INDUSTRY GUIDE TO INFLUENCER MARKETING: E-COMMERCE

Chapter 4: Campaign Monitoring

Once the campaign is in full motion and influencers are doing their thing, your role becomes more about monitoring and organizing all the data and media that’s coming in.

Industry Hub > Industry Guide to Influencer Marketing: E-Commerce > 4. Campaign Monitoring

E-COMMERCE GUIDE NAVIGATOR

0. Introduction

1. Campaign Definition

2. Campaign Setup

3. Campaign Launch

4. Campaign Monitoring

5. Campaign Analysis

Detect & collect published media

You don’t want to miss the influencers’ campaign content once it starts rolling in. It’s a good reason to require influencers to use brand mentions and branded hashtags in their posts. This way, you can check your mentions and track the hashtags to see new content once it’s published.

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, e-commerces should be regularly checking these things anyway. Your entire presence is online, and it’s not strange that a customer may reach out to you via social media. This is even more likely if you use Instagram Shopping or a similar feature, and customers are actually buying your products right on a social network.

Now, if you prefer to not have to comb through your mentions and hashtags looking for campaign content, there’s another option available. Mighty Scout is an influencer tracking, analytics and reporting tool. The software collects influencer media and data, and lets you export reports about your information.

A screenshot from Mighty Scout’s website, showing its influencer tracking tool.

Mighty Scout claims to increase the profitability of your influencer marketing efforts by:

Drastically reducing the time you need to spend managing campaigns.
Giving you access to metrics and insights that can help you make better decisions.

So, depending on how many influencers you plan to work with, and the size of your marketing team, you may be able to handle campaign monitoring in house, or you may benefit from outsourcing the work to a dedicated platform

Repost influencer media to get the most out of it

Once you have influencer media for your campaign, consider reposting it. An obvious option is to repost the content to your own social media feeds. This is a good way to save a bit on content creation. Just make sure you have the influencer’s permission to repost their content.

Another great idea is to repost the content to the actual product pages showing the items featured in the influencer content. If you’re using Shopify, you can do this with an app called Tag Tray. The app lets you insert influencer (or customer) hashtagged content into your Shopify store with an HTML script. Tag Tray works with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

This adds an element of social proof to your e-commerce site. Social proof is a psychological concept that says that people will basically copy what others are doing when they are unsure of how to proceed in a current situation. In this case, when customers browse through products, and find something they like, seeing other people who also like that same product can help resolve doubts and validate their desire to buy it.

Set up e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you track various metrics about your website. See where your audience comes from, and what languages they speak. Track the time spent on your website, and see the bounce rate of all your different landing pages. Look at the traffic brought in by specific links, or monitor your conversions on customizable goals.

And, if you didn’t already know, Google Analytics has an e-commerce feature that you can enable to get even more analytics information about your online store. To enable this option, you’ll need to know how to edit HTML and Javascript, or have some help from a developer.

The two basic steps to set up enhanced e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics is:

Enable e-commerce for each GA view that you want to see it on
Add code to your site to collect e-commerce data and send it to Google

After you get this up and running, you can access your e-commerce data under the Conversions section. In E-Commerce, you get five standard reports:

Overview - Summary of revenue, conversion rate, transactions, average order value and more
Product Performance - See revenue, purchases, quantity, average price by SKU number and item category
Sales Performance - Revenue by date
Transactions - Revenue, tax, shipping and quantity by transaction ID
Time to Purchase - days to transaction and sessions to transaction

With this data, you can see deeper into your e-commerce. If you’d like to learn more about Google Analytics for E-Commerce, see this guide from Disruptive Advertising.

As a final reminder, remember that if you want to use Google Analytics to track the different sources of traffic to your website, you need to add UTM codes to the end of your links. You can easily create UTMs with Google’s Campaign URL Builder. Keep a spreadsheet of all the UTMs your business uses, and remember that your sources should match those found in Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels, or else they’ll be batch into “Other.”

Track your sales, revenue and use of discount codes

If you prefer not to use Google Analytics to track sales and revenue, make sure you have another system in place. Without a reliable analytics platform, you’ll miss out on data that’s necessary for the next and final stage of the campaign: analysis.

Shopify analytics offer a variety of data, depending on which plan you have. If you use WooCommerce, there’s the WooCommerce Analytics plugin to help you analyze your information. And if you’re selling on Amazon, Brand Analytics are only available to brand owners. Taking it a step further, some e-commerce platforms, like Shopfy, let you integrate Google Analytics.

Whatever the case, tracking your sales and revenue is a must. And as we already said, track influencer-specific discount codes, too. This way, you can see which influencer brought in the most sales with their coupon. And if working with various influencers, you can compare which social media channel or influencer tier worked best for driving sales.