Top of funnel
Creator partnerships you can actually attribute.
Creator partnerships measured with matched-market testing, since a media kit's impressions and follower counts can both be purchased, and a tracked code badly undercounts a creator whose real effect shows up later as someone searching the brand by name.
A media kit reports two numbers, impressions and follower count, and both can be purchased directly. That does not make either one useless for judging a creator's actual audience quality, but it makes them unsuitable as a measurement of what a specific paid partnership produced, since a business paying for a post has no way to separate genuine reach from reach that was bought to inflate the pitch.
Tracked links and discount codes solve part of that problem and create a new one. They tell you something real about the people who clicked through and used the code, but they badly undercount a creator's actual effect, because the common response to seeing a creator recommend a business is not clicking a link at all — it is remembering the name and searching it directly later, which shows up as branded search and gets credited to that channel instead of to the creator who actually caused it.
How the work differs
- Creator vetting
- Follower and engagement history checked for bot-driven growth patterns and purchased engagement before any contract is signed.
- Matched-market testing
- Creator content run in a subset of markets while comparable markets go without it, with branded search and bookings compared between the two.
- Tracked-link and code hygiene
- Unique codes and links issued per creator per campaign, refreshed each cycle so an inactive creator never keeps drawing attributed activity.
- Content usage rights
- Organic and paid-amplification usage rights negotiated and documented before any content goes live.
- Disclosure compliance
- Required disclosure wording and placement confirmed on the live post before payment releases.
- Pricing structure
- Rate set from a negotiated flat component plus a performance component tied to the matched-market result.
How it is measured
The number that matters is the branded search and booking lift a matched-market test produces, comparing markets where a creator's content ran against comparable markets where it did not over the same window. That lift figure feeds the attribution layer, giving a creator partnership the same standard of proof any paid channel on this site is already held to.
What this channel cannot claim credit for: raw impressions or follower count reported by a media kit, and any tracked-link click volume presented on its own without the matched-market comparison behind it. Either number in isolation describes reach a creator claims to have, separate from any effect a business can actually verify.
The test itself needs enough markets and enough time to produce a real answer, which varies with how much natural week-to-week variation the brand's branded search volume already shows in a given region. A business with only two or three comparable markets available will need a longer test window to reach a trustworthy result than one with a dozen similar-sized markets to draw a comparison group from, and the required window is calculated upfront, before a creator relationship is signed, using the same sample-size logic applied to any other incrementality test on this site.
What we need from you
Whoever owns the brand's search and analytics access needs to make branded search volume available broken out by market, since the matched-market comparison depends on seeing that data at a regional level rather than as one national number. Legal or marketing sign-off on usage rights terms before the first creator contract goes out, so every subsequent agreement follows the same template. And enough lead time before a launch date to run creator vetting properly and size the matched-market test window correctly, since a rushed vetting process is exactly how a bot-inflated account gets signed.
Who this is for
Built for operators who have run creator partnerships on media-kit numbers alone and want a real answer on whether any of it moved bookings — professional services firms building trust with a niche audience often see meaningful branded-search lift from the right micro-creator, more than a broad-reach macro-influencer would produce for the same spend. It sits among the top-of-funnel programs, works from the same concepting discipline as creative ads strategy when a creator's content gets adapted for paid use, and shares distribution logic with paid social prospecting once a piece earns whitelisted amplification. Client results show a finished matched-market test and the pricing decision it produced.
Candidate creators' follower and engagement history are checked for bot-driven growth patterns and purchased engagement before any contract is signed, since a media kit showing strong numbers says nothing about whether those numbers were earned. Beyond that screen, fit is judged on whether the creator's actual audience overlaps with the business's real buyers, which matters more than raw reach.
A matched-market test: the creator's content runs in a subset of markets while comparable markets go without it for the same period, and branded search volume and booking numbers are compared between the two afterward. That comparison catches the searched-later behavior a tracked link misses entirely, since it measures the market-level effect rather than requiring someone to click a specific code.
A combination of a negotiated flat rate and a performance component tied to the matched-market result, rather than a rate set purely from follower count. A creator whose content measurably moves branded search and bookings in a real test earns a structure that reflects that; one whose numbers do not hold up under a real test gets priced, or renewed, accordingly.
Usage rights are negotiated and documented before anything goes live, specifying separately whether the client can run the content organically, whitelist it for paid amplification, or reuse it beyond the original posting window. Getting this settled upfront avoids the common situation where a post performs unexpectedly well and the client wants to put ad spend behind it, only to find the original agreement never covered that use.
Disclosure requirements — the specific wording and placement platforms and regulators require for a paid partnership — are written into the contract and checked on the live post before payment releases, not assumed to have been handled correctly by the creator. Brand safety follows the same review used for other partner content: the creator's other work and public conduct reviewed before signing, and monitored on a recurring basis afterward.
Find out what a creator program is actually worth to you.
A matched-market test on one creator relationship, comparing markets where their content ran against comparable markets where it did not.