Is EMV BS? Rethinking Influencer Marketing ROI

Influencer marketing has boomed into a $24 billion industry, with nearly 70% of marketers investing more of their budget into this channel this year. Strong ROI is one of influencer marketing’s greatest advantages — yet for many brands, quantifying the true impact of influencer marketing still remains a difficult task.

For years, the go-to measurement metric has been earned media value (EMV), a clean and simple way to quantify success generated by influencers. But here’s the hard truth: relying on EMV alone is holding you back. 

Leadership teams want to see lower-funnel results, and influencer marketers need better, more tangible benchmarks to prove the impact of their hard work. In this results-driven landscape, vanity metrics are not enough to prove ROI. 

In this piece, we’ll explore why EMV is no longer the best KPI for influencer marketing success, and more importantly, how you can evolve your approach to measure the true impact of this channel. 

First, let’s go back to the early days of influencer marketing. 

When influencer marketing first hit the scene, brands sprinted to partner with the biggest names in social media. Everyone wanted a piece of what brands like Fashion Nova and Sugar Bear Hair had built: a direct line to millions of consumers through social media stars and celebrities. It was an exciting, uncharted marketing frontier, and brands hoped to ride that wave to quick success. 

But the market quickly became saturated, and the question loomed: how do you know if influencer marketing is working? Where’s the billion dollar revenue bump from my collab with Kim Kardashian?

Suddenly, influencer marketing wasn’t as simple as putting big names on big campaigns — and that’s where the cracks started to show. 

The rise (and fall) of EMV as a success metric

Enter: earned media value — a seemingly perfect solution to the measurement problem. 

EMV is a metric that aims to assign a monetary value to the exposure generated for your brand through influencers, estimating how much you would’ve spent on traditional media to get the same reach from influencers. 

For a while, EMV gave marketers a way to justify spend by showcasing the reach and engagement influencers were driving in comparison to traditional media. It quickly became the de facto measurement metric for influencer programs. 

But after some time, it was clear that EMV was a quick fix, not a long-term solution. The numbers looked impressive, but they weren’t tied to actual business growth. Leadership teams didn’t want to see hypothetical ad costs — they wanted to see tangible revenue growth.

Essentially, EMV began to look like an illusion of success and brands relying on it faced 3 big problems:

1. EMV is a vanity metric. EMV highlights impressions and engagements, but those numbers can be easily inflated by buying likes and using bots. You can chase likes and comments all day, but if those engagements aren’t translating to real actions — like sales or leads — then what’s the point?
2. EMV doesn’t make influencer marketing look like a cost-effective channel. Achieving impressive EMV numbers doesn’t mean influencer marketing is the best or most efficient channel. In fact, there are faster, cheaper ways to boost media value. If your influencer program isn’t driving results beyond just impressions, your budget could be better spent elsewhere.‍
3. EMV doesn’t measure real business impact. While EMV gives you a surface-level snapshot of visibility, it’s disconnected from actual business outcomes. It doesn’t show how many customers bought your product, downloaded your app, or signed up for your service. And at the end of the day, those are the metrics that matter.

EMV was a decent stand-in for ROI in the early days of influencer marketing. But as influencer marketing evolves, so should the way we measure it.

How to measure influencer marketing ROI the right way

It’s time to stop clinging to EMV as the holy grail metric of influencer marketing success. Instead, shift your focus to what really drives business growth. Your primary focus should be two-fold:

1. Revenue from affiliate links and shoppable commerce

The simplest, most direct way to measure lower-funnel ROI is to track the revenue driven by affiliates and shoppable content. 

On their own, both affiliate marketing and influencer marketing produce excellent results — but combined as an influencer-affiliate campaign, you get a match made in heaven. By pairing modern affiliate marketing with influencer marketing — which is inherently baked in relationships — you’re activating a high-trust commerce experience, thereby allowing your brand to drive immediate sales at scale. 

The results of this initiative speak for themselves:

• 35% increase in AOV when the source is an affiliate
• 2,200% boost in affiliate sales when leveraging influencers

The best part? Tracking affiliate sales is now easier than ever! By using a tool like Aspire, you can streamline the whole process of affiliate marketing, from connecting with the right affiliates, to creating unique promo codes and links, to tracking sales, and paying commissions. Learn more here.

‍

2. Improved ROAS through UGC-powered ads

User-generated content (UGC) from influencers, affiliates, customers, employees, and anyone else in your brand community isn’t just limited to organic engagement — it’s a powerful tool for boosting paid ad performance, as well. 

Today’s consumers are hyper-aware of online advertising and don’t want to feel like they’re being overly sold to. In this cutthroat digital environment, it’s your job to create ads that blend in seamlessly with the rest of consumers’ feeds and feel more genuine and relatable. 

By repurposing UGC in your paid ads across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and more, you can leverage creative that is more relatable and trustworthy, amplifying your conversion rates and ROAS, while lowering customer acquisition costs.

In fact, studies show:

• UGC-based ads get 4x higher click-through rates
• Meta Partnership Ads drive 53% higher CTR and 19% lower CPA
• TikTok Spark Ads see 69% higher conversion rate, 37% lower CPA, and 142% more engagement than non-Spark Ads

Aspire can help you track this impact as well. Our platform has native ad integrations with Meta and TikTok and you can streamline the process of running and tracking allowlisted ads, Meta Partnership Ads, and TikTok Spark Ads directly through Aspire. Learn more about our ad integrations here. 

Tracking affiliate revenue and ROAS from UGC-powered ads gives you a real understanding of how influencers are driving tangible business growth, not just a hypothetical awareness benchmark. Other metrics like engagement and reach still matter, but they should supplement — not replace — the more important, business-driven KPIs.

Goodbye EMV, hello ROI

EMV might look good on paper, but it has no direct line to revenue or performance. If you want to prove the true impact influencer marketing has on your business, it’s time to measure what really matters: direct sales, improved ROAS, and lowered CAC. Aspire can help you bridge this gap, offering tools that go beyond EMV and dive into metrics that prove real business value. See for yourself.

Need real-life examples? Download The Secret to Efficient Growth to see how the world’s leading brands are driving measurable success through influencer marketing.