OMR 2026: Keynote on Influencer Marketing: Why data-driven tracking decides between profit and loss

In audits and onboarding we see a similar picture again and again: an Excel sheet is passed from person to person and contains a few names of influencers, costs and perhaps a “Conversions: yes/no” column. This is a nice list, but it is not yet a database. Most sheets lack basic data:

• Audience data broken down: “DACH, female, 25+” is not enough. You need concrete percentages per age group and gender, both as an estimated target group and as the target group actually reached.
• Verticals: “Lifestyle” doesn’t give you much information. Travel, DIY, food or pets, for example, are categories that you can learn from later.
• Estimated vs. Actual Views: Did you get what you paid for? Without this comparison, you cannot assess whether the influencer you booked has delivered.
• Deliverables and Status: What exactly did you book, did it go live and when?
• Focus product and briefing: Only if you know what was placed and how you briefed can you later evaluate what worked.
• Performance KPIs: There are some KPIs that you can track, from Net Revenue, CAC, NC CAC and new customer rate to AOV, ROAS and CVR to sessions, cost per session and engagement rate. Systematically find the ones that are relevant to you and track them from the start.

The goal is not a huge sheet that no one can maintain. Your task is to build a compact dashboard where everything important is visible at a glance. The best way to find all data points at a glance when working with your 13-inch MacBook is without having to scroll endlessly. With this foundation you can optimize any social media channel and develop influencer marketing into a successful channel.

You can also find all insights from our OMR keynote including Q&A as a complete video on YouTube.

You are currently viewing placeholder content from YouTube. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.

More information

Unlock contentAccept required service and unlock content

Influencer marketing must convert immediately otherwise it is not effective? This is one of the biggest misconceptions we influencer marketing agencies keep hearing. Influencer marketing is not a classic pull channel like Google, but a push channel. This means that content from influencers interrupts your target group's daily scrolling on Instagram & Co. and shows them unplanned content - unlike Google, where users actively search for answers to a problem.

A typical journey today looks like this: someone sees a creator post on social media, becomes aware of your brand, searches for it on Google a few days later, is retargeted via a meta ad and converts two to three weeks after the first contact. So the last click goes to paid social or SEO. Actually, the impetus came from the influencer.

So your job is not to evaluate influencer marketing based on the last click. This puts you at risk of massively underestimating every channel from Instagram to YouTube to Twitch. In our influencer agency, we work for brands like HelloFresh or mymuesli with our brandformance framework, a combination of soft KPIs as leading indicators and hard KPIs as lagging indicators.

Soft KPIs: this is what the channel shows you early on:

• Sessions and Session Duration: How high quality is the traffic?
• Brand Search Uplift: According to Google Search Console, do brand searches increase after a posting?
• Brand Fit: What does the age distribution, gender and interest verticals look like?
• Engagement and Community Sentiment: Based on likes, comments and tone, is the placement positively received or ignored?
• CPM & Community Ratio: How does audience penetration compare to cost?

Hard KPIs: what becomes visible after 2 to 3 months:

• NC ROAS and CAC: What do you pay per new customer?
• CVR for new customers: How high is the conversion rate of the booked influencers?
• Blended Marketing CAC: What was the impact on the overall CAC?
• Conversions over Time: When do purchases actually come in?

The combination gives you a complete picture after a few weeks and you can evaluate which campaigns went well and where you can still make improvements.

To track the success of influencer campaigns, many brands look at what the campaigns of a particular month brought in. That sounds like the logical thing to do at first, but it is often only half the truth. Rather, it's worth asking another question: What came in from all the placements this month - even from those that were launched before?

Particularly on YouTube, placements continue to deliver performance months after go-live. We regularly see conversions that arrive six to seven months after the original posting. This is simply because YouTube videos continue to be played by the algorithm, appear in search results and are now also indexed in LLMs.

That's why you should always keep an eye on two metrics in parallel:

• Campaign Basis: What did this month's placements bring in by the end of the month?
• Month Basis: What total came in from all current and past placements this month?

