Why Influencer Marketing is No Longer a Measurement Blindspot
Back to all articles
Influencer marketing is big business. In 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated the creator economy to be worth $250 billion, with growth to $480 billion projected by 2027. Also in 2023, Search Engine Land, found that half (51%) of Gen Z women prefer TikTok over Google for search. No wonder the biggest influencers now have agents and appear on reality shows.
Major beauty brands are investing heavily in influencer marketing. In May 2025, Coty’s CEO, Sue Nabi, credited TikTokShop for contributing to a strong program in consumer beauty and influencer activity for impressive Earned Media Value (EMV) growth across a number of brands.
Despite these significant commitments to influencer marketing, it has been a notoriously difficult activity to measure, particularly in linking it to outcomes – or sales.
In our recent ANA webinar, Doug Jensen, Head of Business Development at Ekimetrics was joined by Jeremy Lowenstein, Chief Marketing Officer at Milani Cosmetics to unlock how to effectively measure the impact of influencer marketing at the right stage of the funnel.
Drawing on considerable experience in marketing and marketing measurement in the beauty industry, including at Estée Lauder Companies, where influencer marketing measurement was introduced some years ago, Doug and Jeremy explored how mature brands are thinking about the role of influencer marketing in the marketing mix.
The role of influencer marketing in the beauty industry
Over the years, they have witnessed significant change in the skincare and makeup marketing landscape, from the birth of influencer marketing to what we see today; being in touch with where consumers are and how they’re communicating is critical to success.
Disruptor indie brands such as Milani and e.l.f. Beauty [JG1] [SL2] [JG3] are cases of how social media savvy brands can turn influencer, user-generated-content (UGC) and culturally relevant marketing into fast-growth sales success. Driven by what each describes as affordable prestige products and a story that resonates with today’s consumer, told in the places they live.
From micro-influencers to specialists and big names with tens of millions of followers, influencers are just one way of building a brand. But the value of influencers is primarily that they are also consumers who have built communities with other consumers who value and trust their opinion. Who they know will bring them unbiased and unfiltered inspiration and recommendations.
For example, Shelby Ann, has built a community specifically aimed at exploring the changing dynamic of mass market make-up, and in particular, how drugstore beauty performs relative to prestige. Her primary channel is TikTok, with around 1 million followers.
Jeffree Star is very well-known creator and make-up artist, who has nearly 16 million followers on YouTube, over 13 million on Instagram, and almost 8 million on TikTok. Along-time influencer, he has his own cosmetics range and media profile. Both creators have, unprompted by the brand, made mentions and reviews of Milani products that Jeremy says have had an impact on the brand’s success.
Three key principles of influencer strategy
For Jeremy, there is no standard influencer playbook, but he does have some key advice for those new to or less familiar with working with influencers:
1. Focus on relationships. You don’t need a huge team, but you do need to focus on cultivating relationships. For Milani, their relationships haven’t begun at those mentions. What’s more, previous organic relationships build authenticity when using paid relationships. Increasingly, brands and influencers have standards about who they will work with on a paid basis, and consumers are savvy about those partnerships too - authenticity is critical to all parties.
2. Keep the dialogue going. Remember that influencers may or may not like your brand or the product, and social media amplifies those opinions even more. Think of that feedback as a conversation and engage in it as a critical step, either to educate on how to use a product or in future product development and innovation.
3. Consider which channels are most important for your audience. A healthy mix of influencers is always a key consideration, not least as today’s micro-influencer could be tomorrow’s macro-influencer. And as social media continues to evolve, it’s important to continually review and monitor whether TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or Facebook are delivering the influence you need. Part of that is understanding your target audience and ensuring the influencers you target on the platforms they use are a match. It’s also worth considering relationships outside of your direct field, particularly where authentic brand affinity can be demonstrated.
The role of measurement in influencer marketing
As marketers, our job is to drive sales. Which means being able to measure the impact of marketing throughout the funnel to an ultimate outcome. Each lever has a different role, and it’s essential to understand those specific roles.
While paid partnerships are more predictable in their timing, being reactive to organic mentions and reviews, particularly by large-scale creators, is critically important. As Jeremey put it, these can be “like lightning in a bottle”.
That’s why good tracking is critical. Tracking solutions such as CreatorIQ/Tribe Dynamics or Traackr are designed to understand not just mentions, but likes, comments and shares (engagement).
At a campaign level, you want to check whether product samples are landing with influencers and being shared meaningfully, understand when to boost organic references with paid media, and for planned paid, understand the efficiency of the partnership and how the content scales. Is it landing with the right consumers and are you seeing the right level of click-through or view-through rates, traffic to site(D2C), and ultimately conversion to sales.
The role of outcomes in measurement
But being able to relate the specifics of both those organic and paid investments to a business outcome, while highly desirable, can also be quite challenging. Especially if you look only for direct relationships between influencer marketing and sales.
This is where a holistic approach to measurement, such as Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) that includes measuring influencer marketing comes into its own. Through MMM, you can look for how influencer marketing relates to different KPIs across the funnel, for example, search as a KPI for awareness or desirability, website traffic as a KPI for engagement, and sales. And not just D2C but also through partner or retailer distribution channels and brick and mortar. Though this isn’t typical of most MMMs.
Through a multi-stage approach, you can understand the impact on Desirability, Consideration and Conversion (Sales) individually. This means you can build up the picture of how typically top of funnel activity, such as influencer marketing, flows through to outcomes.
For upper funnel – or Desirability –you can use a KPI such as Google Search volumes and link that to the time at which content has been posted and consumed. For Consideration, you can use a KPI such as website traffic on the brand or distribution partner sites. Finally, for Conversion, you are looking at sales models that measurebrand.com, retailer.com or brick and mortar sales.
For Doug, while he was at Estee Lauder Companies (ELC), this was in showing the value of influencer marketing. For example, he was able to demonstrate categorically that influencer marketing was in the top three tactics driving sales. This ability to link influencer activity to sales ensured budget was available for growth-driving activity.
Three key influencer marketing measurement takeaways
Doug wrapped up with three key takeaways:
1. Objectives. Be clear upfront on why you’re working with influencers and the outcomes you expect to change. Ensure you select them to align with your brand and embrace them to help them deliver their best work.
2. Connect influencer marketing to paid media efforts. Ensure influencers are part of a 360, full-funnel campaign. Working with influencers in a transactional way won’t deliver against a brand’s objectives.
3. Implement a measurement program. A robust program to measure outcomes against business objectives is a must.
Fundamentally, without proper measurement in place, you are in effect asking CMOs and CFOs simply to ‘believe’ in influencer marketing. While we may instinctively believe it has a role, good measurement not only demonstrates whether that is true, it allows you to be fully in the driving seat at a granular level, understanding exactly which tactics –the influencers, platforms, content types and more – flow through to the ultimate objective: sales.
To find out more about how to measure influencer marketing:
Watch or listen:
Estée Lauder Companies x Ekimetrics Part 1: 10 years of marketing analytics partnership
Estée Lauder Companies x Ekimetrics Part 2: Getting under the skin of Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
Read our whitepaper:
