It’s not news that getting buy-in from stakeholders and scaling your influencer marketing efforts is hard without the right influencer marketing reports. The problem? Reporting on influencer metrics is as complicated and daunting as solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded.

In this article, I’ll help you feel more confident about your internal reporting by sharing four examples of how real brands “show the data” on influencer marketing to their leadership. Let’s go!

How these 4 brands practice influencer marketing reporting

Before diving deep into the examples, remember there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to reporting. Your goals, company culture, and budget will never look like another company — which means the metrics & information you care about might differ.

The best way to learn & upskill is to use these examples as an inspiration, understand the general best practices, and form your own customized approach to influencer marketing reporting.

1. Aumio

What is Aumio: Aumio is a sleep and relaxation app for young kids/babies.

Which type of campaign(s) does Aumio run: Aumio partners with affiliates and runs fixed-fee campaigns, too.

Which metrics does Aumio care about: codes redeemed is the most important metric for Aumio. So their key KPI for both fixed-fee campaigns and affiliates is the CPM — cost per code redemption. The company uses Mixpanel to retrieve most data, including code redemptions. To get a more holistic picture, their team also looks at booking frequency (& how it relates to the number of code redemptions), spend per engagement, customer acquisition cost (CAC), reach, likes, and engagement.

How does Aumio report these metrics to stakeholders:

Aumio updates all its data on a spreadsheet every weekday. Why so frequently? Because these columns (expected reach, engagement rate, CPM, etc.) are used to calculate the budgets and offers for the creators.

The above spreadsheet is split by fixed fee vs. affiliates and also bifurcated by market. The affiliates’ sheet doesn’t have such as “expected content reach” and “deliverables” because: a) Aumio’s affiliates have full creative freedom to post the content they want; b) it saves time and helps the team focus on scaling.

Aumio agrees on a fixed posting date with creators, so it’s easier to track their deliverables. The  team stores these agreed-upon dates in Pipedrive and syncs it with their Google Calendars. Each marketer is responsible to ensure their assigned influencer partners posts at the right time.

The company also presents a monthly influencer marketing report to stakeholders with a detailed analysis of affiliate and fixed-fee campaigns. It includes five slides:

(Note: sometimes the company might also add a slide or more about their own social channel.)

1. An overview: this slide briefly summarizes creator performance over the month with primary takeaways.

2. Deep dive: the left-hand side of this slide gives a closer look at each campaign’s performance. Aumio manually extracts how each of their long-term influencer partners performs over a month. This information gives them valuable insights such as, “most code redemptions are from partners who did 5+ activations.” The right-hand side of this slide summarizes the table and shares results & takeaways.

3. Results overview: this slide has a table detailing each creator’s size, performance, collaboration frequency, cost, and cost per lead (CPL).

4. Links to best performers: this slide includes details of the best-performing influencer marketers, their category, and CPL.

5. All signups vs live dates: the last slide shares a graph showcasing whether or not there was a spike in sign-ups when an influencer post went live. Anna-Maria Klappenbach, Community & Brand Marketing Lead at Aumio, shared she added this correlation slide because the jump in sign-ups don’t necessarily show in code redemptions.

⚡ Pro-tip: you’ll notice Aumio’s reports has cool insights like, “31.6% of campaigns were influencers >50K and generated 78.76% of redemptions.” These numbers are collected manually. Anna says this might sound tedious, but has its payoffs. It allows the Aumio team to pause and reflect on what’s working and what’s not. Plus: they get super useful results they can use to not only guide their strategy more thoughtfully, but also get buy-in from stakeholders.

2. Deeper Sonars

What is Deeper: ‍Deeper Sonars sells portable sonars and is a core leader in the angling world.

Which type of campaign(s) does Deeper run: Deeper Sonars has an ambassador program that gets 70% of their total marketing budget. It has three levels:

• Deeper Squad is an open community for any fishing hobbyist and/or fan of Deeper. This has the largest number of ambassadors.
• Deeper Heroes are pros who use Deeper sonars.
• Paid partnerships are influencers with whom Deeper has negotiated a long-term deal. These are the fewest number of collaborations (compared to all three ambassador types).

Which metrics does Deeper care about: the core KPIs Deeper looks at are impressions, reach, and website traffic source. To track Instagram’s reach and impressions, Deeper uses Modash. To track website traffic source, Deeper uses Google Analytics.

• The total reach number is the sum of Instagram’s reach in Modash’s campaign monitoring, YouTube views, and TikTok views.
• Similarly, the impressions are calculated by adding Instagram’s impressions (in Modash’s campaign monitoring feature), Instagram plays, TikTok views, and YouTube views.

How does Deeper report these metrics to stakeholders: Deeper uses Modash to collect content from all long-term ambassadors. They check in once per week by grouping content by country & social platform. For example, they’ll filter for creators who have posted on Instagram that week. After verifying those who have posted, they follow-up with influencers whose expected deliverables didn’t go live.

