Influencer Marketing Measurement: Why EMV Falls Short and How VIT Offers a Better Alternative

Measuring the success of influencer marketing campaigns can be complex, particularly when the results span across multiple platforms and serve various objectives. Some goals, like brand awareness, are a bit intangible, making it challenging to connect campaign outcomes directly to business goals. As a result, influencer marketers constantly seek more effective and simplified metrics that provide clear insights into the effectiveness and progress of their campaigns.

One metric that gained popularity in influencer marketing is earned media value (EMV), a remade version of a traditional PR metric. However, as the influencer marketing industry has evolved, it's become evident that EMV has significant limitations. In this article, we’ll explore the shortcomings of EMV in influencer marketing measurement and present a better alternative: the Brand Vitality Score (VIT).

What is Earned Media Value (EMV)? 

Earned media value (EMV) attempts to assign a monetary value to the exposure your brand receives through influencer content or media coverage. It was adapted from Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE), a metric used in public relations, which calculated the cost of earned media by equating it to the price of paid advertising space.

However, AVE was widely criticized for being misleading and was eventually dismissed by respected measurement organizations like the Institute for Public Relations. Despite this, EMV has been used in influencer marketing to justify campaign results, but it comes with significant issues that hinder its effectiveness in measuring true ROI.

Why EMV Falls Short for Influencer Marketing Measurement

Influencer marketing is more nuanced than traditional advertising, and EMV doesn’t account for the complexity of these campaigns. Here’s why EMV can mislead marketers and fail to measure ROI and drive business growth:

1. Misleading Metrics: EMV may claim a large value from a campaign, but that figure doesn’t correspond to actual sales or ROI. For example, a $10,000 influencer campaign might be reported to have generated $1 million in EMV, but this doesn’t mean your business gained that amount in value.
2. Lack of Actionable Insights: EMV doesn’t provide clear guidance on how to improve your influencer marketing strategy. It gives a single, superficial value without revealing which elements of the campaign contributed to its success.
3. Inflexibility: EMV treats all influencer campaigns the same, regardless of whether the goal is brand awareness, product sales, or engagement. This one-size-fits-all approach fails to recognize the diverse objectives of different campaigns.
4. Untargeted: EMV doesn’t consider the quality or relevance of the audience. A campaign might generate large numbers of impressions, but if those impressions aren’t reaching the right audience, the value is irrelevant.

The Problem with Using EMV in Influencer Marketing

The core issue with EMV is that it provides a surface-level view of campaign performance, often inflating numbers and causing marketers to make decisions based on misleading data. Without insights into ROI, influencer impact, and audience engagement, it’s challenging to understand what’s truly driving growth for your brand. Worse, it may lead to inefficient allocation of marketing budgets.

Evy Lyons, CMO of Traackr, explains, “The challenge with EMV is that it puts a dollar on a metric that doesn’t actually measure financial value. It creates a false sense of success, making it seem like you’ve created a million dollars worth of value when, in reality, you’ve only accumulated a number with no direct impact on your bottom line.”

A Better Approach: Brand Vitality Score (VIT)

Recognizing the need for a more meaningful metric, Traackr introduced the Brand Vitality Score (VIT) in 2019. VIT provides a comprehensive view of how your brand is performing within influencer marketing by measuring visibility, impact, and trust across influencer content.

Unlike EMV, VIT offers a more transparent and actionable way to assess campaign success. Here’s what makes VIT a better alternative:

VIT as a Metric

VIT is composed of three key elements:

• Visibility: Measures the reach of influencer content, and is often impacted most by the volume of influencers mentioning your brand (and how frequently they post).
• Impact: Assesses engagement and reach generated by influencer posts.
• Trust: Evaluates the quality of content and its alignment with your brand image.

These three components combine to create a single score that reflects the overall performance of your influencer marketing efforts. However, each element is measured separately, giving marketers deeper insights into which factors contribute to their success.

