Follower count used to be one of the first numbers marketers looked at when evaluating a creator. Then engagement rate became the shorthand for influence.
Today, neither metric is enough on its own.
We asked 10 influencer marketing professionals a set of questions about how they actually evaluate creators:
When someone says an Instagram creator has a 5% engagement rate, what does that number mean?
Which quantitative metrics matter most when selecting a creator?
Which influencer marketing metric is the most overrated?
The responses show how experienced marketers evaluate creator performance today. Follower count can indicate audience size, but it isn't positioned as a proof of influence. Engagement rate still matters, but only when marketers understand how it was calculated. Further, creator evaluation is now a combining audience relevance, actual content distribution, quality of engagement, consistency and measurable business outcomes.
Here are the most important takeaways.
1. A 5% engagement rate raises a new question: 5% of what?
For years, engagement rate has been one of the most commonly used metrics in influencer marketing.
However, there is still no universally accepted way to calculate it.
Several experts told us that if they saw a creator described as having a 5% engagement rate, their default assumption would still be engagements divided by followers.
Shawn Munir, who works on influencer marketing and UGC for D2C brands at Yamammi, said this remains the standard definition used by many tools. But he does not rely on it when evaluating creators. Instead, his team asks creators for Instagram Insights and compares engagement against actual reach.
Similarly, Raquel Moreira, Head of Customer Success at Influx Data, initially interprets a reported engagement rate as follower-based, but wants to see performance relative to reach and views before drawing conclusions. At the post level, she looks at total engagements divided by impressions.
Along the same lines, Nicolas Bon, Founder of Clark Influence, said follower-based engagement remains the most commonly understood definition. However, as Instagram becomes increasingly driven by recommendations, Reels and distribution outside a creator's existing follower base, he considers engagement relative to reach or views more informative.
This distinction matters because two creators can both report a 5% engagement rate while having very different levels of actual content consumption. One might have a large but relatively inactive follower base. Another might consistently reach audiences far outside their existing audience through recommendations.
The same issue was emphasized by Bilal Younus. Until you know whether an engagement rate is follower-based or reach-based, the percentage can mean very different things.
Gigi Robinson went even further. Her first reaction to a 5% engagement rate is essentially: “5% of what?” Different tools include different engagement actions and use different denominators, making apparently comparable percentages difficult to compare directly.
THE TAKEAWAY
Engagement rate is not becoming irrelevant. But engagement rate without a clearly defined formula is becoming less useful. A better question is: What exactly is being measured, against what audience, and over which content?
2. Follower count is losing its position as the default measure of influence
If there was one area where the experts showed the strongest agreement, it was follower count.
Shawn Munir sees follower count as one of the weakest indicators of campaign results. In his view, follower numbers often tell marketers more about pricing than what a creator is likely to deliver.
Raquel Moreira similarly said that follower count alone tells her very little because every category has different dynamics and benchmarks. She prefers marketers to define campaign priorities and KPIs and then determine what creator tier is appropriate.
Nicolas Bon also thinks follower count gets more weight than it deserves. He still sees a use for it, but points out that platforms now distribute content through recommendations and other channels beyond a creator's followers.
A smaller creator can sometimes generate more relevant reach than an account several times larger.
That changes the central question marketers need to ask today.
FROM SIZE TO EFFECTIVENESS
Then: "How big is this creator?"
Now: "How effectively can this creator earn attention from the right people for this brand?"
Vivek Shukla and Rachel Clay made similar arguments, emphasizing that a smaller creator with a relevant and engaged audience can be more valuable than a much larger creator whose audience is passive or poorly aligned with the campaign.
That does not mean follower count has no value. Brenda Ho, Head of Influence at Ogilvy PR ANZ, noted that it can still serve as an indicator of cultural weight or recognizability, particularly when combined with audience data.
Follower count may also help marketers understand visibility, fame or potential cultural impact; but it is simply no longer sufficient as a proxy for campaign performance.
3. Actual distribution matters more than theoretical audience size
If follower count represents the audience a creator has accumulated, reach and views represent the audience their content is actually reaching.
That difference came up repeatedly in the responses.
Nicolas Bon, for example, looks at average reach and views across multiple pieces of content, along with how consistent that performance is. He does not focus only on a creator's best-performing posts.
Vivek Shukla also uses average views and reach to understand how widely a creator's content is actually distributed. Brenda Ho looks at average views or reach per post to estimate how much organic reach a partnership might generate.
Together, these metrics give marketers a better idea of what a creator's content usually reaches and how consistent that reach is. That makes reach and views useful measures when assessing the audience a creator can actually deliver.