Deeper collects the metrics and reports on them monthly. But they also have weekly meetings to track metrics from various departments. In this case, Valeriia Chemerys (Head of Partnerships), tracks impressions and reach from the first day of the month to the date of the meeting. She presents this in one powerpoint slide.

For example, Deeper would report the above numbers as, “January reach was 223–780K and impressions were 1102–2210K,” in the slide.

There are also separate meetings if Deeper is running special campaigns — like for a product launch or during winter campaigns (their busiest time of the year).

3. Killstar

What is Killstar: Killstar is a gothic clothing company.

Which type of campaign(s) did Killstar run: Killstar ran influencer gifting campaigns (with an occasional paid campaign here and there). This means their primary influencer marketing cost included only the COGS with a small amount of influencer fees added (for those creators who needed a fixed payment, too).

Which metrics did Killstar care about: Killstar’s core data points were UTM usage and revenue via codes.

1. UTM usage: each influencer partner got a UTM link and their performance was measured weekly using Triple Whale. The UTM usage report also looked at post-purchase surveys where customers shared which influencers enticed them to purchase from Killstar. The UTM usage reports helped the Killstar team determine which creators performed the best. The highest-performing influencers got their unique discount code to earn commissions for every sale they brought in.

2. Code campaign revenue: Killstar tracked code redemptions coming via influencers using Looker analytics. The performance report also included a breakdown of the total number of posts including codes, reach of influencer posts, and other engagement metrics (such as likes, comments, & views). Here’s what the Looker analytics report’s rows look like:

How did Killstar report these metrics to stakeholders: Killstar had two separate reports on influencer marketing KPIs and influencer content. All the reports were pulled together on a weekly and monthly basis, in addition to any specific campaign reports.

1. Influencer marketing KPI report: the content performance report included the key metrics discussed above — UTM usage and code campaign revenue. It’s worth noting that Killstar also bifurcated the UTM usage and gifting by location to determine where they saw the highest ROI with influencer marketing. This report was shared weekly and monthly via email to the direct manager of the influencer marketer. The direct manager then forwarded this report to the co-founders and CEO.

2. Influencer content report: the content report was built monthly and shared with the stakeholders in presentation form. It included:

• a quick summary of the month
• the star influencers
• top-performing & lowest-performing influencer content
• any specific campaign results
• budget spend
• analysis of the gifted products
• objectives for next month
• conclusion

These reports were also discussed briefly over the bi-weekly all hands marketing meeting to keep the overarching team in loop and involve influencer marketing insights into other areas of the business (an influencer marketing best practice many pros recommend).

4. KoRo

What is KoRo: KoRo is a food company with the mission of making high-quality food accessible to everyone at a fair price.

⚠️ Note: in this section, we’re only talking about the reporting for the Sweden and Finland markets.

Which type of campaign(s) does KoRo run: KoRo runs paid collaborations with a fixed fee and free products. All influencers get a gift card to choose the products they like from the KoRo catalog.

Which metrics does KoRo care about: KoRo’s primary goal with influencer marketing is to build brand awareness — especially when they’re breaking into a new market. To track this goal, they track CAC, ROAS, and cost per order (CPO). KoRo gives influencers a personalized voucher to measure the revenue generated via each creator. They use Looker Studio to pull the code revenue data.

Monitoring influencer content is done manually.

• The publishing date is set in advance for some creators, which makes looking out for influencer content easier.
• If the publishing date isn’t already decided, KoRo uses tags and mentions on social media to track influencer content.
• The influencer partners also report back when they post collaborated content — including performance metrics.

How does KoRo report these metrics to stakeholders: KoRo reports on all metrics monthly and quarterly using a spreadsheet.

• The monthly data is for giving an overarching picture of how things are going. It includes results achieved from all influencer collaborations combined.
• The quarterly report breaks down the data per influencer for the past three months to give an overall in-depth look at influencer marketing efforts.

5 tips to make your influencer marketing reporting a success

Below are five tips from influencer marketing pros to make your influencer marketing reports effective:

1. Lead every influencer campaign with one core goal

It sounds obvious, but many brands don’t set specific goals for their influencer marketing efforts. Whether you’re running a long-term evergreen creator campaign or a short-term campaign for a few months, it’s critical to set clear objectives and KPIs.

It doesn’t matter if you’re running multiple influencer marketing campaigns with different goals simultaneously — each one should have one core goal.

Mike Newton, influencer marketing strategist at Building Influence, calls it your “One Big Number (OBN)” in his influencer marketing playbook.

Mike Newton

Influencer Marketing Strategist, Building Influence

The trouble with influencers is they are capable of impacting a large variety of metrics. With such versatility, it’s critical that you decide for yourself what success looks like for your company. With that in mind, assign a number, what I call the One Big Number (OBN), to your program to measure performance.

During Mike’s time in Discord, it was Cost Per Retained User (CPRU) because the company wanted to grow its active user base.

