I’ve been staring at engagement metrics across LATAM and US campaigns for weeks, and I’m starting to think some of them are actually misleading me more than helping.
Here’s the problem: Last month, we ran a campaign with a Brazilian creator that had a 6.2% engagement rate on Instagram. Sounds great, right? But the conversion rate was garbage—like 0.3%. Meanwhile, a US creator with a 2.8% engagement rate converted at 2.1%. Same product, same offer, different continents.
I originally thought “oh, Brazil must have higher engagement but lower commercial intent,” which made sense. But then I dug into the actual comments and realized: the Brazilian audience was engaging with the creator and her personality. The US audience was engaging with the product and its benefits. The engagement metrics weren’t capturing that difference at all.
So now I’m questioning which metrics actually matter when I’m comparing cross-border campaigns:
- Engagement rate: Maybe not a great proxy for quality?
- Click-through rate: Seems reliable, but only if I’m measuring the same goal on both sides?
- Conversion rate: This feels most honest, but it’s slow to track.
- Audience sentiment: I have no idea how to measure this consistently.
- Follower growth: Vanity metric? Or actual signal?
- Save rate (especially on Reels): This seems more meaningful than likes, but I’m not sure.
I’m also noticing that different platforms report metrics differently, and LATAM creators sometimes use tools we’re not using, so I might not even be comparing apples to apples.
Here’s what I really want to know: When you’re vetting creator performance or campaign results across LATAM and US, which metrics do you actually trust? Which ones do you ignore? And how do you know if a difference in engagement is real or just regional platform behavior?
I feel like there’s a framework for knowing which numbers matter, and I’d rather learn it from people who’ve done this a lot than keep guessing based on my gut.
You just identified the core problem that most people miss. Engagement rate is a vanity metric when it’s disconnected from intent.
Here’s my actual ranking of metrics by trustworthiness for cross-border campaigns:
Tier 1 (High Trust):
- Cost per result (CPA, CPL, ROAS): This is your north star. If a creator costs $5 per conversion in Brazil and $8 per conversion in the US, that’s real and actionable.
- Conversion rate: Only when you can attribute it directly to the creator’s content.
- Click-through rate: Reliable IF the landing experience is identical.
Tier 2 (Situational):
- Save rate on Reels: More meaningful than likes, but it depends on your product category. High save rate for educational content (legit). High save rate for CPG (maybe just people saving for later, not intent).
- Comment quality (manual audit): Don’t trust the volume; audit 20 comments. Are they asking questions? Are they tagging friends? That’s intent.
- Audience overlap with target demographic: Use Creator Studio or third-party tools to see if the audience actually matches your buyer persona.
Tier 3 (Ignore):
- Engagement rate alone: Worthless without context.
- Follower growth: Vanity metric (unless it’s for Tier-1 creators where follower quality is very high).
- Impressions: Volume doesn’t equal value.
My actual framework:
For every cross-border campaign, I calculate three ratios:
- Cost per click / Cost per result across regions. This tells you if one market is harder to convert.
- Quality score (manual audit of 20 comments per region) + engagement rate. If Brazil has 6% engagement but most comments are generic emojis, that’s low quality.
- Audience alignment (does the creator’s audience match your buyer persona in each region?).
If all three are aligned, the campaign is real. If one is off, it’s a red flag.
On your specific example (6.2% engagement, 0.3% conversion vs. 2.8%, 2.1%):
That’s not LATAM vs. US. That’s personality-driven engagement vs. conversion-driven engagement. Your Brazilian creator’s audience wasn’t buying; they were just vibing with her. You need to know that before you spend on her.
How are you currently tracking conversion attribution? Are you using unique links, promo codes, or UTM-tagged landing pages per creator?
Anna’s framework is solid. I’d add one layer: normalize for platform behavior before you compare across regions.
Instagram Reels in Brazil have inherently higher engagement rates than Instagram Reels in the US, just because of platform algorithm differences and audience composition. If you compare them raw, you’ll get false negatives on US creators.
What I do:
- Establish platform benchmarks for each region (what’s the median engagement rate for Reels in Brazil vs. US? Pull 20 posts and average. Same for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, etc.).
- Calculate creator performance relative to benchmark. If the Brazil benchmark is 4.2% and your creator is getting 6.2%, they’re +48% above average. If the US benchmark is 2.1% and your creator is 2.8%, they’re +33% above average.
- Compare relative performance, not raw metrics. This controls for platform and regional differences.
Then layer in conversion data as Anna described.
On your specific example: Your Brazilian creator might actually be above the regional benchmark, making her valuable for brand awareness in Brazil. Your US creator is also above benchmark but converting better. Different use cases.
Don’t try to compare them as if they’re equivalent. They’re not.
Practical question: Are you tracking creator-level performance over multiple campaigns, or is this your first campaign with each creator? Multi-campaign data is way more reliable than single-campaign data. One campaign could be an outlier.
Okay, real talk: the metric that matters most is the one that’s hardest to fake—cost per result.
Here’s why: Engagement rate, follower count, all of that? Easy to artificial-inflate. High CPA? That tells you the audience actually did something commercial.
We’ve built a scorecard:
For every creator partnership, we track:
- CPA (or CPL if not direct-response)
- Conversion rate
- Customer LTV (actually, we only do this for HLV campaigns)
- Audience quality audit (comments, and follower-to-engagement ratio)
Cross-border specific: We also track timezone responsiveness and brief adherence, because those affect actual campaign performance.
The engagement rate? We literally don’t look at it. We look at cost per result, and if it’s good, we keep working with the creator. If it’s bad, we move on.
One thing that surprised us: Brazilian creators often had lower engagement rates than US creators but better CPA. This flipped our assumptions. Now we lead with CPA, not engagement.
For comparing LATAM vs. US campaigns: Don’t compare engagement rates. Compare CPAs. That’s it.
What’s your blended CPA across these two campaigns?
From the relationship side, I’ll add something the pure data people might miss:
Creator responsiveness and communication quality = hidden metric that predicts success.
You can have a creator with perfect engagement metrics, but if she takes 3 days to respond to feedback or doesn’t ask clarifying questions about the brief, you’re going to have problems.
Before we finalize partnerships, we do a “test brief” (no payment, just a quick creative direction):
- How fast do they respond?
- Do they ask about the target audience?
- Do they suggest improvements to the concept?
Creators who ask questions tend to outperform creators who just execute, even if the latter have higher engagement.
I’m not saying ignore metrics—but add this to your framework. It’s a free filter that catches bad partnerships before you spend real money.
Are you doing anything like this, or are you vetting purely on numbers?
From a creator POV: you can’t always trust the numbers because we’re not always consistent. Like, I posted a Reel last week and got 8% engagement. Posted essentially the same Reel last month and got 3%. Same audience, same content, different algorithm moment.
Also—and this is important—when I’m creating for a US brand vs. a LATAM brand, my energy is different, the call-to-action is different, and yeah, engagement changes. But that doesn’t mean I’m worse; it means the content serves a different purpose.
My advice: don’t just look at numbers. Watch the actual content. Do my stories feel authentic? Does the post feel natural, or like I’m reading a script? That stuff affects how the audience engages and converts, but it doesn’t show up in the metrics.
Talk to the creator. Ask how they feel about the content. Sometimes our gut sense of what works is better than the numbers.