E-book Part 7: Performance & Tracking

This is the seventh post in a series based on an ebook we co-authored with AP and Alison Chew. For early access to the rest of the book, click here. 

The challenge in the past has been tracking everything from potential views to engagement to clicks to orders. It’s a struggle. Let’s break it down into the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel.

There are several ways you can track reach and engagement. The first option is manual, using an Excel spreadsheet. You enter your influencer, and their channels and metrics. Once they post, you have to go to all of their channels and record their statistics in your Excel spreadsheet. It is extremely labor intensive, and if you want to do anything like that at scale, get ready to hire bodies full-time.

If you use an analytics system like Google Analytics, you can track with unique tracking codes, and then track clicks and conversions. One way to do it, albeit a very manual process, is to create unique coupon codes for each influencer brought to your site.

You can also track influencer and customer activity through your affiliate program. Inviting your influencer to join your affiliate program might be the most resourceful strategy out there right now. A recent industry survey of 500 influencers found that 61% monetize their blog using affiliate marketing. Using “affiliate influencers” has been a growing trend and it’s becoming more and more popular.

Finally, you can work with a management platform like MediaRails. This will definitely cut most of the work from you an automatically track the influencers’ activity once they post. In a platform like MediaRails, you can even automate your entire recruiting campaign, saving the time and money you’d pay for someone to sit and research hundred of influencers. You can also integrate performance via affiliate network integrations.

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