to 6 months.

Why do many brands fail to get a good ROI on influencer marketing ROI?

Poor results in failing influencer marketing programs are often a result of a tracking gap rather than an influencer performance gap, with missing attribution a common culprit.

What returns are good in influencer marketing?

A return of 2 to 3 times on the first campaign is good, and 5 times if you have optimized for several rounds.

Final Thoughts

As is the case with other social media campaigns, tracking the results of an influencer marketing program can help you determine what is working and what isn't. You can then double down on the step that's already working while ignoring those that aren't working. Therefore, use the tips outlined in this guide to track the ROI of the influencer marketing programs.