Marketing Campaign Tracking for Blog Partnerships

As bloggers we call them partnerships, collaborations, or sponsored post campaigns. On the other side they call them content marketing campaigns, influencer campaigns, or paid publicity. No matter what name you use for it though, there’s one aspect where you will surely converge: a report at the end showing results. So how are you handling this marketing campaign tracking?

Like it or not, nearly every kind of ad spend comes with a need to show some kind of results. While it may be hard for a beer company to measure the results of a Super Bowl ad or Olympics sponsorship, the blessing and the curse of online campaigns is that everything can be tracked: reach, impressions, engagement, clicks, sign-ups, and a whole host of other metrics. Unless an organization is just trying to get its name out there and generate brand/destination awareness, that organization is going to want to see some real data. They want to at least take a stab at proving a positive return on investment (ROI).

The person you set the deal up with has a boss to report to, most likely that boss has another boss, then there might even be a board of directors or shareholders further up the chain. People will require accountability on where their marketing or publicity budget is going and whether the money is well-spent.

So how are you handling your reporting at the end of the campaign—and maybe months down the line as a follow-up as well? You could cobble together what you have from multiple sources, including Google Analytics and what the social media platforms provide, but it’s a lot of work combining all that into a report that makes sense and it requires a lot of man-hours (or woman-hours, or couple-hours).

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a campaign reporting tool called InfluenceKit that makes this whole marketing campaign tracking process a lot less painful. The reports make us look professional and we can put them together far faster.

Reports From a Partnership Campaign Tracking Tool

Sometimes it’s easier to show than tell, so here’s a screenshot from one of the reports my media company did for a campaign with a villa company through our Luxury Latin America site. This is at the top of the report, showing overall campaign reach through the various channels:

As you can see, this gives a high-level wrap-up of how well everything went overall and what the organization got out of what it invested. The report shows overall impressions, YouTube views, and social media engagements, with the graph breaking down the elements individually. The organization can see at a glance that they reached a lot of the right people and when we did a follow-up report months later, they could see that the campaign was still reaching new people via the content and YouTube videos and they were still reaching new potential clients.

Then the reporting gets more specific, with stats on every single item you feed in to be tracked. So the client can see how each article did, how each social media post did, and which videos (if applicable) really resonated. There’s a full breakdown with multiple metrics and they can click through from the report to go directly to the item where it lives on:

That’s just one screenshot showing the results from a blog post, a YouTube video, and an Instagram post. These are just three of the many items though since InfluenceKit also tracked every single tweet from Twitter, every pin on Pinterest, and every Facebook post we put up. Each time it showed key stats such as impressions, engagements, and total watch time (for videos).

That last one is especially impressive since it’s a much better metric than simple view numbers. At first glance, 1,047 views might not blow anyone away but there is some serious watch time in there: 26 hours, 13 minutes. You won’t see that kind of stickiness with Instagram reels.

The cool thing is, unlike with reports you put together manually, these numbers keep updating. We probably did our job too well because this villa company saw a surge in business and they have had inventory availability issues ever since. When we follow up to pitch them again, however, we can say, “Look how well the articles and videos have continued to do. You got years of attention out of this campaign.”

Using Your Campaign Report for Pitching New Deals

We didn’t get a renewal (yet), but the owner of the villa rental company did write us a really nice testimonial. InfluenceKit has a place for you to insert that into the report, then you can use the report as a case study to pitch other clients. We can send this report, with the testimonial at the top, and say, “Look what this client got for $X,000 by working with us. We can do the same for you..”

I can’t show the whole report here but it looks really professional. There’s a spot to put both your logo and theirs at the top. If there were display ad banners involved in the campaign, which we had with two other campaigns, you can display those at the top as well.  Then there’s a handy “Share this report” button so you can just send off a link to someone easily.

Influencer Campaign Reporting From All Platforms

One of the biggest pains about creating reports manually is that you have to go gather up all the data, take screenshots, and somehow make it look pretty even though you’re dealing with different image sizes, layouts, and metrics.

The InfluenceKit reports solve this by tracking the campaign everywhere you want it tracked, including such disparate sources as TikTok, Mailchimp, and Bit.ly. If there’s something missing, you can add it manually and it will look consistent with the other sources.

These reports even include offshoots of the same platform, especially important on Instagram where you may be doing photos, reels, and stories all for the same campaign. It can also track by hashtag to pick up reposts.

Tracking for Multiple Blogger Campaigns

The main problem I had with this tool when I first started using it was that my 360 Degree Travel Network puts together a lot of travel content marketing campaigns with multiple bloggers. It’s usually not just one or two sites of mine participating, but 10 or 12 different blogs all putting up their own content and doing social media posts. One selling point of our campaigns is that we share each others’ content, amplifying the reach, but we couldn’t get all that information tracked unless every participant was paying for the service.

Thankfully InfluenceKit listened and now they offer a free membership tier so that even if someone is not generating multiple reports every month, they can still sign up and have their data tracked. The administrator of the program can invite participants through the platform, they then connect their social channels, and then their activity gets tracked and added to the report info. For articles on their site, they can add them from their site or the admin of the program can add them as things move along.

We’re excited about this function as it’s going to save hours of time for the person who handles the administration and tracking, plus the report will look a lot more professional than anything we could put together manually. Once again, the stats will keep updating even after the campaign is finished, which is really important for content since it tends to take a few months for articles to get traction in the search engines. Often the numbers have doubled when we send a follow-up report months later.

Marketing Campaign Tracker Pricing

If you do a lot of partnership campaigns on a regular basis, InfluenceKit is definitely a tool that pays for itself, both in the hours of time you’ll save and the real potential to close more partnership deals—including renewals—because you’re generating professional reports filled with verified data.

If you only occasionally do some kind of paid campaign for a brand or destination, you can probably get by with the free plan. That allows one report per month and a report is basically the whole collection of data for a particular client or campaign.

Most travel bloggers who are working on multiple campaigns at once will probably want the Grow plan, which allows up to 5 reports per month for $49. You have to be a pretty big operation to be handling more than that at once, but if you do need to step up there’s an unlimited plan for $99 per month. You may be able to get a discount if you belong to an organization that has a partnership arrangement with InfluenceKit, like SATW does and NATJA probably will soon. They were offering a sign-up deal via one of the TBEX events also, so keep an eye out.

If you’ve been following this travel writing blog or reading my books, you know I don’t recommend tools lightly and I mainly tend to tout what I’ve used and believed in. This software tool goes in the “no brainer” category since it’s so easy to justify from an ROI standpoint and if you only need one report a month, you truly have nothing to lose by trying it.

Create your free account here!