Influencer budgets are now defended in the same meetings as paid search, which means a screenshot of a nice comment section no longer counts as reporting. The difficulty is real though: creator content works partly through channels your analytics cannot see. Here is how to measure it honestly, without either inventing credit or pretending the effect is unmeasurable.
Decide what the campaign was for before you measure it
Awareness, content, and conversion campaigns fail differently and should be judged differently. A seeding campaign that produced forty usable assets and no direct sales did its job. A conversion campaign that produced lovely comments and no orders did not. Write the goal down before launch, because after the numbers land everyone becomes flexible about what the goal was.
Track these per creator, not per campaign
- Cost: fee plus product plus shipping plus usage. The whole number.
- Reach and views on the actual deliverables, pulled after the post has settled, not on day one.
- Engagement, with saves and shares weighted above likes. Saves are the strongest intent signal on short-form.
- Attributed sales: unique code and unique link, one per creator, tested before launch.
- Asset value: how many pieces you can legally run as ads. Often the largest return in the whole campaign.
Campaign-level averages hide the thing you most need to know, which is that creator performance is extremely uneven. The point of per-creator numbers is to find the few worth rebooking.
Why last-click undercounts creator campaigns
Someone sees a reel on Tuesday, thinks about it, searches your brand name on Saturday, and buys. Last-click attribution files that sale under branded search, and the creator gets nothing. This is not a rounding error, it is the normal path for discovery-led content.
- Watch branded search volume and direct traffic in the days after a burst of posts.
- Add a how did you hear about us field at checkout. Unscientific, unignorable.
- Run a holdout: a region or a window with no creator activity, compared against one with it.
If your only measurement is last-click, you will conclude creator marketing does not work, and then stop doing the thing that was feeding your branded search.
Count the content, not just the clicks
A campaign that returns thirty ad-ready videos with usage rights has produced something you would otherwise have paid a production company for. Price that at what the equivalent shoot would have cost and put it in the return column. For many brands running paid social, this is quietly the largest line in the whole calculation, and the one most often left out.
The rebooking test
At the end of every campaign, sort creators into three groups: rebook, maybe, never. If your reporting cannot produce that sorting, it is not reporting, it is a slide. Everything above exists to answer that one question.
Sadie reports per deal rather than per campaign: what each creator cost, what they delivered, what it drove, and who is worth booking again.
FAQ
What is a good ROI for influencer marketing? There is no universal figure, and any source quoting one is averaging across wildly different goals. Compare against your own paid social cost per acquisition, and count the content value as part of the return.
Should I use discount codes or tracked links? Both. Codes survive being screenshotted and repeated out loud; links capture the people who tap through. Neither catches the delayed branded-search buyer, which is why the holdout test matters.
How long should I wait before judging a post? Give short-form at least a week or two. Reels and TikToks keep accumulating views long after the first day, and judging on day-one numbers systematically undervalues the format.