4. Median views may tell marketers more than average views
Several experts independently pointed to another problem in creator evaluation, where averages can be badly distorted by viral posts.
Raquel Moreira prefers median views because one exceptional viral post can dramatically inflate an average. Median performance gives marketers a better sense of what a typical placement might generate.
That same issue comes up in Damir Turikbayev’s approach. If one video receives 1,000 views and another receives 100,000, the average does not accurately describe either piece of content. He prefers median views while also accounting for the tendency of sponsored content to underperform organic content.
This is also why Alessandro Bogliari, CEO and Co-Founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory, looks at median views specifically on branded content rather than overall content performance.
For creator evaluation, median views can give a more realistic view of typical performance.
A BETTER FORECASTING QUESTION
How does the creator usually perform, and how does that performance change on sponsored posts?
5. Audience fit remains one of the most consistent selection criteria
Another point of strong agreement was audience relevance.
For creators, the quality of the audience matters as much as the amount of attention they receive.
Raquel Moreira includes follower demographics among her three core metrics because reach has limited value if it does not come from the audience a brand is trying to reach.
Nicolas Bon takes a similar view, looking at demographics, geography, authenticity and alignment between the creator's audience and the campaign target.
Vivek Shukla also prioritizes location, age, gender and audience quality, while Rachel Clay emphasized demographic alignment alongside qualitative considerations such as content quality and brand affinity.
Along the same lines, Brenda Ho described audience data such as local-audience percentage and affinities as critical for ensuring campaigns reach the intended communities.
This is a useful reminder that creator evaluation cannot be reduced to a universal ranking. A creator with excellent overall metrics may still be the wrong creator for a specific campaign.
6. Engagement quality adds another dimension to creator evaluation
The experts also challenged the idea that all engagement signals should be treated equally.
Alessandro Bogliari argued that a percentage alone doesn’t explain the quality of that engagement. Likes and emoji comments require very little effort. Shares, reposts and saves can indicate something different: that people found the content valuable enough to keep or distribute.
Shawn Munir also highlighted saves and shares, describing them as closer signals of intent than basic likes.
Gigi Robinson made perhaps the strongest argument for evaluating individual engagement actions separately.
She sees saves as a sign that people want to return to a piece of content and shares as a proxy for word of mouth. She also looks at comment quality, paying attention to whether people are asking substantive questions and discussing the subject or simply leaving generic reactions and emojis.
ENGAGEMENT ISN'T ALL THE SAME
The type of engagement matters. Shares, saves, reposts and meaningful comments can tell marketers more about how audiences respond to content.
7. Sponsored-content performance deserves its own analysis
One of the most interesting suggestions came from Bilal Younus. Rather than looking only at a creator's overall engagement, he wants to understand how engagement changes when the creator publishes sponsored content.
If performance drops sharply whenever an ad appears, that can reveal something about how the creator's audience responds to commercial partnerships.
Alessandro Bogliari's approach to median views on brand-deal videos follows the same logic.
For marketers, this suggests that historical organic performance may not always be the best predictor of branded-content performance.
An account can be excellent at generating attention for its own content and much less effective at transferring that attention to a sponsor. That difference deserves to be measured.
8. Attention matters most when it leads to action
Most creator evaluation begins with social metrics, but several experts argued that those metrics should ultimately connect to something outside the platform.
Alessandro Bogliari said his team requests historical click data from previous campaigns when available because awareness alone does not answer whether a creator can drive traffic.
Brenda Ho took the argument further, describing views and engagement as useful indicators but not necessarily the best measures of campaign success.
Where possible, she would rather evaluate business outcomes such as brand lift, conversions or sales uplift and ensure those measurement plans are established before the campaign begins.
Gigi Robinson framed the same idea more broadly: what ultimately matters is whether the audience acts.
A creator may generate moderate visible engagement while still driving saves, shares, conversations, DMs or conversions that represent deeper forms of influence. This may be the most important conclusion from all ten responses.
Social metrics still matter, with different metrics taking priority depending on the campaign.
A new framework for evaluating creators
Taken together, the responses highlight four criteria for creator evaluation.
| Criteria | Core question | Indicators to examine |
|---|---|---|
| Audience Fit | Are these the people the brand needs to reach? | Geography; age and gender; audience interests and affinities; audience authenticity and quality; brand relevance |
| Actual Distribution | How many people normally see the creator’s content? | Median views; average reach; view consistency; performance trends; organic versus sponsored performance |
| Quality of Attention | What does the audience do after seeing the content? | Reach-based engagement; saves; shares; reposts; comment quality; engagement consistency |
| Action and Business Impact | Does creator attention translate into something valuable for the brand? | Clicks; traffic; conversions; sales; brand lift; other campaign-specific business outcomes |
Follower count and traditional engagement rate can still provide useful information inside this framework. But neither should be treated as the answer by itself.
