How to track, benchmark and optimise your gifting performance (and your marketing strategy as a whole) One of the biggest advantages small and medium brands have today is access to data that used to only sit inside big-budget marketing departments. You don’t need a full-time analyst to understand if your content is working, if your creator partnerships are worth the investment, or if your campaigns are actually building momentum.
You just need the right metrics - and the clarity to know what they mean and what to do with them .
Influencer gifting is no different. When you track the right data, gifting stops being a “nice-to-have” and becomes a measurable part of your marketing engine. That’s when you can start benchmarking performance, improving campaign structure, and confidently allocating spend across the rest of your marketing mix.
Let’s dig into the metrics that matter most.
Start With Your Benchmarks Before you can improve anything, you need to know what “good” looks like.
Benchmarks aren’t there to judge you, they’re there to guide you. They act as your campaign guardrails, helping you understand if the content you’re generating (and the creators you’re partnering with) are actually contributing to your goals.
Some gifting-specific benchmarks worth tracking:
1. Total Reach Reach tells you how many people saw creator content about your brand.
It’s one of the clearest ways to compare channels.
If your gifting CPM is 10 cents, and your paid Meta CPM is $20, gifting is giving you extraordinarily efficient top-of-funnel exposure.
That’s the kind of data that helps guide a smart budget shift.
1. Creator Posting Rate This tells you how many booked creators actually produced content.
Your product resonates Your campaign structure was clear Creators felt genuinely excited to share Low posting rates often point to:
Poor product-creator fit Overly restrictive briefs Non-compelling gifting value 2. Total Engagements & Engagement Rate Engagement shows you whether your content is interesting, relevant and resonant.rate shows you whether you're reaching the right people.
This is the difference between:
“We got 15,000 engagements” “We sparked strong engagement relative to our reach — our message hit.” Use engagement rate as a quality indicator.
3. Total Content Count & Posts Per Collab Not all creators post equally.
Forecast content volume for future campaigns Plan your organic calendar Understand which creators consistently overdeliver Brands building always-on content pipelines rely heavily on this metric.
4. Creator Posting Rate This tells you how many booked creators actually produced content.
Your product resonates Your campaign structure was clear Creators felt genuinely excited to share Low posting rates often point to:
Poor product-creator fit Overly restrictive briefs Non-compelling gifting value Understand Campaign Health Holistically Metrics don’t exist in isolation - they feed into each other.
When you evaluate performance, look at how metrics interact:
Posting Rate + Engagement Rate High posting rate + low engagement?
Low posting rate + high engagement?
Content Count + Total Reach Lots of content with low reach?
Lower content count but high reach?
These relationships tell you what levers to pull next campaign.
Evaluate Content Mix Most gifting campaigns include Stories, Reels, static posts, and sometimes TikTok content.
A few rules of thumb:
Instagram Reels : strongest reach driverInstagram Stories : strongest trust + conversion cuesStatic Posts : evergreen value, suits storytelling campaignsTrack which content types deliver the best performance for your brand .
Identify Top Performing Creators All creators are not equal - and that’s a good thing.
Re-book creators who deliver results Build long-term advocacy Spot emerging brand ambassadors Understand who over-indexes in content volume or engagement Top performers also help you reverse-engineer success:
What was their style? What messaging did they naturally lean into? How did their audience respond? Use this insight to refine future campaign criteria.
Compare Costs to Marketing ROI If you’re not comparing your gifting efficiency to other channels, you’re missing critical budget insight.
Two key marketing metrics help here:
Cost Per Engagement (CPE) Shows the cost of every like, comment, share or save.
Cost Per Thousand Reach (CPM) This one is big.
Brands that understand these comparisons make smarter decisions about:
Scaling gifting Amplifying creator content via paid ads Shifting budget to the most efficient channels Use Your Learnings to Improve Tracking metrics isn’t just about reporting back - it’s about making your next campaign better.
Metrics help you improve:
Creator selection Briefing clarity Product seeding quality Content expectations Budget allocation Campaign timing Cross-channel amplification And importantly, they help you assess whether your strategy is working across your whole funnel.
If your goal is awareness → track reach, CPM, creator volume.
Metrics are simply the feedback loop.
Recap: Metrics Build Smarter Marketing A strong metrics flow allows you to:
Track performance against the goals you set Benchmark success across campaigns Identify where your budget is working hardest Improve creator selection and briefing Create predictable content pipelines Compare gifting ROI with paid channels Strengthen your overall marketing strategy When brands understand their numbers, they become unstoppable.
#gifting is no longer an optional marketing tactic for brands and neither is understanding how to make your gifting efforts deliver the best results!
picture: freepik
