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How To Track Results From Athlete NIL Deals

By September 8, 2021April 25th, 2022No Comments

The NIL era of college sports has brought several exciting changes for both athletes and businesses.

Athletes seem to be looking forward to beginning the school year more than ever before, as businesses large and small rush to secure deals with them.

After deciding on seeking out an athlete partnership, the first step is to vet the athlete and make sure you find the appropriate individual to represent your business.

The next step is creating a contract to make sure both the athlete and the business are on the same page about what is required of the exchange. 

Finally, the athlete makes the required social media posts about your business. Now it’s time to track the results!

Depending on the format of the post (whether it’s an Instagram post or an Instagram story), you will get different kinds of engagement.

Instagram Post Engagement

If your athlete agreed on Instagram posts, you can track engagement by the number of likes and comments on the post.

Business Account vs. Regular Account

If the athlete has an Instagram business account, you will also have the opportunity to collect additional insights. These insights include the number of accounts reached, profile visits, impressions, content interactions, and more.

If your athlete has a business account, consider asking them to send over a screenshot of the insights on their post for more details on how the post was received.

If the athlete has a regular Instagram account — don’t worry. You can still see the engagement on the post, you just won’t have access to the additional insights.

For a regular account, you can still track results by viewing the number of likes and comments and what people are saying about it.

You can also look at your own account notifications to see if you got any additional tags or follows from the post.

Instagram Story Results

If your athlete opted for an Instagram story, the results will be a bit harder to track from the outside.

Only the athlete will be able to see the engagement for the story they posted, so definitely have them send over a screenshot of the results after a day of being posted.

To do this, they can go to their Instagram story archive and review the results of the story after it’s been up for the full 24 hours.

It’s important to make sure they send the results over the next day, as Instagram doesn’t save the view count data after 48 hours!

As mentioned previously, having an Instagram business account provides the opportunity to track extra analytics for the story data. These include things like forward/backwards taps, profile taps, replies, impressions, viewers, and more.

A regular account will still be able to see the number of viewers on the story, and can also share the different replies to the story if asked.

If your athlete chose Instagram stories, definitely make sure you are on the same page about what data you need from them and when exactly you need it.

Our Case Study: Twinkle Photo Booth

Depending on the kind of business you have, you should prepare for different results.

Our case study featured athletes sponsoring our photo booth company, Twinkle Photo Booth. We weren’t expecting too many conversions from this since college students are not usually the ones booking events with us.

However, we did achieve the goal of putting our business out to a new audience and getting more brand awareness. It also gave us the opportunity to test working with an athlete to consider for our future business goals, as well as for our other clients.

One of our partnerships was with a baseball player from Saint Joeseph’s University. 

For this instance, there was nothing we had to do on our end for compliance. The athlete informed us that he was required to fill out a simple form for his compliance directors and then everything was good to go.

His posts received a total of over 350 likes and 20 comments from friends and teammates!

Another one of our partnerships was with a player on the Drexel women’s basketball team. 

We asked her if she could share more details about her school’s compliance policy, but she informed us that she didn’t know much except that compliance wanted to see a copy of our contract and that she was not allowed to wear any Drexel clothes in the post.

This is another reason why it’s helpful to create a contract for your athlete beforehand so that it will be easier for compliance to approve these deals.

This athlete’s two posts received over 350 likes combined!

Measuring Insights

Although neither of these athletes had a business account to provide us with metrics, our business account allowed us to measure certain insights on our end.

To analyze this data, we went to our insights and set the date range to the days the athletes made their post. For instance, our first athlete made his first post on September 2nd, so we set our date range to September 2-3. 

Here is the data we collected from these insights:

Athlete 1

Post 1: September 2nd

Insights from September 2-3:

  • Growth: +2 followers

Post 2: September 16th

Insights from September 16-17:

  • Growth: +4 followers
  • Impressions: +59 accounts reached
  • Profile visits: +110
  • Website Taps: +1
  • Impressions: +122

Athlete 2

Post 1: September 10th

Insights from September 10-11:

  • Growth: +2 followers

Post 2: September 25th

Insights from September 25-26:

  • Impressions: +31 accounts reached
  • Profile visits: +19
  • Website taps: +1
  • Impressions: +43

While it’s unclear whether these college students will actually use our photo booth, our business definitely got a boost of attention from this promotion. We’re certain that the athletes will remember our brand as they think back on their moment of being an “influencer”.

Want to gain better insights from your athlete partnership? Contact our experts at Sweet Rose Studios today!