So, what should marketers look at in 2026?
There is no universal three-metric checklist that will work for every influencer campaign. And that may itself be one of the main takeaways from our conversations.
An awareness campaign and a conversion campaign should not evaluate creators in the same way.
A luxury brand may care about cultural positioning and brand fit. A performance advertiser may care more about historical clicks and conversions. A local campaign may prioritize audience geography above almost everything else.
The campaign goal determines which metrics to prioritize.
The responses show that creator evaluation considers more than audience size. Marketers also look at audience fit, actual distribution, quality of attention and measurable action.
A creator is an audience that a brand can access through a partnership, but what matters is whether that creator can consistently earn the right kind of attention from the right people and turn that attention into the outcome the campaign was designed to achieve.
About this expert roundup
For this roundup, HypeAuditor asked 10 professionals working across influencer marketing agencies, technology companies, brand partnerships, creator economy and PR the same three questions about creator evaluation.
Their responses were analyzed to identify areas of agreement, disagreement and emerging practices in how influencer marketers assess creator performance today.
Contributors
Shawn Munir — Sales Executive at Yamammi
Vivek Shukla — Strategic Social Media & Influencer Marketing Expert
Raquel Moreira — Head of Customer Success at Influx Data
Rachel Clay — Founder of Influence Luxe
Damir Turikbayev — Head of Influencer Marketing / Ad & UGC Producer / Advisor
Alessandro Bogliari — CEO & Co-Founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory
Nicolas Bon — Founder of Clark Influence
Gigi Robinson — Creator, Speaker, Author
Bilal Younus — Creator Manager
Brenda Ho — Head of Influence at Ogilvy PR ANZ
Source: HypeAuditor Expert Roundup response compilation, September 2026. Expert responses were edited only for synthesis and presentation; individual viewpoints remain attributed to their contributors.
Full Expert Responses
Below are the complete responses provided by the 10 contributors. The wording is preserved from the source response compilation; only formatting has been standardized for readability.
Shawn Munir — Sales Executive at Yamammi
Engagements over followers. That's what every tool shows, so that's the default. I don't use it. We ask creators for a 30-day Insights screenshot and compare engagement against actual reach.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign, and why?
Reach-based engagement from Insights. Reel views versus follower count, which tells me if the algorithm still likes them. Saves and shares, because that's the closest thing to intent and it predicts how the content does in paid.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Follower count. First thing every brand asks, weakest link to results. Our data across 350 campaigns has nanos at over 4% engagement and macros at around 0.5-1%. Followers tell you the price, not the output.
Raquel Moreira — Head of Customer Success at Influx Data
If someone tells me a profile has a 5% engagement rate, I read that as follower-based, so average engagements per post over follower count. But I don't take it at face value. I want to see it against views and reach too, because that's what tells me whether the content is actually travelling or just being served to the audience the creator already has.
At post level I do it differently. I take total engagements (likes, comments, shares, reposts) and divide by impressions. Every platform and tool has its own way of calculating this, so honestly the number matters a lot less than knowing which formula produced it.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
I'll admit I have it easy here. At Influx we have our own proprietary Influence Score, which pulls reach, engagement, audience quality and creator cost into a single 0 to 10 rating. It makes my life a lot simpler, and it helps brands see at a glance which creators are the strongest fit.
If I didn't have that, my three would be:
Median views. Not average, because one viral post skews an average badly. The median tells me what a brand can realistically expect from a placement.
Engagement rate. How deep the relationship with the audience actually is, not just how big it is.
Follower demographics. All the reach in the world doesn't help if it isn't reaching the people the brand wants to sell to.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Not really a metric, but follower count. A lot of marketers still lead with it. Every niche has its own dynamics, its own benchmarks, its own pros and cons, so a follower number on its own tells me very little. I'd rather set the priorities and KPIs first and then work out what size of creator actually serves them, whether that's nano, micro or macro. Size should be the outcome of the strategy, not the starting point.
Damir Turikbayev — Head of Influencer Marketing / Ad & UGC Producer / Advisor
I usually sum up comments, likes and shares, then divide it into views of 1 video, then calculating average for last 5-10 publications.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
I usually look at ER%, % of relevant geo and (it's not metric) how stable / unstable the viewership is.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Average viewership, it doesn't show up the whole picture, since one video may gather 1k views, another 100k and average is 50k. It would be better to use median views, while eliminating outliers and then decrease the number by 40%, since the ad publcication recieves far less attention in general.
