The State of Influencer ROI in 2023

Two years after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes disrupted how advertisers could follow a user from a sponsored post to a purchase, marketing teams in 2023 were still adjusting their measurement approach, and doing it under tighter budget scrutiny than in the free-spending years before.

Attribution stayed harder than it used to be

The clean, single-click attribution marketers had gotten used to from platform-provided tracking was largely gone by 2023. Fewer users could be followed across apps, and privacy-driven changes across the ad ecosystem meant a sale influenced by a sponsored post often showed up nowhere in a pixel-based report. Brands that hadn’t adjusted their measurement approach were left either overpaying for channels that looked ineffective on paper, or underinvesting in influencer work that was driving sales they simply couldn’t see.

Promo codes and affiliate links made a real comeback

Facing weaker platform-level tracking, brands leaned harder on the oldest trick available: a unique discount code or affiliate link per creator. It’s a blunt instrument, it undercounts influence that doesn’t end in an immediate coded purchase, but it produced a number a finance team could trust, which mattered more than ever as marketing spend came under closer scrutiny during a year of broader tech industry layoffs and budget tightening.

Budgets shifted toward creators who could show a real track record

With less room for speculative spending, brands increasingly favored creators who could point to past campaign performance, engagement history or existing affiliate sales data over untested accounts with impressive follower counts alone. The influencer marketing platforms and agencies that survived the tighter 2023 ad market were largely the ones that had built genuine measurement and reporting into their offering, not just creator discovery.

AI-generated content entered the conversation, and the skepticism

2023 saw a wave of interest in AI tools for generating influencer-style content and even fully synthetic “virtual influencers,” alongside real debate about whether audiences would trust it the same way. Most brands stayed cautious, running small tests rather than betting real budget on synthetic creators, but the conversation itself pushed a useful question to the front of every ROI discussion that year: what part of influencer marketing’s value came from reach, and what part came from a real person’s credibility that a synthetic one couldn’t replicate.

What held up

The influencer partnerships that kept justifying their cost in 2023 shared a pattern: individualized tracking through codes or links rather than reliance on platform pixels, a preference for creators with a provable history over an unknown quantity with a big following and honest acknowledgment that some of the value, brand trust, awareness and audience goodwill, simply wasn’t going to show up in a last-click report no matter how good the tracking got. Brands that accepted that and measured accordingly made better decisions than ones still chasing the clean attribution numbers from a few years earlier.

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Keep exploring: browse more Social Media Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2023 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.