The BFCM time can be…hectic (to put it lightly). You have to find influencers, create discounts, build a holiday-centered marketing strategy, and a lot more.

Everyone advises to plan ahead for offers and influencer collaboration (and rightly so!). But what about preparing to track the impact of your influencer marketing efforts? That task is easy to bury in the mountain-sized to-do list. Here, I’ve got seven tips about tracking your BFCM campaigns to put you ahead of the curve.

These strategies come directly from influencer marketer pro, Mark Dandy. He shares his hard-earned lessons from his on-the-ground experiences running BFCM campaigns for brands like Ear to the Ground, SONY, and more.

1: Use both discount codes and custom URLs

Marketers often think of discount codes and URLs as either/or: either give an influencer a unique discount code to track their impact or give them a custom URL. Mark suggests using both. Why? People often hear that a brand is running a discount but don’t use an influencer’s unique URL. They open a separate tab and shop from the sale. This purchase wouldn’t be attributed to the influencer even though the shopper came directly from them.

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

Brands need to make sure that they're ticking all the boxes in terms of where they're measuring impact. They might have missed 60–70% of the sales that an influencer brought if they don’t measure it correctly.

When you use both discount codes and URLs, you ensure you don’t undercalculate an influencer’s ROI.

A note from a consumer who often buys influencer-recommended products ( 🙋): consumers 100% do this A LOT! I often discover sales and products via influencers. But instead of going through the hassle of going to their link-in-bio and finding the link I’m looking for, I open a new tab and search for the brand directly. Finding the unique link when a creator has multiple in their bio is too much work. It’s much more convenient to just search for the brand in a new tab.

2: Make your discount code evergreen

Let’s say the creator you’re partnering with is Kacy. Instead of giving her a BFCM-specific discount code for 20% off – like KACY20 – change the discount code to something more generic – like KACY. Why? Because offers change all the time. As Mark explains:

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

If that discount has changed to 10% but says 20% in the name, people will not get the discount they were originally promised and will switch off.

Not to mention: many forms of content – like YouTube videos – often have a much longer shelf life than the Black Friday period. Sure, a creator might publish a collab video with you on BFCM, but someone might discover it six months later. At that time, the discount might’ve changed or evolved. So you wouldn’t want anything like ‘BFCM’ attached to your discount code either.

Conclusion: BFCM comes and goes. But the discount codes in an influencer’s post? That lasts forever – even if the offer evolves. To make a discount code evergreen, create a generic coupon name. Don’t attach “BFCM” or any numeric value to it.

3: Use influencer content to capture customer emails (early)

Email is an excellent medium for customer acquisition – especially during BFCM. You know that. I know that. But what you and I didn’t know is you can employ influencer content to capture customer emails in September and October.

You know those competitions, giveaways, and other similar types of collaboration that brands run requiring certain steps from a potential customer to win a freebie? Use them early on to collect customer emails and feed them into your CRM.

Having a potential customer’s email address is really powerful because you can use this channel to market directly to them – even beyond BFCM. Mark elaborates with an example:

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

You can send your target audience ten sales emails over a five-day period on Black Friday with different offers and discounts. For the cost of one customer acquisition, you can essentially market to them for free (for life!) – as long as they stay subscribed to your email address.

So, if you’re wondering what’s the most useful customer data you can capture via influencer content, it’s customer emails.

4: Track every customer touchpoint with your long-term influencer partners and double down on what performs well

In our survey, 33.3% of marketers said 20–40% of the creators they collaborate with during BFCM are long-term influencer partners.

Partnering with long-term creators is beneficial for two primary reasons.

• You have already imbibed tracking influencer impact in your workflow. It’s easy for both parties to drive and measure the results

• You can use your long-term partnership to track every touchpoint that customers have had with that influencer
  

Let me explain with an example: let’s say you sell coats and you repurposed the best-performing post of an influencer as an ad.

You found when people clicked on that ad and visited your website, they didn’t convert a lot – probably because there’s a vast disconnect between the way you’ve styled the coat vs. the way the creator styled it. So, you tested using the influencer’s image on your website to see how many conversions it brings in.

You do this data tracking, testing, and experimenting for months at scale with a wide variety of content and various creator partners. Now, when BFCM comes, you know exactly what’s gonna be a hit and what’s gonna be a dud. Mark says this lead up process is critical for tracking BFCM campaigns accurately (and increasing your chances of success):

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

The lead up process – how you're tracking every touch point that influencers have had with their audience, and then how they engage with you through ecommerce or email – will allow you to optimize everything. When Black Friday sales happen, you'll know the best-performing email templates, imagery, influencer content, and sales content.

You can also take this one step further by using influencer content to capture emails (as we discussed earlier) and then hyper-personalize your customer emails by tracking which buyer came via which influencer. Mark explains:

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

You can track every single person that has entered an email address via any influencer. So, maybe the first email you'd send to that customer features other imagery of the same influencer wearing different clothing. This way, you've not only got brand recognition, but also influencer recognition.

