Use Influencers as a traffic generation channel with Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

Historically, influencers have hardly ever been associated with performance marketing. On the contrary, the perceived value of having an influencer program has often resided in the realm of branding and product placement at most.

However, things are changing.

Today, it is becoming increasingly common to monitor influencers’ performance. Despite the rate still being low, more brands are now measuring campaigns on investment than ever before, with 43% of marketers saying that sales and conversions as the main KPIs for influencer marketing.

Direct sales through influencers might, however, not be attainable for every company and every product. You might want or need to achieve different goals but brand awareness (put bluntly, maximise impressions) or revenue (maximise sales) with your influencer strategy. For example, you might want to maximise cheap but high quality traffic to retarget later or generate leads.

However, so far it has been very hard to implement pay-per-click or pay-per-lead campaign types for influencer marketing, for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to scarcity of tools to help you implement them in an efficient and scalable way.

At Make Influence, we are changing this - with our Pay-Per-Click campaigns, more companies than ever can now run performance based influencer campaigns that match their business objectives.

Sounds interesting? Then you should really keep reading on! In this article, we will try to give answers to these questions related to Influencer CPC campaigns: 

1. What Makes a good performance marketing channel?
2. How can Influencers be used as a performance marketing channel?
3. What is a pay-per-click influencer campaign?
4. PPC influencer campaigns: who is it for?
5. How to start doing PPC influencer campaigns: Native vs Platform.
6. Run PPC influencer campaigns with Make Influence.

What makes a good performance marketing channel?

Among the sea of reasons which made performance marketing so widely popular in the last 10 years, there are 3 main characteristics that make modern performance marketing channels like Google and Facebook so effective in generating precise, desired outcomes at scale.

These are:

1. An immense pool of users for the marketer to target.
2. The ability for the marketer to target very precisely and narrow niches within this massive pool.
3. The possibility to choose among different campaign objectives and to simply track and visualise desired results (conversion events).

For example, Facebook offers powerful traffic campaigns, which you can optimise for the number of clicks they generate for your website. You might then want to retarget this traffic with a lead generation campaign, or a conversion campaign, and both Facebook and Google offer these options.

How can Influencers be used as a performance marketing channel?

Good question! I mean, I wrote it (see what I did there? eheh). 

No seriously, it's so good that we also wrote an extensive article to answer this, but here is a quick recap.

First, you might wonder: what is performance based influencer marketing? In its essence, it is the practice of using data to create effective, transparent and fair collaborations that are measurable and predictable between a company and an influencer.

We usually consider these 3 different kinds of data to be of primary importance: 

1.  influencer account data, 
2. content data and
3. conversion data.

The first kind is important in the initial phase of scouting and recruiting when trying to find the right influencer that matches your target audience (in Facebook, you would call this the “targeting” phase).

The second one is important when trying to understand which content is driving the best results (in Facebook would be the content optimisation phase).

The third one is critical to track overall campaign results and judge the results of the optimisations on the previous two data points.

Obviously, following this tight approach and collecting and monitoring all these data is not an easy feat without the appropriate tool. Luckily, there are a few tools that can help you work this way with influencers... We might be biased, but we think nobody quite does it like Make Influence: being a marketplace, we give you access to all the available account data (such as detailed audience demographics) in real-time, content data (coming very soon!) and, obviously, conversion data such as clicks, impressions and sales. You can read more about how we work and what campaign types we offer here.

What is a pay-per-click influencer campaign?

Put simply, a pay-per-click influencer campaign is a campaign where you try to maximise the amounts of clicks to a desired destination (for example your website, messaging platform or app store) and pay influencers based on the clicks generated.

To work, a click campaign needs two essential things:

1. A maximum budget you are willing to spend for the campaign, spread across a defined period of time (for example 1000 euros max spend within a two weeks period) or, ideally, an individual max budget for each influencer you will want to onboard.

2. A target cost-per-click you will want to pay the influencers. It can also be different from an influencer to an influencer, for example, you could pay more to influencers that are a better match to your target audience.

Choosing the right price per click might be complicated at first as you will need to do some trial and error by asking several influencers what would they be happy with.

At Make Influence, we see CPC to differ depending on your industry and category, while being extremely competitive compared to Google and Facebook, especially considering the notoriously high quality of the traffic usually driven by carefully selected influencers.

However, data for this is still limited and could vary significantly from company to company.

Interested in discovering what could be a target CPC for an influencer for your brand?

You can download our CPC cheat sheet, containing the average CPC for campaigns in 15 different categories, from fashion to electronics and interior design.

PPC influencer campaigns: who is it for?

In short, PPC campaigns are useful for any company aiming to generate high quality traffic to a specific landing page. In particular, PPC influencers campaigns are very useful for companies with strong retargeting setups. To go into more detail, PPC campaigns are super useful for companies with one or more of these characteristics:

• Companies that do not have the possibility to perform a sale directly online from a webshop, but require instead a consultation or in-person meeting before, or where the performance is paid for after a service is provided. An example could be a real estate agency.
• Companies with a long sales cycle, that requires multiple digital or in-person touchpoints before the sale can happen.
• Companies that offer expensive products and services, often with high margins.
• Companies selling products that are inconvenient or impossible to ship, so that the influencer can’t actually show the product or service in action.

Companies with these characteristics can be found in several industries, such as luxury, high-end jewellery and fashion, real estate, travel and tourism, electronics, and more.

On the contrary, for e-commerce brands with an average basket size between 30 euros and 150 euros, conversion campaigns where you pay influencers a commission share of the sales they generate is usually a better option.

How to start doing PPC influencer campaigns: Native vs Platform.

Technically, you could start doing PPC influencer campaigns on your own by asking the influencer to track the clicks generated on stories linking to you, and asking to share proof of this in the form of screenshots.

Technically, you could start doing PPC influencer campaigns on your own by asking the influencer to track the clicks generated on stories linking to you, and asking to share proof of this in the form of screenshots. However, this has proven to be very time-consuming for both you and the influencer, which would probably require you to pay a price per click above of what you could potentially pay using other marketing channels, such as Google and Facebook.

At the same side, there is also the risk of fraudulent behaviours from the influencers, for example in the form of valueless clicks by people in their network or by click farms. 

These problems have been hindering the adoption of this compensation method and campaign type by companies and influencers.

On the other side, using a platform that allows you to include PPC in your campaign brief, allocate your budget to different influencers, track and report on unique clicks generated and automatically pay for them, can save you a lot of time and money, and perhaps even justify the effort of setting up a in-house influencer program within your company.

On top of this, some platforms can also have security measures in place to ensure your clicks are actually legit from real influencers’ followers.

Run PPC influencer campaigns with Make Influence.

At Make Influence, we support PPC campaign types in all of our packages.

Make Influence is a leading performance-based influencer marketplace, with over 1500 verified, professional influencers with high-quality audiences. We empower over 200 brands to run both revenue campaigns and click campaigns, as well as scouting, recruiting of influencers, influencer relationship management, accurate performance tracking, and reporting and automated payout directly on the platform.

You can read more about our campaign types, platform features, and use cases on our website... or you can discover the platform yourself, by booking a call demo meeting with our team! 

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