Compare Influencer Performance Across Campaigns in the GCC

Your airline ran three creator campaigns this year: a cabin review on YouTube, a loyalty promo on Instagram and a city-break series on TikTok. Each report says it worked, one with views, one with likes, one with reach. None of them lets you compare influencer performance across multiple campaigns, so the next budget decision goes to whoever presents best.

In the Gulf the gap is wider. A Saudi creator's audience comments in Saudi dialect, an Emirati vlogger's followers mix Emirati Arabic and English in one line, and much of what matters is said out loud in the video, not written in the caption.

This guide gives airline and travel marketers a method: a normalized scorecard, a comparison sheet you can copy today, a worked example and a tool checklist.

What is the best tool to compare influencer performance across multiple campaigns?

Short answer: the one that measures every campaign the same way, on what people said afterwards, not only on what the post delivered.

In practice, that tool should:

1. Capture the conversation each campaign creates, including posts and comments that never tag your airline.
2. Read comments in the dialects your passengers write in, not only formal Arabic or English.
3. Transcribe what creators say in their videos, so a spoken mention counts.
4. Apply the same window and rules to every campaign, then export the results side by side.

For named tools, see our roundups of the 4 best tools to choose the right influencer and track campaign performance and the 5 best tools to track influencer performance before and after a campaign. This guide is the method behind them.

How do you track influencer performance?

Track three layers for every creator post:

• Delivery: views, reach and watch time. Only the creator can see these, so write a screenshot or export into the contract.
• Response: comments, replies and shares, and what they actually say.
• Effect: what happened to the conversation about your airline afterwards, across platforms.

Most influencer performance tracking stops at delivery. The comparison happens in the other two.

Where can I track influencer campaign performance?

Where	What you get	What you miss
The creator's platform insights	Views, reach, watch time, audience country	Everything said outside that post
Your own pages	All comments and replies on your posts	Talk on the creator's page and elsewhere
Tracked links and promo codes	Bookings you can attribute	Interest that never clicked
A social listening tool	Untagged mentions, spoken mentions in video, rivals, dialect and channel	Private delivery numbers (ask the creator)

You need at least the first and the last.

Why reach and likes don't compare across campaigns

• Platforms count differently. A TikTok view, a YouTube view and Instagram reach are three different measures.
• Formats play different roles. A 14-minute cabin review and a 30-second reel do different jobs.
• Audiences differ. A large following spread across many countries can matter less than a smaller one concentrated in Kuwait. See how follower count affects audience expectations.
• Likes are cheap. They don't tell you whether anyone wants to book.

The normalized influencer scorecard

Score every campaign on the same eight measures. Each is a rate or a share, so small and large campaigns sit side by side.

Measure	What it tells you	How to normalize
Earned conversation	Other people's posts and comments about your airline in the 7 days after, above baseline	Per 1,000 views
Comment intent and quality	Questions about routes, fares, cabins or joining the programme, versus generic praise	Share of comments
Sentiment and emotion	Sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and emotion (excitement, curiosity, trust, confusion), read separately	Share positive; top emotion
Share of mentions driven	How much talk about your airline in the window came from the campaign	Share of mentions
Audience fit	Commenters in your target market, read from dialect and profile location	Share of commenters
Spoken mentions	Whether the creator named the airline, cabin or route out loud	Count per video
Content lifespan	Days until the conversation falls back to baseline	Days
Cost per qualified conversation	Fee divided by intent comments plus earned posts, if known	Fee per conversation

Score each measure from 1 to 5 against your own baseline. Then weight by goal: a route launch weights earned conversation and audience fit, a loyalty promo weights comment intent.

How to compare like with like

• Set a baseline. Average daily mentions of your airline and the usual comment mix, over the four weeks before each campaign, by market.
• Same window. Seven days after each post for response, 28 days for lifespan.
• Same market. Score Saudi audiences against the Saudi baseline. Don't blend the UAE and Kuwait into one number.
• Same rules. One keyword list, with Arabic, English and Franco-Arabic spellings and common misspellings of your airline's name. Exclude your own promoted posts.
• Same season. Compare summer with last summer, Eid with the last Eid.

