Insights & Analytics Every Food Blogger Should Provide

August 11, 2015
5:49 pm

Posted by DMA Solutions Team

Working with food bloggers and online influencers is valuable to fresh produce marketers for many reasons – with one of the more obvious benefits being brand exposure. However, another benefit is that it helps build trust between the consumer and the brand very quickly. Bloggers are typically highly trusted by their audience, so when they promote your products, you’re able to establish trust with consumers in a way that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Having said that, an important piece to working with food bloggers are insights they provide after delivering on their services. Having these insights is key to understanding which blogger relationships bring you the most value, allowing you to justify additional spend and ongoing relationships that are mutually beneficial. Regardless when you work with a food blogger, there are 3 pieces of information we recommend that you require from them:

Number of Impressions

How many people was the blogger able to reach for your brand? Impressions are important because they can determine (in a very general way) the overall value of the promotion. As we already know with social media, although impressions do not equal direct sales, it’s helpful to know how many ‘eyes’ had the opportunity of seeing your product or promotion. Typically, the higher number of impressions, the more valuable your promotion was with an influencer.

Overall Community Growth

Did the blogger contribute to the overall growth your brand’s communities? The blogger should provide you with overall growth stats, such as the number of followers your brand gained as a direct result of the promotion. This can be represented in a number of ways, but should show you where social media follower counts were just before the promotion and where you ended just after the promotion.

Documented Mentions

If the promotion was hosted on the blogger’s website as well as pushed out on their social media channels, you should expect a list (even screenshots) containing solid examples of where the brand was mentioned to ensure you received the appropriate amount of promotion based on your agreement. This includes blog posts, Facebook posts, @mentions from Twitter, Instagram, etc. Whatever the case, these are specific examples that should be showcased after a promotion, which can be used as a visual aid when measuring results.

Bonus Tip

As the client/brand, there is another important number you should evaluate on your end to determine additional value from working with a blogger: referral traffic. We recommend monitoring how much traffic a blogger sends directly to your website as a result of your partnership. If a blogger is sending very little traffic to your site despite numerous mentions or a post to their blog, you may not be getting the value you should be looking for with an ongoing blogger partnership.

We’ve found that most bloggers are eager to provide the information listed because it validates their value and performance to you and sets them up for future opportunities to work with you. The more detailed a blogger can be in presenting the analytics and success of a promotion, the better. While each promotion and partnership with a blogger is unique, you can at very least expect these measurements to be delivered. Happy promoting!