Your OBN can be sales via unique links or promo codes. Or it could be a certain number of influencer posts live — especially if you’re running UGC or product seeding campaigns. Think about your overall business objectives and how influencer marketing can contribute to those.

The OBN should be the highlight of your influencer marketing reports. Lead with it as a headliner to help your stakeholders remember this number (and your success!).

2.  Add context to your reports

Let’s say you share a monthly influencer marketing progress report with your stakeholders. To them, “10K sales” means nothing on its own. But if you say, “This month we had 10K sales, which is a 100% increase compared to last month (5K sales),” you’ll hold their attention.

But that’s not it: you also need to highlight why your core metric increased, decreased, or stayed stable compared to last month or quarter. Maybe the number’s changing because you increased your outreach efforts to 200 creators per month instead of 100. Perhaps a specific creator over-delivered on their expected targets.

Whatever it is, your influencer marketing reports should have the full 360 on a situation — holistically presenting the data ensures your team members and stakeholders understand the “why” behind influencer performance.

3. Make every data point count

If you’re sharing an influencer metric in your reports with stakeholders, you also need to share why it matters and how it’ll affect your behavior.

Let’s say you shared your sales (core goal) doubled for the month because you vetted creators thoroughly before collaborating with them (context).

Next, you also need to share how this analysis will alter your influencer marketing strategy for the future. Maybe you’ll purchase an influencer analysis tool (like Modash) to refine the vetting process without it being a time-suck for your team. Or perhaps you’ll aim to maintain the same results with a smaller number of creator partners because they’re analyzed thoroughly.

Killstar is an excellent example of how to do this — they have a slide dedicated to “objectives for the [next month]” at the end of the report. It gives the whole picture on how the above data points will affect the team’s behavior in the future.

Critically review everything you’re reporting on to ensure it’s useful for stakeholders. If any metric or chart is redundant, cut it out. It’ll make your reports more concise and easy to understand. Plus, your leaders will focus only on what matters rather than getting bogged down in random data points.

4. Separate performance & content reporting

Data and hard KPIs are essential to make your influencer marketing reports successful. But carve a way to show both the numbers and the actual influencer content going live.

Why? It’ll help your team members and leaders see how influencers represent your brand. Not to mention: it’ll help adjacent marketing teams — like organic social media & paid ads — with reposting and creative testing. It’s the best way for your influencer marketing team to be cross-functional and support other business areas.

Burga is a great example: their team has a separate Slack channel where every influencer marketer posts the link to live influencer content, so everyone remains in the loop.

The hard part is collecting all this influencer content. Deeper uses Modash’s monitoring tool — all you have to do is give the tool a list of creators and a guideline on identifying sponsored content (e.g., posts using a specific hashtag or mention). Modash collates all influencer content (even Stories!) to your dashboard.

The best part? Modash will highlight if an influencer used only three of the four suggested hashtags or didn’t do a proper ad disclosure. You can even integrate Shopify and Modash to get the meat of the revenue data directly inside the tool.

5. Reporting can be simple or complex depending on your needs

Taking inspiration from other brands on influencer marketing reporting is great. But if a larger team with a bigger bandwidth has three reports and a gazillion metrics to track, it doesn’t mean you need to too.

Influencer marketing consultant, Georgina Whalen, said it best:

Georgina Whalen

Influencer Marketing Manager, ex-One Medical

“The reporting side of influencer marketing campaigns only needs to be as simple or complex as your gauge of success.”

For example, at One Medical, Georgina was tasked with increasing 25% (YoY):

• influencer generated content
• impressions via creator content
• new memberships driven via influencers

Since these metrics were complex, she tracked sales, total CAC, regional CAC, impressions, engagement rate, and CTR.

But you don’t need to go this in-depth if you’re a one-person team with simpler goals. For example, a one-person team with only “brand awareness via product seeding” as their single goal from influencer marketing might only create a basic report including the number of live posts per month, outreach response rates, and collective reach of creator content. That’s A-OK because the company’s needs and bandwidth are different.

The bottom line? Don’t make reporting more complicated than it needs to be. Does a metric affect your influencer marketing decisions in any way? If not, cut it. Think of the metrics that truly move the needle and report only on them. It’ll not only make your reports more concise and impactful, but also save you time and resources.

Reflecting & reporting is a part of the strategy

It’s important to remember that reporting on influencer performance and analyzing the numbers & influencer content isn’t separate from your overall strategy; it’s a part of it. Assessing numbers is a must-do not only to keep stakeholders informed but also to learn what’s working in your current plan and what needs tweaking.

You have to find a way to enmesh reporting and analysis in your daily, weekly, or monthly tasks. Want to find a way to streamline the task? Start by automating the collection of influencer content using Modash. Try it for free for 14 days.

Want to learn more? Check out our 7 tips to tracking Black Friday and Cyber Monday influencer campaigns.