You sent product to four influencers last month. They all posted. Sales went up that week. Your revenue report looks healthy. And you have absolutely no idea which creator was responsible for which sales.
This is the default state for most small brands doing influencer marketing. You know the channel works in aggregate — you can see the revenue bumps after creator posts go live. But when it comes to deciding who to work with again, who to increase budget for, and who to quietly drop, you're guessing.
The usual approach is to look at engagement. Creator A got 50,000 views on their Reel, Creator B got 8,000. So Creator A must have driven more sales, right? Not necessarily. Views measure reach, not intent. A creator with 8,000 views and a highly engaged audience of people who actually buy things will outsell a creator with 50,000 views from people who just scroll past.
The discount code trap
Most brands try to solve this with promo codes. Give each creator a unique code — ANNA15, MIKE10, whatever — and count redemptions. Simple enough.
Except it isn't. Promo codes leak onto coupon sites within days. Someone searches "your brand discount code" before checkout and finds a code that was meant for a specific creator. That creator gets credited with a sale they had nothing to do with. Meanwhile, the creator who actually drove the purchase — through a Story that inspired someone to visit your site directly — gets zero credit because that customer didn't use a code.
Coupon aggregator sites exist specifically to intercept this attribution. They scrape codes from social media, publish them, and capture traffic that was already going to buy. Your data ends up attributing sales to the wrong source.
Codes also have a conversion friction problem. Some customers see a code field at checkout and go hunting for one, leaving your site and potentially not coming back. Others enter the code wrong and give up. The code mechanic itself can reduce conversions while simultaneously misattributing the ones that do happen.
What actually works: per-creator tracked links
Give each creator a unique link instead of a code. When someone taps the link, the click is recorded server-side with a timestamp and anonymous identifier. When that person makes a purchase — whether that's five minutes later or three days later — the purchase is matched back to the original click.
No codes to leak. No coupon sites to interfere. The attribution happens in the background without the customer doing anything special.
The key difference from a regular URL with UTM parameters: server-side tracking doesn't depend on the browser preserving query strings. Instagram's in-app browser, link shorteners, and redirect chains can all strip UTM parameters. A properly tracked attribution link handles the redirect server-side before the customer reaches your site, so the tracking survives regardless of what happens to the URL afterwards.
Setting this up
The mechanics are straightforward:
Create a unique link for each creator. Something memorable if they need to share it verbally, something short if it's going in a bio or Story.
Share the link with the creator. They use it wherever they'd normally link to your product — bio, Stories, link stickers, pinned comments, email newsletters, whatever.
Connect your payment system. When a purchase happens, your payment processor sends a webhook notification. The attribution system matches it to the original click and records which creator drove it.
Check your dashboard. You now have a per-creator breakdown showing clicks, conversions, and revenue.
With LinkOwl, this takes about ten minutes to set up. You create links in the dashboard, connect your Stripe or RevenueCat webhook, and the matching happens automatically. No SDK to install if you're running a website (there's a lightweight JavaScript snippet). For apps, there's a Swift and React Native package.
What the data actually looks like
After a month of running tracked links for four creators, you might see:
Creator A posted three Reels and two Stories. 420 clicks on their link. 18 purchases. £720 in revenue. Cost you £200 in product and fee. Return: 3.6x.
Creator B did one YouTube video. 89 clicks. 12 purchases. £480 in revenue. Cost you £150. Return: 3.2x.
Creator C posted five TikToks. 1,200 clicks. 4 purchases. £160 in revenue. Cost you £200 in product. Return: 0.8x — you lost money.
Creator D shared a single Instagram Story. 31 clicks. 7 purchases. £280 in revenue. Cost you a free product worth £40. Return: 7x.
Without tracking, you'd probably have renewed with Creator C because of the view count. You'd have ignored Creator D because one Story feels like minimal effort. The data tells the opposite story.
Handling the "but they didn't click" problem
The main limitation of link-based attribution: some people see a creator's content, remember your brand, and search for you directly without clicking any link. That purchase won't be attributed to any creator.
This is real, and it affects every attribution method that doesn't use device fingerprinting (which Apple is increasingly blocking anyway). The practical impact depends on your product and audience. For impulse purchases under £30, most people click through immediately — attribution capture rates are high. For considered purchases over £100, there's more of a delay and more direct searches.
Think of tracked links as the floor, not the ceiling. They tell you the minimum each creator drove. The actual number is higher, but the relative ranking between creators tends to hold. If Creator A's link drove 3x more tracked purchases than Creator B's, the untracked purchases probably follow a similar ratio.
Commission-based deals become possible
Once you can track per-creator sales accurately, you unlock commission-based partnerships. Instead of paying a flat fee or sending free product and hoping for the best, you pay creators a percentage of the sales they drive.
This aligns incentives properly. Creators who drive real purchases earn more. Creators who produce content that looks good but doesn't convert earn less. You only pay for results.
The tracked link data gives you the numbers to calculate commissions fairly. No more arguments about whether a code was shared or whether the timing lines up. The data is the data.
Getting started
If you're currently running influencer partnerships with no per-creator tracking:
- Sign up at linkowl.app and create your first links
- Share them with your existing creators for their next post
- Connect your payment webhook (Stripe, Shopify, or RevenueCat)
- Wait for the data to come in — you'll have actionable numbers within a week
You pay 5p per attributed sale. No monthly fee. If nothing converts, you pay nothing and at least you know.
The first time you see a clear per-creator revenue breakdown, the guesswork stops and the real optimisation begins.