Measuring the impact of influencer on our strategies can become somewhat complex, although it is true that we can count on the metrics from story views, likes and engagement rates often we cannot trace the impact that these patterns have on the business.
However, there is a method to measure traffic in our website which has been generated by the efforts of the influencer. To achieve this, we need three basic ingredients in the recipe:
- Website
- Google Analytics / or your prefered platform of digital measurement
- A “UTM” link to measure the influencer
In the following article, we will explain everything that you need to be able to measure the traffic to the site from your influencer strategy.
UTMs, What are they and how are they built?
The UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are URL parameters that use Google to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns with unique URLs. When we use different campaigns and means of publication, the use of these parameters in the URL for accessing the site, together with the use of Google Analytics allows the server to identify the specific campaign which is directly traffic to that website.
The UTMs can be generated directly from the Campaign URL Builder tool. Within this page, we can find several fields to fill but for today’s example, we will use four fields which are essential to measure the traffic that is received by the site from influencer actions. In this case, we will use:
- Website URL
- Campaign Source
- Campaign Medium
- Campaign Name
We need to remember that we want to be able to measure how many people are entering my site and count how many conversions that are generated by the contracted influencer. We are going to explain the objective of each field mentioned earlier and what we need to put into each of these.
Website URL: As the name states, we put our website link in this field, we recommend using this format: “https://www.example.com”.
Campaign Source: In this field, we place the website from which the influencer is going to talk about our brand or website. For example, if it is for an Instagram strategy then “instagram”. If it will be on different social media, then we need to generate a unique UTM link per network, therefore the steps have to be repeated until you have a link for each network.
Campaign Medium: In this field, we put “influencer” as this is the means by which the users will see the activation and enter the website.
Campaign Name: Definitely one of the most important fields, put the name of the influencer who will share our website in this field.
Once the fields have been completed, we can see below that an URL appears which has been generated by the tool, this is the URL which we need to share with the influencer and with which we can see the results obtained by this influencer. Continuing with the example above, this would be the link generated by the influencer “alberto alberto”:
https://www.example.com?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=influencer&utm_campaign=alberto_alberto
Recommendations when creating UTM links:
- Always use lower case letters, including for the names of the influencer and social media.
- Do not use special characters like “ñ” or accents.
- As we mentioned earlier, use a UTM if the strategy with the influencer is launched on various social networks, in the example, we used “instagram” but if the same influencer needs to make a post in Facebook, they have to use a link created with the source “facebook”.
I have created the UTM links. Now what do I do?
Very easy, this link needs to be used by the influencer in their social networks. Therefore, if the influencer needs to place a post on their Facebook page the idea is that our website link is placed, a Shortener can be used in their post. On the other hand, if it is for use on Instagram then the same influencer can share the link from their stories. Now we are certain that the influencer is sharing our link, we can review the results of this campaign.
I want to see my results!
We need to go to our Google Analytics view and look for the source/medium report to be able to see the results of the influencer strategy. Within this report, we can see all the means by which our users have entered our site. We can, in this way, view the results of the traffic received from the influencer campaign.
During the creation of the UTMs, we mentioned placing the name of the influencer who we want to measure in the Campaign field. We do this precisely to be able to independently analyze the results from the influencer, we can add the dimension of Campaign by means of a secondary dimension in Google Analytics.
As we can see in the previous example, this influencer campaign on Instagram gave us a total of 1,497 users. It is important to clarify that the result is based on web traffic.
This method of analysis becomes much more powerful, as we will be able to see the number of conversions in the site generated by users who entered the site through our influencer campaigns.
In Summary
If we want to effectively measure the number of users which have entered the site by means of the influencer campaign and in addition, we recommend using UTMs to track this traffic to see if they generate conversions within the site. We can enhance the reporting of results with the information on the website traffic and conversions as well as counting on traditional metrics that measure influencers such as publication Reach and the Engagement Rate.
