Brands misjudge influencer campaigns by relying on likes and impressions, exec warns

Brands need to stop judging influencer campaigns on likes, impressions and click-through rates if they want a clear view of performance, a senior executive at influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy has said.

Simon Harwood, the agency’s global effectiveness director, said many marketers want influencer campaigns to build awareness and drive future sales, but measure them using short-term results.

Referencing research conducted among marketers, Harwood said there was “a bit of a disconnect between the types of objectives that they’re tasking influencer marketing with achieving… and then how they were measuring it.”

Speaking on No Shelf Control, a podcast hosted by retail media measurement platform Portal, he said measurement remains one of the sector’s biggest challenges.

“You can’t expect everything from one strategy,” he said. “What we can’t do is use performance measurements to assess brand work… and then be disappointed with the results.”

Harwood said brand-led campaigns can still drive sales, but the effects may appear over a longer period than campaigns focused on immediate conversions.

The comments come as influencer marketing faces growing scrutiny over how return on investment is calculated. The industry’s reliance on simplified proxies has previously been criticised, including the use of earned media value (EMV).

Baskets over views

To address the issue, agencies are increasingly looking beyond platform dashboards and towards purchase data to understand what consumers actually do after seeing creator content – a shift that mirrors wider moves in the sector to link influencer campaigns more directly to retail outcomes.

Billion Dollar Boy recently worked with Portal to track behaviour on Amazon, Walmart and Target after users clicked through from influencer posts. Rather than stopping at views or clicks, the test examined how long people stayed, what they browsed and whether they added items to cart.

Speaking on the same podcast, Olivia Cripps, paid media director at Billion Dollar Boy, said average session duration exceeded 30 seconds, with users exploring wider product ranges rather than viewing a single item.

More significantly, the retail data reshaped assumptions about which creators were driving commercial impact.

In an oral care campaign, content from dental students generated around 80% of add-to-carts, despite more polished videos from practising dentists delivering stronger view-through and click-through rates.

The student content, framed as “Confessions of a dental student”, combined professional credibility with a more relatable tone, and drove significantly more people to add products to their carts.

Cripps said the data enables the agency to prioritise creators based on retail behaviour, rather than surface-level performance indicators.

Watch the full podcast episode here.