Influencer marketing ROI is the question every CFO now asks about creator budgets, and most marketing teams still answer it with a screenshot of likes. That gap matters because the money has become serious. Brand spend with creators in the US reached an estimated $37bn in 2025 according to the IAB, and UK creator partnership revenue is forecast to pass £1.2bn in 2026. Yet in Kantar’s latest research only 29% of marketers said they were confident they could measure the impact of that investment.
This report pulls together the most useful evidence published between 2023 and October 2026: platform lift studies, marketing mix models, vendor surveys and regulator data. We explain what return on creator spend actually looks like, why earned media value keeps flattering the numbers, where budgets leak, and how to build a measurement plan that would survive a finance review. If you want the wider context on where creator budgets are going, start with our report on creator marketing in 2026.
The short version
- Influencer marketing can pay back well. Independent and platform models increasingly show creator content matching or beating other channels on incremental return, especially when it is amplified with paid media.
- Most teams cannot yet prove it. Discount codes and affiliate links are still the most common measurement tools, and they capture only the slice of value that converts on the spot.
- Engagement is a weak proxy. Kantar found engagement lined up with brand impact in only about one in three cases.
- EMV is not revenue. Even the vendors who calculate earned media value describe it as advertising equivalent exposure, not sales.
- Measure incrementality, not activity. Lift tests, holdouts and marketing mix models are the tools that answer the ROI question. Everything else is a diagnostic.
What is influencer marketing ROI?
Influencer marketing ROI is the profit a creator programme generates for every pound it costs, after the cost itself is taken away. The formula is the same as for any channel: incremental profit minus total cost, divided by total cost. Two words in that sentence do most of the work. Incremental means sales that would not have happened without the creator activity. Total cost means fees, product, usage rights, paid amplification, agency or platform fees and your own team’s time, not just the creator invoice.
Most reporting falls short on one of those two words. A promo code report counts sales that used the code, including people who would have bought anyway. A campaign recap lists the creator fee but leaves out the paid budget that boosted the posts. We walk through the arithmetic with a worked example in our guide to how to calculate social media ROI. The table below shows how the common metrics relate to the real question.
| Metric | What it answers | Why it is not ROI on its own |
|---|---|---|
| ROI | Profit returned per pound spent, net of cost | Only meaningful if the revenue is incremental |
| ROAS | Revenue per pound of media or fee spend | Ignores margin and usually ignores baseline sales |
| EMV | What the exposure would have cost as paid advertising | An estimate of media value, not sales or profit |
| CPM / CPV | Cost of reach or views | Says nothing about what the views achieved |
| Engagement rate | How much the audience interacted | Matched brand impact in only about one in three cases (Kantar) |
| Code and link sales | Directly tracked conversions | Misses delayed, offline and brand effects; includes buyers who would have converted anyway |
Advertain guidance. Sources for figures linked in the text.
How big is the money behind influencer marketing ROI?
The scale of spend is why the ROI question has moved from the social team to the boardroom. The IAB estimates US brand spend with creators rose from $13.9bn in 2021 to $29.5bn in 2024 and $37bn in 2025, growing around four times faster than the media industry as a whole (IAB). Its projection for 2026 is about $44bn (PPC Land). Those figures exclude affiliate commissions and creator subscriptions, so they measure brand directed money only.
US creator ad spend, $bn
In the UK, IAB UK and IRM put creator partnership revenue at £804m in 2024 and £966m in 2025, with a forecast of £1.217bn for 2026 (InPublishing). That still excludes paid amplification of creator posts, which respondents suggested could be two to three times the partnership revenue itself. At a global level, WPP Media estimated creator ad revenue at $185bn in 2025 (Tubefilter).
Appetite keeps rising too. Kolsquare’s survey of UK brands and agencies, reported by Marketing Week, found the share expecting to increase influencer spend climbed from 50% in 2024 to 93% in 2026 (Marketing Week). The same survey found only 38% of UK brands and agencies use ROI to measure effectiveness.
UK brands and agencies expecting to increase influencer spend
Why is influencer marketing ROI so hard to measure?
