Influencer fraud cost brands an estimated $1.3 billion in 2019, and the additional rise in influencer scandals has put pressure on marketers to ensure brand value alignment before collaborating. Today Traackr, a leading influencer marketing platform, announced the launch of two new discovery tools, Audience Quality and Brand Values Match, for marketers to evaluate which influencers will resonate with their target audience and drive the highest ROI.
“Purchased followers, bots and misaligned values all detract from an influencer’s audience integrity and limit the impact they can have on a brand campaign, leading marketers to routinely overspend on the wrong collaborations and miss out on the highest potential performing influencers,” said Pierre-Loic Assayag, CEO and co-founder of Traackr. “We developed these tools so marketers can access rich data about the makeup of influencers’ audiences and make investment decisions based on authenticity and alignment, instead of perpetually relying on audience size – a problem which has plagued the industry for the last decade.”
Weeding out suspicious activity
Traackr’s Audience Quality tool, built in partnership with HypeAuditor, assigns a “quality score” for Instagram influencers, breaking audiences down into four groups: legitimate people, suspicious followers, mass followers, and other influencers. This tool predicts how likely the influencer’s content is to actually reach a relevant audience that has a high degree of authentic engagement. Ratings include the following.
- Audience Quality is calculated with a score, ranged from one to 100, that measures overall quality of an Instagram influencer’s audience. It takes into account suspicious accounts and authentic engagement.
- Audience Type shows the percentage breakdown of an influencer’s audience: real people, influencers (more than 5,000 high-quality followers), mass followers (those who follow more than 1,500 accounts) and suspicious accounts (bots, hacked accounts, etc.).
- Authenticity and Reachability reflect total authentic audience, ratio of followers who see the influencer’s posts in their feed, and comments/likes authenticity to better identify where followers or engagements might be artificially boosted.
Identifying potential risks to brand
The Brand Values Match toolset streamlines the evaluation of influencers for brand fit and identifies potential risks. Marketers can input keywords to search for controversial topics across all platforms where an influencer publishes and allows marketers to approve influencers who align with their values.
- Brand Values Keywords can include topics like politics, religion, drugs or profanity. Marketers assign a “tolerance score” to each topic and are alerted if their maximum number of posts containing these keywords is reached.
- Values Match Score applies a traffic light score to each influencer based on your tolerance levels. Under 50% of the threshold, under 100% and above 100% are displayed as blue, orange and red, respectively, signifying how closely an influencer aligns with brand values.
- Approvals are managed by account administrators once an influencer passes the safety checks. Admins are alerted when users and brand managers have requested a Brand Safety Check as a task.
“At amika, we strive to ensure our A-team influencers share our message and values, as we’ve had collaborations in the past that have fallen flat with our audience,” said Chelsea Riggs brand president at amika. “Traackr’s Values Match and Audience Quality have added a new layer of insights that have helped us find influencers who truly represent the ‘amika core user,’ whether it’s vetting accounts for suspicious followers or worrisome content. Our partnership decisions are much more data-driven, allowing us to justify an investment in an influencer collaboration.”
These features follow the release of Traackr’s Influencer Market Benchmark (IMB), the most comprehensive, standalone market benchmark for marketers to understand the impact of influencer content on their brand performance, and Brand Vitality Score (VIT) – a patent-pending metric designed specifically to measure a brand’s performance among influencers’ content. These capabilities demonstrate Traackr’s commitment to leading the influencer marketing category with data-driven technology that enables authentic and impactful influencer relationships.