Doing this increases your chances of success because the customer likely recognizes the creator. You’re bringing a familiar face into their inbox – a pleasant surprise against the hundreds of spammy sales emails during BFCM.

5: Calculate the long-term ROI you get from each influencer

Influencer marketing ROI is simple in theory: calculate how much you put in vs. how much you got back via each creator partnership. But the reality is far more nuanced. An influencer might not instantly bring over the big bucks, but they might do so eventually.

Let’s say an influencer charges you $100 and they generate back $100 on the same day as their collab post. In theory, your ROI is even now, right?

But if you have creator-specific data (and you should) on your long-term partners, you’ll know that this creator also usually brings buyers with a higher than average order value (AOV). And any new customer this influencer brings in also buys at least three times from your brand. So, in reality, your return on investment is much higher than you’re letting on.

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

A lot of brands get too focused on how they spent X and got Y back, but they don't think about the long-term impact of creators. Therefore, they can be too quick to turn off influencers.

⚠️ Note: the above is a simplistic example of how many factors influence calculating ROI for each creator. Don’t take it at face value. On your end, you also have to account for any software costs, for example.

And remember: you can only track your BFCM campaign’s ROI with this much accuracy when you’ve been collecting deep data on your business and on each influencer partner for the long-term. Maybe you won't have this level of accuracy for this BFCM, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't start right now.

6: Separate influencer activity from website activity

A common mistake many influencer marketers make while tracking their BFCM campaigns is mistaking a website problem as a creator problem.

For example, let’s say a creator is bringing in many website visitors, but very few are converting. It might be an audience-fit, messaging, or influencer content issue.

But it might also be that you’re offering a 20% discount via the creator while having a larger 30% discount on your website. Why would a customer choose the shorter end of the stick? This tiny thing might be easy to miss when running BFCM campaigns with multiple discounts and offers. However, if not spotted promptly, it can lead to misattribution of a creator’s impact.

A solution to this: as a best practice, don’t treat influencer marketing in a silo. Talk to other branches of your marketing and sales teams to understand what offers they’re running. Come up with a uniform approach to how you will work together to roll out the BFCM discounts.

It isn’t possible to have a neat attribution model in marketing. Sometimes, your offers and methods will affect each other and overlap, but communicating in advance and working together can solve many of these problems. The alternative, as Mark rightly says, is just chaotic:

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

If you’ve just got different teams doing different things and nobody's talking to each other, they're all going to chase their own targets and then it'll be a mess.

Another example Mark shared was the brand's website performing poorly due to the influx of traffic during BFCM. Before thinking a creator is not bringing conversions, check:

• Is your website loading fast enough?
• Is the checkout process seamless?
• Are your offers compelling enough?

An influencer’s job is to get a buyer’s foot in the door by making them visit your website. From there, the onus is on your website’s user experience.

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

If your website doesn't load fast enough, your offers aren’t good enough, the potential buyer is not going to convert. That's something that a lot of brands get wrong. They're just not prepared on their own side. They're not looking internally as to what they can fix.

It doesn’t matter how great, engaging, and high-performing the influencer content is if your website and/or offers are a downer. When tracking BFCM campaigns, don’t look at influencer content and conversions in isolation, also note how internal issues might affect their overall impact.

7: Measure impact differently for each cohort of creators

Mark suggests dividing your influencer partners into various cohorts. Some creators might excel at driving brand awareness. Others might be A+ for capturing customer data, like emails. Then there will be some who are unbelievable at bringing in direct conversions.

Mark Dandy

Influencer Marketing Specialist

Divide influencers into different cohorts based on what you're looking for them to achieve.

Track the impact of each cohort using metrics that are the most appropriate for their role. For example, you could track a brand-awareness-influencer’s success using post engagement or website visitors. But for capturing-data-influencers, you might evaluate how many emails they bring in.

Expecting brand-awareness cohort creators to bring in direct leads is like expecting cookies to bake in the fridge. Having separate success metrics for each cohort will ensure you don’t overestimate or underestimate any influencer’s true impact.

Influencer tracking is a beast, but one you can tackle

When you’re knee-deep in Black Friday, it can be hard to keep track of all the ROI your influencers are driving for your business. But when you get a chance to take a breath in February, you’ll need this campaign tracking data to prove the impact of your influencer marketing efforts. So, like you do everything else in BFCM, prepare early for tracking campaigns:

• Start finding and testing long-term creator partners in June
• Constantly measure every customer touchpoint coming via creators
• Create unique discount codes (generic with no value) and URLs for every influencer
• Measure the deep data for every influencer – like what’s the AOV of the buyers they bring in and how many of them become repeat customers
• Keep your website and offers ready so your and your influencer partners’ efforts can bear fruit – test discount codes, offerings, website speed, user experience, etc.
  

The earlier you begin, the more prepared you’ll feel to track your BFCM campaigns.

Want to know more about how influencer marketers manage Black Friday campaigns? Check out our recent survey on BFCM influencer campaigns here!