Ask any brand manager who has run an influencer campaign what the hardest part is, and most of them will say the same thing. Not the brief, not the creator selection, not even the budget conversation. The hardest part is explaining to someone above them whether the campaign actually worked.

And the reason it is hard is that most brands are measuring the wrong things.

Likes and views have become the default metrics for influencer marketing because they are the easiest numbers to screenshot and put in a report. But they are also the numbers that tell you the least about whether your campaign did anything useful for your business. At 6th Street Artist, we have seen campaigns with half a million views that generated no results and campaigns with 30,000 views that drove a week of record direct sales. The difference was never the reach. It was always what was happening underneath the reach.

Here is what you should look at.

Why Likes and Views Miss the Point

A like takes half a second. It requires no thought, no intent, and no real engagement with what the post was saying. Views are even more passive. Someone scrolled past your content for three seconds, and the platform counted it. That is not an influence. That is exposure.

The brands that get real returns from influencer marketing are the ones that stopped obsessing over these surface numbers and started tracking the signals that actually indicate behaviour change. According to Sprout Social’s research on influencer marketing metrics, brands tracking engagement quality and conversion signals consistently report stronger ROI than those measuring reach alone.

The good news is that the metrics worth tracking are not complicated. You just have to know where to look.

Influencer KPIs That Actually Mean Something

Engagement Rate

Not total likes. The ratio of meaningful interactions to total reach. A creator with 80,000 followers and 3,000 genuine comments on a post is worth far more than one with 500,000 followers and 800 comments. The engagement rate tells you whether the audience is actually paying attention or just following out of habit.

When evaluating creators before a campaign, this number matters more than follower count. Always.

Save Rate

This one is criminally undertracked. When someone saves a post they are telling you something important. The content was useful, interesting, or relevant enough that they want to find it again later. In categories like parenting, personal finance, skincare, and food, a high save rate is one of the strongest signals of purchase intent you can get from organic content.

If creator content is getting saved at a meaningful rate, the audience is not just scrolling past it. They are keeping it. That is a very different thing.

Shares and Forwards

Shares are the metric that separates content people tolerate from content people actually value. When someone shares branded content to their own story or forwards it to a friend in a chat, they are putting their own name behind it. That is personal endorsement and it extends the campaign into conversations the brand was never paying to be in.

Track this in the first 48 hours after a post goes live. High early share volume is one of the best signals that a piece of content is working.

Referral Traffic

Every influencer collaboration should have a way to track how many people actually left the platform and came to your website. UTM links, creator-specific landing pages, and unique discount codes. Without this, you are guessing at attribution, and the guess is almost always lower than the real number.

People who arrive at your site from a creator referral are different from people who clicked a cold ad. They came because someone they follow sent them. They are already warmer. That shows up in time on site, pages visited, and conversion rate.

Branded Search Volume

This is the one most brands never check, and it is one of the most revealing campaign metrics available. When an influencer campaign lands well, people go and search for the brand on Google. They want to find out more. That behaviour shows up as a lift in branded search volume, and you can track it in Google Search Console.

A spike in branded searches in the days following a creator post is direct evidence that real people were moved enough to take an active step. Passive ad exposure rarely produces this. Good influencer content does.

Conversion and Sales Attribution

Setting up proper attribution before the campaign starts is non-negotiable if you want to know what actually drove results. Creator-specific codes and affiliate links make this straightforward. Without them, you are left with a gap between the content that went live and the sales that came in and no way to connect them with confidence.

Share of Voice

How much of the conversation in your category does your brand own compared to competitors? A well-executed influencer campaign, especially one where multiple creators post in a concentrated window, often produces a measurable shift in share of voice. Tools like Brandwatch and Mention track this across platforms and give you a picture of whether influencer activity is changing your position in the category.

What to Track Before, During and After

Before

Set a baseline before anything goes live. Current engagement rate, website traffic, branded search volume, follower count, conversion rate. Without these numbers you have nothing to compare against when the campaign ends.

Also agree on what the primary objective is for this specific campaign before any content is produced. Awareness campaigns and conversion campaigns need different primary metrics. Trying to measure both equally usually means measuring neither properly.

During

The first few hours after a post goes live tell you a lot. Watch comment quality, not just comment volume. Specific, personal comments that reference the product or the creator’s experience with it are a strong signal. A flood of generic responses is not.

If referral traffic or branded search spikes in real time, that is as clear a signal as you can get that the content is working right now.

After

Do a full review against the baseline you set before the campaign. Every metric, compared to where it was. Then look at the thirty-day window, not just the week after. Creator content that performs well keeps driving traffic and conversions long after the initial post and that tail is where a lot of the real value sits.

To understand how brands across industries are building smarter measurement into their influencer strategies, this piece on why every industry is betting on influencer marketing gives a good broader picture.

How We Do This at 6th Street Artist

Measurement at the 6th Street Artist does not start after the campaign. It starts before the brief goes out. We agree on the influencer KPIs that matter for each specific objective, build the tracking infrastructure before anything launches, and deliver reports after the campaign that go well beyond reach and impressions.

What we actually look at is engagement quality, referral traffic, conversion signals, branded search movement, and whether the campaign shifted the metrics that matter to that specific brand’s business. Not what looks good in a deck. What actually tells you something useful.

If your influencer campaigns are producing numbers but not answers, come talk to us.

Let’s Talk

Call us: +91 91366 69815 Email: info@6thstreetartist.com

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Manpreet Singh

Manpreet Singh Chadha was a visionary entrepreneur and co-founder of 6th Street Artist, a Mumbai-based influencer marketing agency. With a passion for empowering creators and brands, he played a pivotal role in shaping the agency’s mission to revolutionize influencer marketing in India. His legacy continues to inspire the industry.