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Most influencer reports lead with views, because views are the easiest number to collect and the easiest one to be impressed by. Over nine months we booked and managed 132 campaigns for a 19-location restaurant group, and views were not the number that told us the most. What follows is how to measure influencer marketing in a way that holds up in a real conversation about money, including the metrics I quit reporting entirely.

What 132 Campaigns Looked Like Up Close

Nine months. Nineteen locations. 132 campaigns booked, briefed, posted, and tracked. That’s a campaign going live roughly every other day, most of them with a different creator, in a different market, with a different manager expecting somebody at the door.

Across the run: 535,000+ views, 45,000+ interactions, and more than 500 hours of real human watch time.

The tracker was a spreadsheet with a tab per location. Not a platform with a sales rep attached. A spreadsheet, updated weekly, that anybody on the team could open without a login.

Watch Time Is the Number I’d Keep

If somebody made me report one metric for the rest of my career and hand back the others, I’d take watch time.

Time is the only thing an audience can’t fake and can’t be botted into giving you. A view can be a thumb that kept moving. A like costs nothing. Watch time means a person chose to keep looking at your dining room, your shrimp, your patio at golden hour, for actual seconds of their actual day.

Five hundred hours is close to three straight weeks of continuous playback. Three weeks of people watching food they haven’t ordered, in restaurants they haven’t been to yet.

Ask your platform analytics for average view duration and completion rate before you ask for reach. If a creator’s audience bails at second three, the follower count is decoration.

Views Are a Starting Line, and Comments Are the Real Report

535,000 views is a fine number. It’s also the least interesting one in the set, because it tells you a video was served and nothing about whether it landed.

The 45,000 interactions are where the information lives. Not the count of them. The content of them.

Read the comments. Every week, all of them. Somewhere in there is a person tagging their sister, somebody asking whether you take reservations, somebody asking if the pasta is gluten free, and somebody saying they used to drive out for this every fall.

If three people ask the same question under a creator’s post, that question belongs in your next caption, on your website, and probably on a sign near the host stand. It’s a focus group nobody billed you for.

The Metrics I Stopped Reporting

Some numbers exist to make a report look heavier than it is. These four came out of mine.

• Estimated media value: Invented math. EMV takes organic reach, multiplies it by what an ad would have cost, and hands you a dollar figure that never touched your bank account. It’s built to make marketing look good in a meeting. I won’t put it in a report.
• Follower count as a predictor: The weakest signal on the list. Fit beats followers. A creator with 8,000 followers and 60 real human comments beats a creator with 300,000 followers and 40 rows of emoji. Every time.
• Reach, reported by itself: Reach without duration says a video was on a screen. Pair it with watch time or leave it out.
• Creator follower growth: Lovely for the creator. Not a result you paid for.

Name the Win Before You Book Anyone

Measurement usually fails at the beginning, not the end. Nobody ever said what the campaign was for, so every number afterward is just a number.

Begin at the end. Decide the one thing this campaign has to do before you send a single email. Fill Tuesdays. Introduce the new location. Get 30 pieces of usable content out of one weekend. Reach families in one zip code who have never heard of you.

Then pick the metric that proves it and ignore the rest. A campaign built to fill Tuesdays gets measured on Tuesdays, not on likes.

The Honest Limit of Attribution

This is the part most influencer decks skip. You will not cleanly attribute every guest who walks in because of a creator post, and anybody promising otherwise is selling you a dashboard.

Some of it you can track. Trackable links, unique codes, a reservation source field, a landing page built for the campaign, a lift in branded search the week a post goes live. Use all of it.

Some of it you can’t. A person watches a video in April, says nothing, and shows up in July with four friends for a birthday. No code, no link, no attribution. That happens constantly and no report will ever show it to you.

What you can do is watch the things you can see move together. Branded search, direct traffic, guest tags, walk-ins who mention it at the host stand. When those rise inside a campaign window, believe it.

Honest measurement means saying out loud which numbers are proof and which ones are signal, and never dressing one up as the other.

[Note to requestor: A statistic on the share of restaurant or hospitality visits that begin with social discovery would strengthen this section. A citable industry study would work.]

Start With One Campaign

We keep a network of more than 1,000 creators and have built 225+ partnerships, and the reason we can match on fit instead of follower count is that somebody actually watched the content first. That part doesn’t scale. It’s also the part that works.

If you’re running your own program, do this next: write down what winning means, pick two metrics, and read every comment for a month. You’ll know more about your audience than any dashboard was ever going to tell you.

And if you’d rather hand the whole thing to somebody who has done it 132 times in nine months, Start With a Chat.