How Can I Measure Influencer Impact? Hint: UTM Codes

Quick question: How would you measure an influencer’s or brand ambassador’s impact on your marketing campaign?

When asked in a recent Twitter chat, many people responded with tracking the influencer’s own reach and adding their qualitative trustworthiness value to the brand. But what if I told you that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and your measurements could be 100% quantitative?

What if you could measure the total impact of each influencer?

What if you could look in Google Analytics and attribute web traffic referrals and sales for each influencer? What if an influencer put a link to you on their blog which was later copied onto a Facebook post by one of their readers, and then was copied into a tweet by one of the reader’s friends, and you could know that everyone who clicked on that tweet or Facebook post was because of that one influencer?

I’m here to tell you how.

The answer is UTM Codes.

What are UTM codes? UTM codes are the pieces of text you can add to a link that tells Google Analytics (and other analytics tools, too) to pick up extra information about each link. Information you can collect on each link:

• Source (Who is sending the web traffic to you?)
• Medium (What are they using to send it? Social Media? Blog? Email header?)
• Campaign (What campaign/promotion should this be counted towards?)

New to UTM codes? I recommend reading Buffer’s blog post on UTM codes and social media campaigns and HubSpot’s blog post on UTM codes which include Google’s URL Builder instructions.

OK, Cool Story. So How Do I Do This?

This can be done in 5 easy steps:

1. Assign a unique UTM text to each influencer. An easy way to do this is to use their names.
2. Place that text into the Source field.
3. Create as many UTM enabled links as you need for each medium an influencer might use: Social Media, Blog, Email, etc. If you want to send just one link to your influencer, just put influencer in the Medium field.
4. Shorten the long UTM code link and give the unique URL to the influencer and ask them to share your content only using this link.
5. Watch the stats come rolling in!

Now you can track which influencers had the biggest impact on your campaigns!

Need some help with Google Analytics or setting up an influencer campaign? I’m happy to help!