Measuring and reporting how well one of my outreach campaigns performed is one of the slipperiest parts of my job. Honestly it's almost impossible to get an exact measurement of how well the campaign performs.
But like other marketers and PR pros who run these campaigns whether for an agency client or to "earn their keep" at a brand, I need something to take back to the bosses.
Though there is no industry standard (yet but I'm anxiously waiting) and no way to know exactly how much sales a campaign generated, there are starting points. There are very educated guesses. There are tools and measurements that tell us if one tactic worked better than another.
Based on a very thorough study that IZEA ran and presented visually on SlideShare (yes, it's necessary you check it out sometime today) and my own research and conversations with other professionals here are some starting points and forms of measurement that work.
What to Measure
IZEA questioned marketers on the following 8 ways to measure sponsored content and the results were interesting.
- Quality of Content
- Sentiment of Content
- Click Through Rate
- Cost Per Click
- Cost Per Acquisition
- Cost Per Impression
- Comments
- Shares
The majority of marketers responded that they use content shares to measure the success of a sponsored outreach campaign. I was surprised that shares were considered more important measurement tactics than a click through rate.
I'm hypothesize that a share symbolizes more value than a click because a social media user is putting their reputation on the line when recommending something. If I tweet a piece of content to my followers I'm only going to share something I stand behind and think they'd find useful. Or honestly, then I look bad... So a tweet represents that the tweeter believes in the content they're sharing.
Izea's research aside, there is also the obvious measurment-web traffic. This is what I put the most weight in to when measuring how well my own campaigns performed.
More than how much traffic a piece of content brought to my site, I look at how many of those people clicked on a registration form after reading my post. I look at this percentage and put more weight in to a piece of content that converts at 15% and brought 100 people to my site than a piece of content that brought 500 people to my site and has a 2% conversion rate.
Consider Attaching a Monetary Amount
Whether you want to put weight in to social media shares, impressions, site traffic or conversions-decide on a monetary amount to attach to each impression or conversion so that the end result of your campaign can be given an actual value.
This monetary value is a tangible number to many clients and bosses while a conversion or impression may still be slippery. Plus, if you can give them a monetary value, based on the number you decided before you ran your campaign, you have job security, kudos, gold stars, high fives and all kinds of bright and shiny things.
Time to Report
When it comes time to present your chosen measurement methods back to a client or a boss, the more visually appealing you make your results, the better.
Display the results of the campaign as a whole as well as how each individual post or influencer did.
If you are a GroupHigh user, you can export your campaign in to a pdf which will automatically create graphs and lists reporting all crucial data points from your campaign. So professional!
What stats do you use to report the success of your influencer outreach campaigns?