The honest answer is that most programmes are measured with the tools that are easiest to switch on rather than the ones that answer the question. In the Influencer Marketing Hub benchmark for 2026, the most common ways brands tracked results were promo or discount codes (45.9%), affiliate links (26.0%) and native shop features (25.0%) (Influencer Marketing Hub). Each of those captures a direct, trackable purchase. None captures the viewer who sees a creator video on Tuesday and buys in a supermarket on Saturday.
How brands track influencer results
Other surveys tell the same story. EMARKETER, drawing on CreatorIQ data, found engagement rate (48%), conversion rate (46%) and sales (44%) were among the most used metrics, while 85% of US creators said they received no feedback from brands on how they were evaluated (Tubefilter). In Linqia’s 2026 study of US enterprise marketers, 48% named attribution as their biggest measurement gap (Linqia).
Confidence varies a great deal depending on who you ask. Sprout Social found 65% of marketers in the US, UK and Australia said they were very confident they could show the business impact of influencer work (Chief Marketer), while Kantar put confidence in measuring creator impact at just 29% (Marketing Interactive). Our reading is that the difference sits in the definition. Teams are confident they can report results; far fewer can show which of those results were caused by the creator.
“Engagement remains a useful signal, but it is not enough as the sole measure of success.” Hani, creative solutions lead, Kantar Indonesia
What the evidence says about influencer marketing ROI
The better news is that the evidence on actual return has improved sharply. Several large datasets published in the last year measure incrementality rather than activity, and they broadly point the same way: creator content works, and works better when it is paid to reach more people. The caveat is that much of this research comes from platforms and vendors with an interest in the answer, so read it as direction rather than gospel.
Platform lift studies
In October 2026 Meta published a meta analysis of 20 conversion lift studies run by advertisers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa between January and June 2025. When at least 30% of campaign assets were partnership ads (creator posts run as paid ads), the median cost per incremental purchase was 45% lower and median incremental ROAS was 35% higher than business as usual (PPC Land). The confidence level was 92%, below the 95% threshold many analysts use. A separate set of 14 brand lift studies found 71% higher intent lift when partnership ads took at least 20% of spend.
Partnership ads vs business as usual, Meta studies
TikTok reports a similar pattern on its own platform: ads posted from a creator’s account saw 59% higher engagement and 16% higher six second view through rate than ads not posted from a creator account, though it does not disclose the sample (TikTok).
Marketing mix models
Mix models matter because they measure sales, including offline sales, against every other driver at once. The Meta paper cites agency Charlie Oscar, whose analysis of 94 marketing mix models found partnership ads delivered 30% more incremental conversions than business as usual ads, and that new customers made up 48% of partnership ad orders against 32% for standard ads (PPC Land). That second figure is important for ROI: new customers are worth more than repeat buyers who would have come back anyway.
New customers as a share of orders
An earlier Nielsen study for Whalar modelled six creator campaigns and found ROAS ranging from $1.50 to $4.50, with an average of $2.63 against $2.43 for the platforms overall. Nielsen also found the campaigns were running at around 25% of the spend level where returns would start to saturate, which suggests underinvestment rather than overspend (Nielsen). The sample is small and dates from 2023. NIQ modelling for TikTok in beauty found Spark Ads, which run creator style posts as ads, delivered 37% higher ROI than standard formats (PPC Land), though that study covered only two brands in one market.
The most authoritative UK dataset is the IPA influencer database. Its October 2025 analysis, which we covered in our report on paid vs organic social media, put influencer long term ROI above most other channels. We do not repeat those figures here.
Brand effects
Kantar’s 2026 work adds a brand lens. Of 101 creator assets tested with Whalar, 62% delivered both short term impact and long term equity, against 27% under Kantar’s norms for digital advertising. Kantar also estimates the brand impact of creator content has risen around 77% since 2022, against about 4% on average across the 20 leading touchpoints (Marketing Interactive).