A concrete example from our OMR keynote shows you what this means in practice: A brand evaluates its March campaigns on a campaign basis and sees a CAC of €73, 178 conversions and a ROAS of 1.02. But if you instead look at all conversions that came in in March, including overlap from previous months, the CAC drops to €46 and the ROAS increases to 1.15. The channel and the campaign are the same, but the perspective is different.

The course of campaigns and the bookings of the content creators also have a major influence on your success in influencer marketing - whether with or without an agency. Basically, we say: Long-term bookings are almost never worth it, even if the planning security is tempting - at least not in the way most brands approach it. The idea behind it is not the problem and can even be very useful if the collaboration goes well. However, implementation often starts without exit options and without clear performance goals. You might be committed to ten posts straight away without testing a single placement. Instead, it makes sense to test a few placements first and pay attention to various points:

• Book creators with growing communities and increasing reach.
• Define clear performance or reach goals.
• Define exit options if goals are not achieved.

In order to ultimately create a successful partnership between brand and creator, it is always worth paying attention to a clear structure, for example using three different placements with different goals:

1. Building awareness in the community: Sessions and session duration are the focus. Is the community even interested? What are people writing in the comments? How long do they stay on the site?
2. Build trust: Are conversions increasing compared to before? Is the proportion of people who decide to buy increasing?
3. Conversion: We regularly see the clearest uplift in the third placement. The creator stands behind the brand, the community knows the product, the storytelling builds on each other, which increases the sales impact.

Especially when you work with content creators in the form of rebookings or long-term bookings, sooner or later the topic of discount codes comes up.

On the one hand, you definitely have to pay attention to the overlap performance. If the influencer uses the same code for every placement, tracking will be more difficult for you. If there is a different code every time, communities, especially on Instagram, sometimes find this annoying. It is important to find a good middle ground here. In our creator marketing agency, for example, we always work with individual codes for YouTube placements; for Instagram it is sometimes the same code.

On the other hand, discount codes are basically a double-edged sword. They make campaigns measurable, but eat into margins, train customers for discounts and make it difficult to separate real channel influence from promotions. That's why it basically makes sense to find a way out of the discount codes. We recommend three phases:

• Phase 1: Collect data with code: Track verticals, formats, platforms, target groups over several months and check hard and soft KPIs.
• Phase 2: Translate Benchmarks: How can you convert hard KPIs into soft KPIs? For example, experience shows that a CAC of €35 with an AOV of €60 and NC ROAS of 3x roughly corresponds to a CPS of €3 with a minimum session duration of 3:34 minutes. If you or your influencer agency know these equivalents, you can become profitable with soft KPI combinations.
• Phase 3: Remove codes gradually: Reduce one share first instead of switching off immediately and everywhere at the same time and use the soft KPIs as a new lever. UTM links do the tracking, your margin increases and the attribution becomes cleaner.

If you are looking for influencers who fit your brand, you can either use a professional influencer marketing agency or first use digital scouting tools. Such tools offer you various functions:

• Discovery & Outreach: Find millions of creator profiles, filter them, and contact them directly at the touch of a button.
• Brand Collab Data: You can see which brands creators have already worked with.
• Performance Rating: A reporting dashboard shows you data on spend, engagement and, if applicable, promo code sales through a Shopify API.

But what is very important is that even inactive accounts can look good in the software, there is no access to real performance data and you are missing a lot of data and learning to make a safe decision. So you still have the task of testing content creators for your brand and building a performance influencer marketing strategy.

Influencer marketing still works in 2026. What often doesn't work, however, is tracking, evaluation and patience. If brands reduce influencer marketing only to the last click, give up quickly or use discount codes as the only adjustment screw, it is difficult to scale the channel profitably. However, if you build a clean database, combine brand awareness and performance, develop and test campaigns across multiple placements instead of blindly following trends, you will see: influencer marketing delivers significantly more than clichés and critics claim.

Do you want to know what an influencer marketing strategy can look like for your brand? Then let's talk.