Ad Specialist GmbH

Influencer marketing is at a clear turning point in 2026:

→ Creators are getting more expensive → Consumers are becoming more hesitant, customer journeys longer → Attributing individual placements to direct conversions is getting harder

Yet we still see the same pattern with many brands:

They book creators, look at the CAC after 7 days, and then decide whether the channel "works" or not.

The problem with that: influencer marketing is a push channel. You activate groups of buyers who didn't have you on their radar before. They google, they compare, they see more ads — and often buy through Meta or Google. Anyone who measures the channel on last click alone makes it look systematically worse than it actually is.

What we've learned across more than 10,000 campaigns and €50M in managed ad spend:

The brands that really grow with influencer marketing evaluate the channel on two levels in parallel:

→ Soft KPIs (brand search uplift, session duration, CPS, engagement, community sentiment) show early on whether a campaign is having an impact — weeks before conversion data becomes meaningful.

→ Hard KPIs (CAC, NC ROAS, CVR, CLV) show in the end whether the campaign was profitable — over a realistic evaluation window of 60 to 90 days, with clean attribution.

That's Brandformance. Not brand instead of performance, but both measured in parallel and weighted differently depending on the phase of the campaign.

The foundation for this: clean UTM tracking at the creator level.

This is exactly the setup we've been running for years for brands like Upway, Wetter Online, Emma and HelloFresh.

If you're looking for an agency that only optimizes for 7-day CAC, we're not the right fit.

If you want to establish influencer marketing as a standalone, long-term growth channel that unites brand and performance — let's talk