Hi SushiVidFam,

"What's my ROI?" is the question that ends almost every campaign conversation — and the one too many brands can't answer. In 2026, with budgets tighter and finance teams sharper, "we got a lot of likes" doesn't cut it. Here's how to measure influencer marketing properly.

Step 1: Decide what "return" means before you spend

ROI is meaningless until you've set the goal. The three broad ones each need different metrics:

  • Awareness — reach, impressions, video views, follower growth.
  • Consideration — engagement rate, saves, shares, comments, profile/site visits, click-through.
  • Conversion — sales, sign-ups, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend.

Pick your primary goal first. Measuring a brand-awareness campaign by last-click sales is how good campaigns get killed for the wrong reason.

Step 2: Instrument the campaign

You can't measure what you didn't tag. Before anything goes live:

  • UTM links for every clickable placement, so traffic shows up properly in your analytics.
  • Promo and affiliate codes per creator — the simplest way to attribute sales to a specific person.
  • TikTok Shop / platform data for shoppable and live formats, where GMV is tracked natively.
  • Brand-lift or a simple pre/post survey for awareness goals.

Step 3: Be honest about attribution

Last-click attribution lies. An influencer often plants the seed weeks before someone converts through a Google search or a retargeting ad that then takes the credit. Look at assisted conversions and view-through, not just the final click, and watch the overall trend — traffic, branded search, and sales during and just after a campaign — rather than obsessing over one code.

Step 4: Benchmark against reality

Sanity-check your results. In 2026, brands earn an average of about USD 5.78 for every USD 1 spent on influencer marketing, so that's a rough bar for a healthy conversion campaign. For engagement, compare against tier norms — in Malaysia, nano and micro creators average around 4.79%, well above the big accounts.

Step 5: Put it on one page

Every campaign should end with a one-page scorecard: the goal, the metric that matched it, the result versus benchmark, cost, and one thing to change next time. At SushiVid, every campaign already comes back with a detailed report — the point of measurement isn't to grade the past, it's to spend the next ringgit smarter.

For more of the basics, see the 10 most frequently asked questions about influencer marketing and what analytics a brand wants from influencers.

Sources: Influencer marketing statistics 2026 — Digital Applied; Influencer marketing statistics Malaysia 2026 — INSG.