Creator assets delivering short term impact and long term equity
Earned media value: why EMV is not influencer marketing ROI
Earned media value is the most quoted number in influencer reporting and the most misunderstood. EMV estimates what the reach and engagement a post achieved would have cost if you had bought it as advertising. It is a media value, not a sales figure, and there is no standard formula. CreatorIQ describes its own EMV as calculated with a proprietary algorithm (CreatorIQ), and fashion data firm Lefty applies a $100 CPM to qualifying Instagram posts (Glossy).
The vendors themselves are candid about the limits. Writing about Paris Fashion Week, where Lefty and Karla Otto estimated $795.8m of EMV, Glossy noted: “Those dollar figures estimate the advertising value of exposure, rather than sales.” (Glossy). Traackr has gone further and argued that EMV does not correlate with ROI or sales at all (Traackr).
“The metric doesn’t measure ROI nor does it help you understand what is actually working.” Evy Lyons, CMO, Traackr, on earned media value
The risk is that EMV gets presented as a return. Influencer Marketing Hub reported that 1.4bn influencer posts in 2024 generated $236bn of EMV and described that as an 8.4x return (Influencer Marketing Hub). That is a media equivalence ratio, not a profit ratio. Launchmetrics’ own measure, media impact value, put the 2026 Met Gala at a record $1.56bn (Campaign Middle East), which is a useful signal of attention but tells you nothing about what anyone bought.
Our view: EMV is fine as a way to compare the relative reach and resonance of creators within a programme. It should never appear in the ROI line of a board report.
Where influencer budgets leak
If creator content can deliver strong returns, why do so many programmes disappoint? The data points to three leaks: weak branding, thin attention and poor compliance.
Branding. CreativeX analysed boosted creator content on Meta and estimated that 45% of spend delivered no value because ads were unbranded and unwatched. Half of creator ads missed branding in the first three seconds, the window in which it says 86% of viewers drop off (Influencer Marketing Hub). Kantar found only 27% of the creator content it analysed had strong brand linkage (Net Influencer).
Attention. A 2026 working paper from Nanyang Technological University estimated that only 14% of influencer impressions are watched for three seconds or more, and that viewers recall the brand after fewer than a third of pieces (The Illusion of Influence). That paper is a secondary synthesis, so treat the figures as indicative.
Compliance. Undisclosed ads are a legal risk and a measurement one, because they cannot be cleanly separated from organic content. The ASA found about 57% of influencer ads were adequately disclosed in its 2025 monitoring (Lewis Silkin), and since April 2025 the CMA can fine businesses up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover for consumer law breaches (Stephens Scown). Only 42% of multinational brands in a WFA survey said they monitored influencer compliance with standards (WFA).
Allocation is the fourth, quieter leak. A Journal of Marketing study of 1,256 campaigns found a 1% increase in influencer spend raised engagement by 0.457% and concluded firms were allocating budgets sub optimally (AMA). The data is from 2022 and measures engagement rather than sales, but it matches the Nielsen finding that many creator campaigns run well below their efficient spend level.
What is a good ROI for influencer marketing?
There is no single good number, and anyone quoting a universal multiple is selling something. Return depends on margin, price point, purchase cycle and how much of the effect lands outside the tracking window. What you can do is set expectations from the closest credible evidence and then test against your own baseline.
The modelled evidence above suggests creator activity typically returns in the same range as other digital channels, and often better when amplified: Nielsen’s campaigns averaged $2.63 of revenue per dollar (Nielsen). For a full channel by channel picture, our marketing ROI benchmarks report sets creator returns against TV, search and social.
Cost benchmarks are softer. The ranges below come from practitioner experience rather than large studies, so use them to sense check quotes, not to forecast. For UK fee levels by tier, see our guide to how much influencers charge in the UK.
| Format | Typical CPM range (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram Stories | $20 to $50 | Short life, good for links and codes |
| Instagram Reels | $15 to $45 | Wider reach to non followers |
| TikTok | $7 to $25 | Cheapest reach, short attention |
| YouTube integration | $15 to $35 | Longer shelf life in search and suggested |
| YouTube dedicated video | $50 to $75+ | Highest attention per view |
Source: Modash, practitioner estimates mainly from US and UK campaigns; the source notes it is not a large quantitative study.
