Are you in charge of marketing or working with influencers?

February 7, 2023 1:58 PM

When a company pays an influencer or blogger for a sponsored post (on a blog/website or on social media), what is considered a good ROI?

Forgive me if I don't have the right acronyms (ROI, KPI, etc.), but I am curious what kind of results are considered "good" or "successful" when paying a blogger or social media influencer for a sponsored post. How many views of a blog post per dollar spent are considered a successful campaign?

As a food blogger, I occasionally work with food brands on sponsored blog posts. I am comfortable with the rate I charge and always provide a report about a month after publishing a blog post. I typically report how many pageviews a blog post gets, how many saves a pin on Pinterest gets, how many views/shares/comments/saves there are on social media posts. I realize this doesn't always end up in immediate sales for the company (but neither do display ads on websites or TV ads and I know designers and production companies are paid a lot to create those?).

I'd love to get a rough range of "X-XX views for $X spend is a result that I feel good about reporting back to my boss."

I always wonder if I am providing enough value for the brand. I'm mostly curious about blog posts since I am not really a social media "influencer," but insight into sponsored Instagram posts would be fine too.

Any other interesting marketing/budgeting considerations you can share, or podcasts or reading materials on this topic are welcome too. I've always had a curiosity in marketing.

posted by dabadoo to Work & Money (1 answer total)

I work with influencers and bloggers, and for us the only metric that matters is how many sales we get. So, views are a start, but ultimately, views don't pay the rent.

We work either with affiliate links, so bloggers also get a cut of the sales, or with a discount code, so i can see where the sales come from, or, i can simply track if someone went to our shop after clicking from a link on a specific blog.

So... you won't have this info on your side, unless you're also using affiliate links, but the company hiring you can definitely track their ROI based on sales attributed to your blog.
If you have a good relationship with your sponsors, definitely ask them what their sales are from your blog, so you can start keeping your own stats of X views roughly means Y sales.

For example, on tiktok, i get about 10% of the viewers that click on the content, and about 3% of those who clicked that actually purchase.


A "good" Return on Investment (ROI) for me depends on the margins of the specific product we're promoting. If the margins are low (typically, products under $50), i'll need a higher ROI. With the cost of the product, shipping, overhead etc all factored in, i break even with an ROI of 3, and i aim for about 6 at the minimum for the campaign to be profitable.

So let's say i pay you $100 to advertise x, i'll need to make $600 in sales to make a profit.

These numbers will obviously vary a lot based on the products involved. I sell physical goods that need to be manufactured, shipped from A to B and possibly get returned. If the product is digital or a service, or higher ticket items, the numbers are probably way, way different.
posted by PardonMyFrench at 12:57 AM on February 8, 2023 [1 favorite]