I’ve been staring at our campaign data for weeks, and something’s bothering me. On paper, our influencer-led UGC campaigns look solid—good engagement, decent reach, and our cost per impression is reasonable. But when I track actual conversions back to specific pieces of creator content, the picture gets murkier.
Part of it is attribution hell. UGC lives everywhere—across platforms, in email, in retargeting ads, on the website. By the time a user actually converts, they’ve probably seen the same piece of content in five different places, and we’ve attributed it to whichever touchpoint happened to be last. That doesn’t tell us if the UGC was actually the reason they bought or just the final nudge before they were ready anyway.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think we might actually be measuring the wrong things.
Most of our benchmarks are engagement-based: likes, shares, time spent. For DTC though, engagement isn’t the outcome—trust is. And trust is way harder to measure. A creator’s video might not get massive engagement, but if it’s the content that made someone actually believe your product works, that’s where the real value is.
The other thing I’m wondering is whether we’re even placing the UGC in front of the right audience. We might have brilliant content that’s being shown to people who were going to buy anyway, or who aren’t in our target demographic. That would make the ROI look worse than it actually is.
I’m thinking about restructuring how we evaluate influencer partnerships. Less focus on vanity metrics, more focus on actual business outcomes—not just immediate sales, but things like repeat purchase rate, cart abandonment on product pages with creator content, even NPS scores correlated with UGC exposure.
But I’m curious: are you running into similar friction? Or is your attribution actually clean enough that ROI feels clear?