Engagement benchmarks are useful only as a quality filter. Socialinsider’s 2026 data put average brand engagement at 3.70% on TikTok and 0.48% on Instagram for 2025 (Socialinsider). A creator far below the norm for their platform and size is worth a closer look; a creator far above it is not automatically a better investment.
Here is an illustrative example of why the definition matters. A brand spends £40,000 on creator fees, product and paid amplification. Codes and links record £90,000 of sales, which looks like 125% ROI on revenue. A geo holdout test then shows only £60,000 of those sales were incremental, and at a 50% gross margin that is £30,000 of incremental profit. The true ROI is minus 25% on the tracked window alone, and the campaign only pays back if longer term brand effects, measured separately, make up the gap. The figures are illustrative, not from a real campaign.
How to measure influencer marketing ROI: a seven step plan
This is the approach we recommend to brands that want an answer finance will accept. It is Advertain guidance built on the evidence above, and it scales from a single campaign to an always on programme.
1. Decide which question you are answering
Short term sales, new customer acquisition and brand building need different measures. Write the objective and the single metric that will judge it before you brief anyone. Our influencer brief template has a section for this.
2. Count the full cost
Include creator fees, product, usage rights, paid amplification, platform or agency fees and internal time. Leaving out paid amplification is the most common way creator ROI is overstated.
3. Set a baseline and a control
Before launch, record normal sales, search and site traffic. Where you can, hold out a region, audience or time period that does not see the activity so you can compare like with like.
4. Track the direct response, but label it
Use unique codes, affiliate links and UTM tagged URLs per creator. Report these as tracked conversions, not ROI, because they include people who would have bought anyway and miss delayed purchases.
5. Run a lift test on the paid layer
Platform conversion lift and brand lift studies compare exposed and control groups. If you amplify creator posts on YouTube, our guide to running a YouTube brand lift study covers minimum budgets and question design.
6. Feed creator spend into your mix model
Give creator activity its own line in your marketing mix model, split into fees and paid amplification. Models need spend and timing data by week, so collect it from day one.
7. Report a range, then reallocate
Present tracked conversions, lift results and modelled incremental return side by side, with the confidence for each. Move budget toward creators and formats that win on incremental return, not on likes or EMV.
| Method | Answers | Cost and effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Codes and links | Who bought directly | Low | Ecommerce brands, quick diagnostics |
| Geo or audience holdout | What would have happened without it | Medium | Larger programmes, UK regional tests |
| Platform conversion lift | Incremental purchases from paid creator ads | Medium, needs spend | Partnership ads and Spark Ads |
| Brand lift study | Change in awareness and consideration | Medium, minimum budgets | Awareness and launch campaigns |
| Marketing mix model | Incremental sales across all channels, including offline | High, needs 2+ years of data | Brands with significant creator spend |
Advertain guidance.
If you are still choosing who to work with, our guide to finding the right influencers covers vetting, and our report asking whether influencer marketing is dead covers trust and fatigue. To see how we approach creator led content for the brands we work with, see our work or get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good ROI for influencer marketing?
There is no universal benchmark. Modelled studies suggest creator activity often returns in line with or above other digital channels, for example an average of $2.63 in revenue per dollar across the campaigns Nielsen modelled for Whalar. The right test is incremental profit against your own baseline.
How do you calculate ROI for influencer marketing?
Take the incremental profit the activity generated, subtract the full cost including fees, product, usage rights and paid amplification, and divide by that cost. Incremental means sales that would not have happened without the creators, which needs a control group, lift test or mix model to estimate.
Is earned media value the same as ROI?
No. EMV estimates what the exposure would have cost as paid advertising. Vendors who calculate it describe it as advertising value, not sales, and there is no standard formula.
How do you measure influencer marketing beyond discount codes?
Combine tracked conversions with holdout tests, platform conversion or brand lift studies, branded search and site traffic trends, and, for larger budgets, a marketing mix model with creator spend as its own variable.
How long does influencer marketing take to show ROI?
Direct response from codes and links appears within days, but brand effects and delayed purchases build over weeks and months. Measure both short and long term windows before judging a programme.