Nicolas Bon — Founder of Clark Influence
By default, I’d assume that 5% is engagements divided by followers, simply because that’s still the most commonly understood definition. But honestly, engagement rate without context is becoming less and less meaningful.
With Instagram increasingly driven by recommendations, Reels and non-follower distribution, I’m much more interested in engagement relative to actual reach or views. Two creators can both have a 5% follower-based engagement rate and deliver completely different levels of attention and impact.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
At Clark Influence, I’d say:
Average reach/views: Followers tell me the potential audience. Reach tells me the audience the creator actually gets. We look at consistency across multiple pieces of content too, not just the best-performing posts.
Audience quality and relevance: Demographics, geography, authenticity and how closely the audience matches the brand’s target. 500K followers mean very little if only 10% of them are relevant to the campaign.
Engagement quality and consistency: Not just the engagement rate itself, but what creates that engagement and whether it’s consistent. We look at the ratio between views, likes, comments, shares and saves because these signals can tell very different stories about how people consume the content.
Ultimately, the weight we give each metric depends on the campaign objective. A creator who is great for awareness isn't necessarily the creator I’d select for consideration or conversion.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Follower count, without hesitation.
It’s still useful as a reference point, but I think the industry continues to give it more importance than it deserves. The algorithm doesn’t distribute content based purely on how many followers someone has, and a smaller creator can sometimes generate significantly more relevant reach and impact than someone 5x their size.
At Clark, we’re increasingly thinking about creators less as “audiences you rent” and more as content and distribution partners. The real question isn’t “How big is this creator?” It’s “How effectively can this creator earn attention from the right people for this specific brand?”
That shift, to me, is where creator evaluation is heading.
Bilal Younus — Creator Manager
Honestly, like others my first assumption had been always likes and comments divided by total followers. That's just what most tools spit out by default. But I don't really trust that number until I know if it's follower-based or reach-based, because those two can tell completely different stories. A creator with 100K followers and a 2% reach-based ER is often doing better than someone showing 5% off their follower count, especially if a chunk of those followers are inactive or fake.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
Reach-based engagement rate, not follower-based because it's just a more honest read on real attention. Audience authenticity, meaning what percentage of followers are actually real, active people, because a great ER on a fake audience means nothing. And this one's less common but I think it matters most: how much engagement drops between a creator's organic posts and their sponsored ones. If it falls off a cliff the second #ad shows up, that's telling you something about how much their audience actually trusts them.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Engagement rate, weirdly enough, when someone just throws out a number with zero context. I see "5% ER" treated like a finished thought all the time, and it's really not but it depends completely on how it was calculated and against what. Until you know that, it's more of a talking point than a real metric.
Vivek Shukla— Strategic Social Media & Influencer Marketing Expert
By default, I would assume it’s calculated based on the creator’s follower count, using total engagements (likes, comments, saves, shares) divided by followers × 100. However, for campaign evaluation, I prefer looking at engagement rate by reach/views as well, because it gives a better picture of how actively the audience is responding to the content.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
Engagement Rate – to understand audience interaction and content relevance.
Average Views/Reach – to assess the creator’s actual content distribution rather than just their follower base.
Audience Demographics & Quality – especially location, age and gender, to ensure the audience matches the brand’s target audience.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Follower count is probably the most overrated metric. A large following doesn’t necessarily mean strong influence or campaign performance. I’d rather work with a creator who has a smaller but highly relevant, engaged and authentic audience than someone with a huge but passive or mismatched following.
Rachel Clay— Founder of Influence Luxe
That they're likely a micro-influencer, potentially operating in a niche (i.e. a watch collector) where their content is well aligned with their followers' interests, that their audience maybe slightly older as younger followers can (although not always) be more passive in their social media consumption habits. Possibly that they are also commercially focused and use tactics such as 'comment below'.
Generally I'd expect it to be based on the average number of interactions (likes, comments, saves, shares etc) generated from an agreed number of posts, divided by either follower count or average reach (if available).
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
Audience demographics: age, gender, location and interest breakdowns to ensure we're reaching the target audience. We then also pay close attention to qualitative factors such as content quality, brand affinity and messaging to ensure brand guardianship.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
I personally think follower count is still wildly overrated. One of the biggest misconceptions that still exists amongst some brands is that working with a bigger influencer 'guarantees' bigger reach or results. While on occasion this might be true, and large, well-known profiles can definitely create PR opportunities, support brand positioning and wider marketing goals, generally speaking, it's far more successful to prioritise profiles with high engagement and strong audience alignment.
