Fake followers and murky return on investment push brands to rejig influencer strategy

Influencer marketing is in flux as brands express concerns about return on investment (ROI) and fake followers, pushing them to explore alternative strategies.

“Ironically, the medium that outpaced traditional advertisements, such as television and billboards, on the grounds of measurable results, is struggling with a massive problem of attribution to return on investment,” said Dhruv Khurana, founder of Astatine.ai, an AI-powered influencer marketing platform.

“This is because fake followers can be bought in India for as little as ₹8 to ₹50 per thousand. We analyzed over 2 million creator profiles and found that 65% had between 10% to 15% suspicious or inactive audiences. This directly impacts campaign performance and makes it difficult for brands to measure real ROI,” Khurana added.

Also read: Influencers, brands turn to social media to raise cyber awareness

According to a BCG report in May, 74% of brands highlighted the challenge of fake followers, whereas 40% complained about a lack of measurement of return on investment.

“ROI measurement remains a challenge in influencer marketing, especially with top-funnel content,” said Rajiv Dubey, Dabur India Ltd's media head, replying to queries shared by Mint in an email. Top funnel content aims to raise awareness instead of advertising products to new users.

He underlined that this led them to update their metrics to add engagement rate (ER%), cost per engagement (CPE), and cost per view (CPV) to all major influencer campaigns of theirs. These attempts to assess the impact of digital advertisements by measuring how many users have watched, liked, shared, or commented on the posts.

Dabur’s measures

“We are aware of the prevalence of bot followers and inflated metrics in parts of the influencer ecosystem. To address this, we rely on third-party analytics tools and platform audits to evaluate influencer quality, ensuring that we work only with authentic, engaged creators. We also cross-check audience credibility, using engagement quality as a more reliable metric than follower count,” Dubey added.

Also read: India’s influencers face a harsh reality: more views don’t mean more subscribers

He further highlighted that the FMCG giant is also experimenting with a model where the creators they bring in get paid on their sales conversions instead of a blanket payment known as affiliate marketing. “Affiliate marketing is an area we’re actively exploring, especially within our D2C and e-commerce initiatives. We believe affiliate partnerships, when aligned with content creators or health advisors, offer a more trackable and ROI-driven model,” Dubey said.

“We’re currently exploring pilot programmes in categories like skin care and health supplements, with influencers driving traffic via custom discount codes and UTM links, helping us precisely attribute conversions,” he added. UTM links are used to track the performance of digital marketing campaigns by adding specific parameters to a URL, allowing you to track where traffic is coming from and the effectiveness of different marketing efforts. 

Managing issues

Startups like Plum Goodness and Wow! Momo are also similarly navigating through these issues. Shankar Prasad, founder of Plum Goodness, said that they use analytics to guide decision-making and track metrics such as click-through rates, coupon redemptions, etc. Meanwhile, L. Muralikrishnan, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Wow! Momo said, “We do a lot of bot tracking to estimate the number of genuine followers through third-party SaaS platforms before we work with creators.”

Affiliate marketing is a popular concept in the Western creator economy that is gradually trickling into the Indian market.

Also read: The dark side of India’s booming meme industry: broken laws

Affiliate marketing matured earlier in Western markets, thanks to a strong e-commerce infrastructure and a performance-driven brand mindset. “In India, it’s gaining momentum—we work with 250+ brands who now believe in the model. But traditionally, brands have been more comfortable with fixed-fee influencer deals rather than outcome-linked partnerships,” Minaal Dembla, market expansion head at Wishlink, a creator-led affiliate marketing company.

On the infrastructure side, many lacked the tools to track creator-level conversions. Fortunately, these systems are now emerging and improving. “Creators, too, were initially hesitant—preferring guaranteed payments over commission-based models. But that’s changing, as the model becomes more transparent and creators see consistent earnings through platforms like Wishlink,” Dembla added. Now, with growing data, it’s evident that the model is delivering value to both brands and creators.

Some influencer marketing agencies try to integrate affiliate marketing, especially in gaming live-streaming categories, to push impulsive purchases. “Youngsters hooked to gaming watch their favourite creators play games for hours on platforms like YouTube. Instead of just relying on links, we target them through QR codes, which become a visual medium, luring them and making their jobs easier. Especially in most cases, we try to use QR codes that take the user to the products on quick commerce platforms, further pushing them to buy impulsively, especially snacks,” said Tushaar Garg, founder of creator economy startup Stream O.