How to spot inflated engagement in the comments

Before trusting a high score, read the comments for these signs:

• Many short generic comments ("🔥🔥", "wow", "رهيب") with no question or detail.
• The same wording from different accounts within minutes of each other.
• Commenters whose dialect or language doesn't match the creator's stated audience.
• Accounts with very few followers and no other posts on the subject.
• High engagement on the post, but earned conversation stays flat.

When several appear together, hold the score until the creator shares an audience breakdown.

Can a tool attribute influencer-driven Arabic trends by dialect and channel?

Yes, if it reads dialect. Tag every mention by channel (TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, Snapchat) and by dialect (Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, Omani, Egyptian), then watch where the creator's own phrase travels. When ordinary users repeat it in the creator's audience dialect, on more than one platform, the trend is creator-driven, and you can see which market and channel carried it.

Campaign comparison sheet (template)

Copy this into a sheet. One column per campaign, one row per field.

Field	What to write
Campaign and goal	e.g. "New cabin, awareness"
Creator, platform, format	Who, where, how long
Market and window	Country, dates, baseline period
Earned conversation per 1,000 views	From your listening tool
Intent comments (% of comments)	With the top three questions quoted
Sentiment and top emotion	Read separately
Share of mentions and audience fit	Both as %
Spoken mentions	Airline, cabin or route named out loud: yes or no, how often
Lifespan (days)	Until back to baseline
Cost per qualified conversation	If spend is known
Flags, score and decision	Renew, re-brief or stop

A worked example

Illustrative example. The airline, creators and numbers are made up to show the method.

Airline A, a fictional Gulf full-service carrier, ran three trip-report campaigns in one quarter:

	Campaign 1: new cabin	Campaign 2: loyalty promo	Campaign 3: city-break route
Creator and market	Emirati vlogger, YouTube, UAE	Saudi creator, Instagram, Saudi Arabia	Kuwaiti creator, TikTok, Kuwait
Views	420,000	1,100,000	2,300,000
Earned conversation per 1,000 views	3.1	0.9	1.4
Intent comments	28%	41%	19%
Sentiment / top emotion	72% positive / trust	58% positive / confusion	80% positive / excitement
Audience fit	81%	63%	88%
Spoken mentions of the airline	9	2	0
Lifespan	19 days	6 days	9 days

On views, the city-break series wins easily. On the scorecard, the cabin review wins: the smallest audience, but the most conversation about Airline A afterwards, lasting almost three weeks.

The loyalty promo drew the most intent, but the main emotion was confusion. Comments asked "كيف أسجّل؟" ("how do I sign up?"). That is a programme communication gap, not a creator problem.

The city-break videos were loved, but the creator never said the airline's name, so viewers talked about the destination, not the carrier.

The Saudi campaign's audience fit was low, with a cluster of generic comments from near-empty accounts. Flagged for review.

What Airline A does next: renews the Emirati vlogger for the next cabin launch, re-briefs the Kuwaiti creator to name the airline and route in the first ten seconds, publishes a sign-up guide before the next loyalty promo, and asks the Saudi creator for an audience breakdown.

How to choose an influencer marketing tool with performance analytics

• Reads comments in Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, Omani and Egyptian dialects, plus English and Franco-Arabic mixed in one line.
• Transcribes audio and video, so spoken mentions count.
• Captures untagged and misspelled mentions, and full X threads and replies.
• Is clear about comment coverage: all comments on your own pages, and the top comments on other public posts. Snapchat coverage is usually limited to accounts you provide.
• Shows user metadata such as follower counts and total posts about the subject.
• Reports sentiment and emotion as separate measures.
• Exports by API, CSV, Excel, PowerPoint or live dashboard.
• Sends real-time alerts by WhatsApp or email.

What decides it in the GCC

Most influencer tools are strong on a creator's own numbers. But when the question is which campaign actually moved the conversation about your airline in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the answer sits in comments written in Emirati, Saudi and Kuwaiti dialects, and in what creators say out loud. dima transcribes and summarizes audio and video, so a creator's spoken review counts like a written post, and it has captured 50M+ mentions. That's the part of influencer measurement dima was built for.

If you ranked your creators by the conversation they started instead of the views they got, would the order change?

Compare your creator campaigns on what passengers actually said, not just on views.