Short or Long-term over Influencer Marketing on D7 and D30 ROI

If you’re judging influencer marketing on D7 and D30 ROI, you’re setting yourself up for the wrong conclusion.

The long-term data tells a very different story.

The long tail and the halo effect have always been the channel’s real strength. Very few channels keep working for you long after the campaign has ended. Influencer marketing does. Consistently.

Yet budgets keep getting pulled way too early for teams to even see that impact internally.

This new IPA dataset finally puts numbers behind what many of us have been saying for years.

Here’s what the charts show:

1. Short-term influencer ROI indexes at 99
Right on the industry average. Nothing crazy at first glance.

2. Long-term influencer ROI jumps to 151
Suddenly influencers outperform paid social by a wide margin. Once you zoom out, the story flips.

3. Influencers have the highest long-term multiplier of any channel
The compounding effect of influencer content outpaces almost everything else.

And here’s the part that should worry people.

Even with this long-term potential, influencer marketing still sits at the bottom in terms of budget allocation. That gap tells you one thing. Brands still approach the channel the wrong way.

It is a vicious cycle.
Teams want proof before they invest, but they never invest enough or long enough to generate the proof.

This data should push more teams to rethink how they measure IM. Because there is an incremental effect here that you simply cannot see in short windows. Both in how creative continues to perform over time, and in how influencer content lifts every other channel around it.

If you focus only on short-term ROI, you are missing half the picture.
Probably the half that makes influencer marketing actually worth scaling.