Influencer Marketing · 24 July 2026
What a creator scorecard should actually measure
Engagement rate tells you how much a creator's existing audience likes them. It tells you almost nothing about whether they can sell your product to a stranger.
Arjun Nair — Director of Influencer Operations · 5 min read
Most influencer decisions are still made on two numbers: follower count and engagement rate. Both are easy to inflate, both describe the creator's relationship with their existing audience, and neither predicts the thing you are buying — whether their content can persuade someone who has never heard of them.
Here is what we track on every creator scorecard instead.
Performance in paid
**Cost per acquisition when whitelisted.** The definitive number. If their content converts cold traffic profitably, nothing else on the scorecard matters much.
**Three-second hold rate.** What percentage of paid impressions survive the first three seconds. This is a pure measure of hook craft and it is remarkably stable per creator.
**Cost per thousand at scale.** Some creators produce content that performs beautifully at £500/day and collapses at £5,000/day, usually because the appeal is narrow. Track the delta.
Commercial signals
**Revenue per asset, trailing 90 days.** Not per post — per asset, because good assets keep earning long after the post is buried.
**Code redemption rate.** For affiliate creators, the share of engaged viewers who actually use the code. It separates genuine persuasion from polite applause.
**Retention of referred customers.** Some creators bring bargain-hunters who churn in a month. Others bring believers. A creator whose customers retain two months longer is worth substantially more per acquisition, and almost nobody measures this.
Operational reality
**Brief-to-delivery time.** Median days from brief to first cut.
**Revision rounds required.** Two is normal. Five means the briefing relationship is broken or the creator is not right for paid work.
**Rights posture.** Whether they grant perpetual paid usage at signing, and at what premium. This single term can double or halve the lifetime value of the partnership.
A creator with 11,000 followers, a 62% three-second hold rate and perpetual usage rights is worth more to a performance programme than a 900,000-follower personality who charges £14,000 and grants thirty days of organic-only usage. We have the spreadsheets to prove it, and they are not close.