What’s the takeaway?
We’ve proven a statistical relationship between influencer marketing performance and organic performance, and measured the organic uplift of an influencers campaign, across the entire funnel.
The Problem
While the power of influencer marketing is now widely accepted, it can still be difficult to prove the ROI. Potential customers might seek out the product organically after viewing a campaign on YouTube or Instagram, rather than using the promo code or trackable link. Most companies are running many campaigns on many channels at any given time, which adds to the difficulty of attributing performance to influencer marketing.
User acquisition via lower-funnel influencer marketing is our expertise at TATAM. We wanted hard data to measure the actual impact of influencer marketing.
We set out to find out: What is the impact of an influencer marketing campaign on the organic performance over the course of a campaign?
Methodology
To measure the impact of influencer on organic, we ran 6 months of Instagram influencer campaigns for a subscription-based app. The KPIs were installs, trials, and subscriptions.
The campaigns ran in markets where no other marketing efforts were running during this time: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Spain.
We worked with ~140 influencers, who created ~600 stories and ~100 posts. Each Instagram Story had a “swipe up” link to download the app that was uniquely trackable.
After 6 months, we reviewed all daily installs, trials, and subscriptions—both organic and those that were tracked via the download link and directly attributed to influencer marketing (we’ll refer to these as “tracked”). Then we analyzed the correlation between the data sets, to find the correlation coefficient.
From this, we estimated what we call the the Influencer Multiplier Effect: the spillover from influencer campaigns to KPIs attributed as organic. We measured this as the “tracked/delta ratio”: the ratio between tracked installs/trials/subscriptions and the delta between tracked and organic installs/trials/subscriptions.
Results
Since the first influencer campaign, organic installs grew 371%, organic trials grew 568%, and organic subscriptions grew 1737%. The organic subscription conversion rate improved 400%.
There were strong positive correlations between tracked performance and organic performance: a 43.44% positive correlation for installs, a 63.98% positive correlation for trials, and a 43.44% positive correlation for subscriptions.
The relationship between tracked performance and organic performance was measured as the tracked/delta ratio (see “Influencer Multiplier Effect” above). For installs, this ratio was 1 to 0.7. For trials, the tracked/delta ratio was 1 to 0.8. And for subscriptions, the tracked/delta ratio was 1 to 3, which means that for every tracked subscriber, we actually registered other 2 organically.
Conclusion
Based on this analysis, we can say with confidence that influencer marketing dramatically improved performance across the entire funnel, with a multiplier ratio of 1:3 in the reviewed example.
One potential method of extending this analysis would be to pause campaigns in a key market—for example, Brazil. This would show how long the Influencer Multiplier Effect holds, and when and where exactly the KPIs stabilize.
The Influencer Multiplier Effect can be used by performance marketers—especially those for subscription-based apps—to estimate the organic spillover from influencer campaigns. We’ve found it to be a very useful tool in strategic planning.