Alessandro Bogliari — CEO & Co-Founder of The Influencer Marketing Factory
Let me say this: ER is just a number! It never tells the full story. Content today is interest-based, not network-based anymore, so I'd rather see ER calculated on the views of each video than on the whole profile. And a percentage says nothing about quality. Is that 5% mostly likes and emoji comments, which take zero effort? Or is it shares, reposts and saves? Those are the actions that actually matter.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
First, audience demographics: who actually follows them, follower quality, where they're located. Second, historical click data from past campaigns, which we request by email when available. Awareness is nice, but can they drive traffic? Third, trend data: are they gaining or losing followers, are their views going up or down. That helps us forecast how their next videos will perform. We also look at median views on brand deal videos specifically, not overall views, because one viral video can skew the average and hide what a sponsored post really does.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Followers, for sure. By now I hope most brands know this already. And ER too. As I said, it only tells part of the story. If you go all in on quantitative analysis without any qualitative focus on the content and the engagement itself, you won't get much out of it.
Gigi Robinson— Creator, Speaker, Author
When I hear a 5% engagement rate, my first question is 5% of what. That single number tells me nothing until I know the audience and also the fact that different tools calculate it wildly differently. Some platforms use likes plus comments divided by followers. Others use total engagements (likes, comments, shares, saves) divided by reach or views. A 5% rate calculated against followers looks completely different from a 5% rate calculated against reach, especially on Instagram where organic reach can be 10-20% of your following on a good day.
By default, most marketers still calculate engagement as likes plus comments divided by followers, but that math is increasingly meaningless in an era where Instagram surfaces content to non-followers through Reels and Explore. The number I actually trust more is engagement per reach, because it tells me how the content performed against the audience that actually saw it. That is very different than performance against a follower count that includes ghost accounts, inactive followers, and audiences that were built years ago.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
Three metrics I would look at: Saves are the strongest signal of content value. When a follower saves a post, they are telling you the content is worth returning to, which means the creator is delivering something substantive. Shares mean the audience thinks the content is worth putting their own reputation behind. That is the closest social proxy for word-of-mouth marketing, and it is the metric most correlated with a creator's ability to actually drive discovery for a brand. And comment quality, not comment count... Are the followers speaking the topic's jargon, asking substantive questions, having conversations with each other? Or are they generic emoji responses? Comment quality tells me whether the creator has built a real community or just an audience of passive scrollers.
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Engagement rate and follower count. Follower count is the more obviously outdated metric. It rewards creators who bought or inflated their audience years ago and tells you nothing about who is actually watching now. A 500,000-follower account with 5,000 real viewers is a worse buy than a 20,000-follower account with 15,000 engaged viewers, and any brand still buying by follower count is optimizing for the wrong outcome. Engagement rate is the more insidious one because it sounds rigorous. Marketers use it as a shortcut for content quality when it is actually a shortcut for how easy it is to manipulate a specific metric. A creator can juice their engagement rate with pods, giveaways, and controversy bait without delivering any real value to a brand's actual customer. Meanwhile, the creators quietly driving business outcomes like saves, shares, DMs, conversions, offline conversations, often have moderate engagement rates because they are optimizing for depth over reactivity.
The metric that actually matters is whether the creator's audience acts. That is what marketers should be asking about. Not how many people liked a post, but how many people did something because of it.
Brenda Ho — Head of Influence at Ogilvy PR ANZ
5% engagement rate is a good indicator that the influencer’s content tends to capture attention/ be engaging to their audiences. My preference is for the 5% to be calculated based on views (for video content) or reach as opposed to followers, as social algorithms today are based on interest graph as opposed to social graph; so calculations based on followers are increasingly irrelevant.
Q2 What are the three quantitative metrics you always look at when evaluating a new creator for a potential campaign — and why?
I wouldn’t say that the metrics to look at are the same across each and every campaign as it depends on the campaign’s objectives, but broadly:
Audience data (e.g. local audience following %, audience affinities) - critical to ensure you’re reaching your bullseye audience/ the right communities
Average views/ reach per post - good indicator of how much organic scale/ reach you might be able to achieve through the partnership
Followers - an indicator of cultural weight/ recognisability, especially when paired against audience data
Q3 What is the most overrated metric in influencer marketing today? Is there a metric that many marketers pay attention to but you personally don’t consider that important? Why?
Most social metrics along the lines of views, engagement etc. are vanity metrics. They still have a role as an indicator (e.g. shares for measuring shareability), but should not be considered the key indicators for campaign success. The best measures would be actual business metrics attributable to the partnership/ content/ campaign - brand lift studies, conversions/ sales uplift etc. - which should be planned upfront prior to campaign launch.
Source: HypeAuditor Expert Roundup response compilation, September 2026.
