Brands are increasing their spending on influencer marketing, however, advertisers and influencer agencies still experience a lack of best practices on how to measure influencer marketing campaigns.

Being able to identify the most relevant and effective channels for the brand is crucial for campaigns success and will define the bottom line and ROI. While Influencers across the board still prefer flat fees, marketers should take an extra cautious approach to Influencer selection.

That’s why we’ve developed a system of metrics, which cover 4 key areas of Influencer targeting: Relevance, Reach, Engagement, and Sentiment.

Each group of metrics includes several points of data, that help marketers make a comprehensive evaluation of target channels and compare them to each other.

In this article, we’d like to share the details about metrics goals/meaning, how they are being calculated and how they can be used to make better business decisions.  In addition to the influencer marketing metrics, marketers are used to seeing, we include unique metrics like sentiment score, relevance score and more.

We have also developed an infographic covering all the key metrics in a nice, easy to comprehend visual format.

Here are the top metrics you need to keep in mind to measure influencer marketing.

1. RELEVANCE

• RELEVANCE SCORE

What is it: Relevance score is a number from 1 to 10 that shows how relevant each Influencer is to the target game/keyword

How it works: Calculated based on the weight of a target keyword in the Influencer channel’s metadata (title, description, and video tags)

• TOP 20 KEYWORDS

What is it: Identifies the top 20 most used tags and their frequency; shows the most prominent tags and tags relative prominence

How it works: Calculated based on the count of the video tags within the specified time period and is visually represented as a weighted list (word cloud)

• MOST RECENT KEYWORDS

What is it: Identifies video tags used for 20 latest videos and their frequency; reveals the most prominent tags and tags relative prominence

How it works: Calculated based on the count of the video tags used for 20 latest videos and is visually represented as a weighted list (word cloud)

• TOPICS RELATIVE FREQUENCY

What is it: Shows which topics are most widely represented on the Influencer’s channel and what is their relative frequency

How it works: Calculated as a fraction of times each topic occurs based on the frequency of the topic divided by the total number of videos on the channel (based on 1000 last videos)

2. REACH

• TRUE REACH SCORE

What is it: Measures the percentage of channel’s active audience and identifies influencers that have fake and/or inactive followers

How it works: Calculated as a median number of views from 20 latest videos divided by the total number of Influencer channel’s subscribers and multiplied by 100

• MEDIAN VIDEO VIEWS

What is it: Identifies how many views on average a video gets on the channel

How it works: Calculated as a median number of views of the channel’s 20 latest videos. Median is used because a small number of outliers could drastically skew the average

• CHANNEL GROWTH RATE

What is it: Analyzes at what speed channel’s audience grows and reveals the channel’s overall health and future potential

How it works: Calculated as a percent change in subscriber count within the last 30 days

• UPLOAD FREQUENCY

What is it: Upload frequency shows how frequently videos are uploaded to the Influencer’s channel

How it works: Calculated based on the number of videos uploaded to the Influencer’s channel within the last month divided by 30

3. ENGAGEMENT

• ENGAGEMENT SCORE

What is it: Engagement Score reveals how actively Influencer channel’s audience interacts with its content

How it works: Calculated as a percentage of the average number of interactions (a composite of likes and comments) in the median number of video views

• CONVERSATION RATE

What is it: Shows whether Influencer channel content is sparking a conversation and how much of its audience is participating

How it works: Calculated as an average number of comments per thousand views based on 20 latest videos divided by the total number of channel’s subscribers and multiplied by 100

• AMPLIFICATION RATE

What is it: Amplification Rate is the rate at which channel followers share its content through their networks

How it works: Calculated as an average number of shares per thousand views based on 20 latest videos divided by the total number of channel’s subscribers and multiplied by 100

4. SENTIMENT

• SENTIMENT POLARITY

What is it: Sentiment Polarity is a verbal representation of the video comments sentiment. It can be “negative”, “neutral” or “positive”

How it works: Calculated using natural language processing and rule-based sentiment analysis based on the comments from 50 latest videos

• SENTIMENT SCORE

What is it: Sentiment Score is a more precise numerical representation of the sentiment polarity, expressed as a numerical value between -1 and 1

How it works: Calculated using natural language processing and rule-based sentiment analysis based on the comments from 50 latest videos

• LIKES/DISLIKES RATIO

What is it: Analyzes Influencer channel’s content likeability based on how often followers like and dislike videos

How it works: Calculated as a ratio based on the average like/dislike count of 20 latest videos

To help you measure influencer marketing properly, Cloutboost has compiled this infographic that captures all the metrics described above.