VIT as a Method

Beyond just a metric, VIT is a methodology that allows marketers to ask critical questions about their influencer marketing strategy, such as:

• Are we working with the right influencers?
• Are we engaging enough influencers to drive meaningful results?
• How loyal are our influencers to our brand?
• Does the content produced by our influencers resonate with our target audience?
• How do we compare to competitors in terms of influencer-driven performance?

By breaking down the performance of individual influencers, content types, and audience engagement, VIT helps marketers understand what’s working and what needs improvement.

How VIT Aligns with Business Goals

In contrast to EMV’s broad approach, VIT is designed to help marketers align influencer marketing efforts with business objectives. Whether your goal is increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, or boosting sales, VIT allows you to track progress against specific KPIs.

Real-World Impact: VIT in Action

VIT isn’t just theoretical—it’s proven to work. By using VIT, brands can make data-driven decisions that improve long-term marketing performance, rather than relying on misleading metrics like EMV. The reality is there are many paths to success. But if you don’t have transparent and unpackable data, you can’t figure out which path is the best for your brand. 

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Brands can generate attention from audiences with completely different strategies. Above is an illustration of two very different influencer marketing strategies that ultimately drive very similar VIT. Brand A engages a large network of influencers, but the content they produce is less efficient. Brand B focuses on a small number of larger tier influencers with strong performance. 

The question isn’t should we do a brand ambassador program or sponsor macro influencers. 

The question is: which strategies are right for your brand (could be both!) and how should you measure the performance of each strategy so you can improve over time? 

Without an influencer marketing platform that can provide you with deep analytics and insightful KPIs, it’s impossible to know what move to make next. VIT solves this for you. 

Examples of How Brands Use VIT

How Beekman 1802 used VIT to analyze and improve influencer marketing performance

In 2021, Beekman 1802 became one of the top performing skincare brands on TikTok. The brand's key performance indicators (KPIs) were complex, because they involved all parts of the marketing funnel. Not only were they aiming to increase brand awareness, they wanted to drive online and in-store sales.

Using VIT, they were able to analyze the performance of their influencer marketing efforts, validate strategies, and evaluate how they stacked up against competitors in the industry. Read the Beekman 1802 case study here.

How Shiseido used VIT to set influencer marketing goals, KPIs, and strategy

In 2021, Shiseido’s overarching goal was to grow its overall VIT score in 2021, with an eye on continuing its success in the trust category, and improving its performance in the visibility and impact categories. Read the Shiseido case study here.

“We built our 2021 strategy by using Traackr to identify what drove the most VIT for us – so we knew what to keep doing – and for our competitors – so we could identify what new things to experiment with. Having that clear and actionable insight really helped us hyper- focus our team.” — Erin Kelly, director of integrated communications and influencer engagement at Shiseido

Moving Away from EMV to VIT

Transitioning from EMV to VIT requires buy-in from stakeholders who may have relied on EMV as a measure of success. Here are a few steps to help you make the shift:

1. Educate on EMV’s Limitations: Share concrete examples of how EMV fails to deliver actionable insights and ROI.
2. Showcase Success Stories: Highlight industry leaders who have successfully adopted VIT and are seeing better results.
3. Conduct a Lookback Analysis: Use VIT to analyze past influencer campaigns and identify growth levers to improve future performance.

Conclusion: The Future of Influencer Marketing Measurement

In influencer marketing, the ability to measure success accurately is crucial for making data-driven decisions that fuel growth. While EMV may have once been a go-to metric, it’s time to move beyond simplistic numbers and embrace a more holistic and actionable approach. The Brand Vitality Score (VIT) offers a better framework for measuring the true impact of influencer marketing efforts and helps brands optimize their strategies for real business growth.

For more resources on influencer marketing measurement, check out our webinar on measurement frameworks or explore guides on spend efficiency metrics, budget optimization, and influencer rates.