You've run a few influencer campaigns. Some felt great. Some felt like throwing money into a hole. But "felt" is the problem — you need numbers, not vibes.
The question after every round of campaigns is the same: who do I work with again, and who do I quietly never DM back? Most brands answer this by gut feel. They liked the creator's content. The comments seemed positive. The engagement looked healthy. Then they rebook, spend another few hundred quid, and still can't say whether it actually worked.
There's a better way, and it starts with having the right data in front of you.
The only three numbers that matter
Forget follower counts. Forget engagement rates. Forget how polished the content looked. When you're deciding who to rebook, three numbers tell you almost everything:
Sales attributed. How many actual purchases came through this creator's tracked link? Not clicks. Not "add to carts." Purchases. Money in your account.
Cost per acquisition. What you paid the creator divided by how many sales they drove. If you paid £200 and got 8 sales, your CPA is £25. If another creator cost £100 and drove 2 sales, their CPA is £50. The cheaper creator was actually more expensive per sale.
Revenue generated. What those purchases were actually worth. A creator who drove 5 sales at £40 each generated £200 in revenue. A creator who drove 10 sales at £8 each generated £80. Volume isn't everything.
That's it. Three numbers. You can calculate all of them if — and only if — you gave each creator a unique tracked link before they posted.
Building a comparison
Line up every creator you've worked with. For each one, fill in:
- What you paid them (fee, product cost, or both)
- How many sales their link drove
- Total revenue from those sales
- CPA (cost ÷ sales)
Sort by CPA, lowest first. That's your rehire list in rough order. The creators at the top are generating the cheapest customers. The ones at the bottom are burning your budget.
Here's what that might look like for a small clothing brand:
Creator A: paid £150, drove 12 sales, £480 revenue, CPA = £12.50 Creator B: paid £80, drove 3 sales, £120 revenue, CPA = £26.67 Creator C: paid £200, drove 2 sales, £80 revenue, CPA = £100 Creator D: paid £50 (gifting only), drove 7 sales, £280 revenue, CPA = £7.14
Creator D is the obvious winner here. Creator A is solid. Creator B is borderline. Creator C is a definite no.
Where people get this wrong
Judging by content quality instead of results. Creator C might have made the most beautiful content you've ever seen. Professional lighting, perfect styling, captions that made you tear up. None of that matters if it didn't convert. Pretty content that doesn't sell is just advertising for the creator, not for you.
Ignoring the time dimension. Some creators drive all their sales in the first 24 hours. Others trickle in over a week or two because their audience saves posts and comes back later. If you're comparing two weeks after posting, make sure both creators have had the same amount of time.
Comparing different formats unfairly. A creator who posted a Story (which disappears in 24 hours) shouldn't be judged against one who posted a permanent feed post. Stories drive fast bursts; feed posts accumulate over time. If you want a fair comparison, keep the format consistent or account for the difference.
Counting discount code redemptions as attribution. Discount codes get shared. Someone finds the code on a coupon site, uses it, and you credit it to the influencer. Tracked links are more reliable because each click is tied to the actual source.
The "almost good" creators
Not every creator falls neatly into "rebook" or "drop." Some sit in the middle — decent results but nothing special. Before you cut them, consider a few things.
Was this their first post about your product? First-time campaigns almost always underperform repeat ones. The creator's audience needs to see a product two or three times before they trust it enough to buy. If a creator showed promise on their first post, a second campaign might perform twice as well.
Did something go wrong with the campaign itself? Maybe they posted at a bad time. Maybe their link was buried in a long caption. Maybe your product page was slow that week. Look at the click-to-purchase conversion rate. If they drove plenty of clicks but few sales, the problem might be your site, not their content.
Did they reach a different audience? A creator with lower raw numbers might be reaching a demographic you can't access through your other marketing. That has value beyond the immediate CPA calculation.
Renegotiating with your winners
Once you know who your top performers are, you have leverage. Not leverage to screw them over — leverage to build a real partnership.
Go back to Creator D from the example above. They drove 7 sales from a £50 gifting deal. That's phenomenal. You want them posting about you regularly. Offer them a proper paid deal with a higher fee, because you know they'll deliver. Or offer a commission on top of a flat fee so they're incentivised to push harder.
The conversation is easy when you have data: "Your last post drove 7 purchases for us. We'd like to do a monthly deal — £100 per post plus 10% commission on any sales through your link."
Creators love hearing specific numbers. It proves you're paying attention and it proves their audience actually converts, which is something they can use to pitch other brands too.
Setting up the tracking
All of this depends on one thing: giving each creator a unique tracked link before they post. No link, no data. No data, no comparison.
With LinkOwl, you create a link per creator in your dashboard. Every click and purchase is logged against that specific link. When it's time to compare, you pull up the dashboard and the numbers are there — sales per link, revenue per link, clicks per link.
The setup takes about two minutes per creator. The alternative is spending hours in spreadsheets trying to guess which sales came from where based on timing correlations that might be completely wrong.
When to drop a creator entirely
Some creators just don't work for your product. No shame in it. Their audience might be wrong, their content style might not drive action, or your product might not resonate with their followers.
Drop a creator if:
- Two campaigns in a row produced zero or near-zero sales
- Their CPA is more than 3x your average across other creators
- They drove clicks but essentially no purchases (audience window-shops but doesn't buy)
- They swapped your tracking link for their own affiliate link without telling you
Don't send a breakup message. Just don't rebook them. If they follow up, a simple "we're focusing on other channels right now" is enough.
The rehire cycle
Run your first batch of campaigns. Compare. Rebook the top performers. Drop the bottom. For the middle, give them one more shot with better creative direction. Compare again after round two.
By the third round, you'll have a small roster of creators who reliably drive sales for your brand. That roster is worth more than any influencer platform subscription. You built it with data, and you can scale it by finding more creators who match the profile of your winners.
The brands that win at influencer marketing aren't spending the most. They're learning the fastest. And learning requires measurement.