Tracking Influencer Marketing - My First App

[Kathan]

Hey guys!

After running 2 Shopify stores for over two years now, I've had many annoyances and problems arise - most that could be solved by simply downloading an app. However, one problem kept coming up that I could not find an easy solution for: tracking sales from influencer marketing campaigns.

Over the years, I've paid 10's of thousands of dollars to market with influencers, but was never really able to track sales back to a specific campaign. Shopify would always tell me that customer X came from "Youtube" but not which video!

I always enjoyed the idea of creating a Shopify app, but never really knew what I would build... until now of course 😉

So I got to work, learning how to program along the way, and built LinkTrack - an app to help track your influencer marketing campaigns. And not just how many visitors came to your site, but how many sales that campaign actually brought in. 

How does it work?

Enter in some brief details about your campaign (including which product to link to) and the app will generate you a unique link. You can shorten the link if you wish, then give it to the influencer. When they promote your product, they can use your link to send people to your site. At last, real-time information about that campaign, including clicks, orders, revenue, and conversion rate. 

You can now double down with the influencers that are performing, and stop working with the ones that are not. You can also quickly calculate your profit margin from campaigns you paid for. 

Of course, this will work for any type of marketing campaign (blog post, email, sms, FB ad, etc), but I found it is extremely helpful when working with influencers. 

Alright, that's my pitch. I hope that some of you may find this useful & also hope this is an OK place to try to market my new app. Please feel free to respond with any questions, or even negative feedback (saying "your app sucks and here's why" is actually very helpful and will help me improve). 

Link to my app: https://apps.shopify.com/linktrack

[Mat-cha-rles]

In theory it's a great idea, one that I wanted to work on for sometime because we had the same pain point.

After doing my assessment, I did not pursue this opportunity for 2 reasons:

1) Influencers rarely like anymore to share any kind of links or discount code with their audience, as it seems to hurt their engagement durably..

2) A reason why they don't want to, is actually because they know it allows to track their performance, which they won't benefit from in the current state of the market, the price of influencers being in majority way higher than the immediate value they bring back.

3) Another way to find out the effectiveness of influencers would be by gathering data about them and their audience, and compare that to the brand's follower and customer data. Unfortunately, big platforms are aware of this and are heavily restricting (and more and more) the access to available data, only to give it to a few partners that will have exclusivity to resell it. 😞

If you find a way around these, there is definitely a market need, but the wind of market forces (or at least influencers) is not blowing right in your direction.
Let me know your thoughts

[Kathan]

Appreciate the response! Some interesting points you make. 

I actually have not had any resistance with giving out trackable links. Every influencer uses the link provided and we work with 10+ new influencers every week - however, I am working with "smaller" influencers. Guessing your points do become more of an issue the larger the audience of the influencer. Or this could also differ industry by industry. Would you agree?

I will definitely give this some more thought and see how things go as I progress. 

[Laxus]

Hey, we love the app, was all about to install, and then saw it was only in USD, how come ??, this app would really benefit from more currencies 🙂

Best

Lars

[ultroaudio]

Hi Kathan,

Thank you so much for building this app! its exactly what I have been looking for. 

I own a shopify store www.ultroaudio.com and use a lot of influencers for marketing purposes this is a perfect way to track sales without devaluing a brand by using certain discount codes all over the show to track sales from an individual. 

How good!