You found a creator who feels right. Their audience looks genuine. You've agreed on a price or a gifting deal. Now what?
Most brands skip straight to "send the product, hope for the best." The post goes live, you watch the likes roll in, and then you spend the next week refreshing your sales dashboard trying to figure out whether any of those new orders came from the campaign or just... happened.
That guesswork is completely avoidable. You just need about ten minutes of setup before the creator posts.
The one thing to get right before anything else
Give the influencer a tracked link. Not your homepage URL. Not a generic bit.ly. A link that's tied specifically to them, so every click and every purchase that follows can be traced back to their content.
This is the single biggest difference between brands that learn from their influencer campaigns and brands that keep throwing money at creators without knowing what works.
A tracked link does two things. First, it tells you how many people actually clicked through from the creator's post. Second — and this is the part most people miss — it lets you connect purchases back to that specific creator. Not "we got 12 sales this week and the influencer posted on Tuesday so maybe some of those were from them." Actual, attributable purchases.
What a tracked link looks like in practice
You create a link through an attribution tool. The link points to your product page or App Store listing but carries a unique identifier. When someone clicks it, that click is logged. If they go on to buy something, the purchase is matched back to that click.
The creator's audience sees a normal URL. They click, they land on your page, they buy or they don't. On your end, you see exactly how many clicks came through and how many of those converted to sales.
With LinkOwl, for example, you'd create a link in your dashboard, name it after the creator, and hand them the URL. That's the full setup. When purchases come in through RevenueCat or Superwall, they're automatically matched to the right link.
Set expectations with yourself first
Your first influencer campaign probably won't make you rich. That's fine. The goal of a first campaign isn't maximum revenue — it's learning what works for your specific product and audience.
Here's what you should actually be looking at:
Click-through rate. How many of the creator's followers actually clicked the link? If they have 50,000 followers and you got 200 clicks, that's a 0.4% click-through rate. Not unusual for a first campaign, but worth comparing against your next one.
Conversion rate. Of the people who clicked, how many bought? If 200 people clicked and 6 bought, that's a 3% conversion rate. For a cold audience seeing your product for the first time, anything above 1% is decent.
Cost per acquisition. Divide what you paid the creator by the number of sales. Paid £150 and got 6 sales? That's £25 per customer. Whether that's good depends entirely on your product price and margins, but now you have an actual number instead of a feeling.
Timing. When did the clicks and purchases happen relative to when the post went live? Most influencer-driven purchases happen within 48 hours. If you're still seeing trickle-in sales after a week, the creator's content has legs.
None of these metrics mean anything if you don't have tracking in place before the post goes up.
The spreadsheet trap
Some brands try to track this manually. They screenshot follower counts, note the time the post went live, then compare sales before and after. Maybe they create a discount code and count redemptions.
This sort of works when you're running one campaign at a time with one creator. It falls apart the moment you scale to two. Or when you're running an ad campaign at the same time. Or when someone buys three days later and you've already forgotten which creator posted when.
Discount codes are better than nothing, but they have a specific problem: people share them. A code meant for one creator's audience ends up on a coupon site, and suddenly your attribution data is contaminated. You think Creator A drove 40 sales when really 25 of those came from people who Googled "[your brand] discount code."
Tracked links don't have this problem. Each click is logged individually. There's no code to share or leak.
What to tell the creator
Keep it simple. "Here's your link, use this in your bio / story / description." Most creators are used to this. They've worked with brands before who gave them tracked links or affiliate URLs.
If the creator asks why you're using a tracked link instead of a direct URL, be honest: "It helps us see what's working so we can do more campaigns." Creators who perform well benefit from proper tracking because it proves their value — which means higher rates and repeat bookings.
One thing to watch for: make sure the creator actually uses your link and doesn't swap in their own affiliate link or a generic URL. Check the live post when it goes up.
After the campaign
Give it at least 72 hours before drawing conclusions. Some audiences act fast; others take their time. Check your attribution dashboard on day one, day three, and day seven.
Write down three numbers: total clicks, total purchases attributed, and cost per acquisition. Even if the campaign was a disaster, those numbers are useful. They give you a baseline. Your second campaign now has something to beat.
If the numbers look good, book the creator again. Repeat campaigns with the same creator almost always perform better than the first one because their audience has already seen your product.
If the numbers look bad, check whether the problem was traffic (nobody clicked) or conversion (people clicked but didn't buy). Low traffic means the creator's audience isn't interested or the content didn't hook them. Low conversion means the audience is interested but something about your product page, pricing, or checkout is losing them. Two very different problems with very different fixes.
The ten-minute version
- Create a tracked link for the creator (LinkOwl, or whatever attribution tool you use)
- Send the link to the creator with clear instructions on where to place it
- Verify they used the correct link when the post goes live
- Wait 72 hours
- Check clicks, purchases, and cost per acquisition
- Decide whether to rebook or move on
That's it. Ten minutes of setup gives you actual data instead of guesswork. And once you've done it for one campaign, every future campaign follows the same pattern.
The brands that get good at influencer marketing aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who tracked everything from day one and made better decisions each round.