I think you're overestimating how well social influencers can be measured. It's true, you can measure clicks to a landing page, one per influencer - but that's relatively annoying administratively, and only measures clicks, not sales. Plus, that counts on your influencer actually following instructions and using the custom landing page URL, which is harder than you might think.
If you're a consumer lifestyle or luxury brand, most of your sales are in-store and hence attribution due to influencers becomes incredibly difficult.
What many companies I've seen do is attempt to measure organic reach through a variety of internal or external scoring mechanisms, and using engagement as a proxy for reach. So a beauty influencer posting a screenshot of her travel bag with your brand tagged would have comments, likes, reshares/regrams measured, and then have that scored as some sort of an effectiveness index.
Its can be pretty straightforward if you run your campaigns through a software platform. The way we (mavrck.co) do it is we do outreach for a campaign, screen the influencers based on their engagement rates/relevancy, have influencers connect their instagram/facebook accounts to our platform, generate individual tracking links for each influencer, ingest their posts via API, and measure the comments/likes/clicks/conversions with our analytics.
Wouldn't that qualify as operating an ad network on instagram, something that is explicitly forbidden via the instagram terms of service?
"Don't transfer any data that you receive from us (including anonymous, aggregate, or derived data) to any ad network, data broker, influencer network, or other advertising or monetization-related service."
If you're a consumer lifestyle or luxury brand, most of your sales are in-store and hence attribution due to influencers becomes incredibly difficult.
What many companies I've seen do is attempt to measure organic reach through a variety of internal or external scoring mechanisms, and using engagement as a proxy for reach. So a beauty influencer posting a screenshot of her travel bag with your brand tagged would have comments, likes, reshares/regrams measured, and then have that scored as some sort of an effectiveness index.