The reach number is the magic trick Last quarter a founder I know spent thirty lakhs on influencer marketing. The report he got back was a beautiful PDF. Total reach of fourteen million. Average engagement rate of 3.2 percent. Sixteen posts shipped. He emailed me and asked if he had just spent thirty lakhs on a magic trick.
Yes. Sort of.
Reach is the number every agency leads with because it is the easiest one to put in a deck and the hardest one to argue with. If a creator has two million followers and you pay them to post once, the agency gets to claim two million reach. The actual number of people who saw the post is closer to ten percent of that. The actual number of people who paid attention is closer to one percent. The actual number of people who did anything because of it is a different conversation no agency wants to have.
What we actually measure At Big Bang Story we measure five things, and we make the brand sign off on the targets before the campaign starts. None of these are clever. All of them are skipped by most of the agencies reporting on influencer work.
1. Trackable link clicks. Every creator gets a unique link. Every link goes to a landing page we can measure. Click-through rate against post views tells you whether the content was persuasive, not just visible.
2. Code redemptions. Where the brand supports it, every creator gets a unique discount code. Redemption rate against follower count tells you whether their audience converts, not just engages. We have run campaigns where a creator with eighty thousand followers outperformed one with two million on this single metric.
3. Profile visit lift on your handle. Native Instagram analytics show you exactly how many people visited your page in the week after a creator posted. If that number does not move, the creator's audience did not care.
4. Follower lift on your handle. Same window. If a creator's audience trusted them, some of them came and followed you. If nobody did, the partnership was wallpaper.
5. Brand search lift. Branded search volume on Google Trends, week over week. This one is slow and noisy, but for bigger campaigns it is the most honest signal of whether anyone actually remembered you exist.
What we stop measuring We do not report on total reach, average engagement rate, or impressions, unless the client specifically asks for them. Not because they are useless, but because they encourage the wrong behaviour. If reach is your north star, your agency will pick the biggest creators with the cheapest rate cards, and they will do that even when nano-creators in your niche would convert ten times better.
Why the industry will not fix this The honest answer is that the brand pays for the metric the agency makes look good. Reach reports look impressive. CAC reports look like work. If you grade your agency on impressions, you get impressions. If you grade them on cost per acquired customer, suddenly the recommendations change.
A 2025 Statista study showed 67 percent of brands surveyed could not confidently attribute revenue to their influencer marketing spend. The same study showed that of the brands who could attribute revenue, 81 percent used unique links or codes. The fix is unglamorous. It is also the only thing that works.
What to ask your agency this week If you are already running influencer marketing, the next conversation with your agency is short.
Ask three questions:
- What is our trackable link or code on every post going out this month
- What is the click-through or redemption rate we are targeting
- What was the profile visit lift on our handle last campaign
If the answer is impressions, reach, or anything ending in 'sentiment', you are paying for a magic trick. If the answer is a number and a target, you have an agency. Pick accordingly.
