Influencer Analysis

Summary#

Influencer Analysis returns a ranked shortlist of the creators, publishers and outlets publishing about a niche, each scored by how often they are cited and how much authority their pages carry. It also shows their channel mix, their country spread and a sample piece from each.

Purpose#

Outreach fails when the list is built from audience size, because follower counts are easy to inflate and say nothing about whether someone covers your subject. This tool builds the list from publishing behavior instead: who is actually writing about the topic, how often, and with what lean. That is the list you can pitch.

Overview#

Enter a niche phrase or a brand. Metric Vault queries the DataForSEO Content Analysis index twice — a summary across news, blog and organization pages, and a sample of the highest-scoring citing pages, one per domain — then groups every citation by publishing domain.

Each domain becomes a candidate creator with four measured attributes: how many times it cites the topic, the summed page-authority signal of those citations, the dominant page type, and the connotation lean of its coverage. An influence score combines the citation count (log-scaled, so a domain with ten times the citations does not get ten times the score) with the authority contribution, capped at 100.

The tool's own description states the position plainly: influence is measured by "citation volume, page authority, and sentiment lean — every score from DataForSEO's Content Analysis index, not estimated follower counts."

Benefits#

• Every row is a domain that has demonstrably published about your topic.
• The ranking is reproducible: citations and page authority, log-scaled, capped.
• Each creator arrives with a real sample piece and its URL, so you can open their work before you write to them.
• Sentiment lean tells you which creators are already friendly.
• Country reach shows where the coverage sits, which matters for regional campaigns.

Use Cases#

• Building an outreach list. You need twenty names in a niche and no budget for a media database.
• Vetting a proposed partner. Someone pitched you; check whether they actually publish in your space and how often.
• Regional expansion. Country Reach shows which markets already carry coverage, and which do not.
• Competitive PR. Run a competitor's brand as the niche and see who covers them that does not yet cover you.
• Channel choice. The channel mix tells you whether the conversation lives in news, blogs or organization pages before you commit a campaign to one.

Requirements#

• A signed-in Metric Vault account.
• A paid plan. Free covers the zero-credit technical tools only.
• Eight credits available in your monthly allowance. See How credits work.
• A niche broad enough to be covered by more than one publisher.

Permissions#

Plan decides access; team role does not.

Cost#

8 credits per run, printed on the button as Find Influencers · 8 reports.

This is the joint most expensive tool in Metric Vault, alongside Shopping Ads (PLA). At 8 credits it is a premium report and is deducted from your monthly allowance, so on a Starter plan's 100 credits a run costs roughly 8% of the month. Plan your niches before you run them.

A shared-cache hit still charges 8 credits. Influencer data is held in the shared cache for seven days, so the same niche returns the same shortlist for a week at full price each time. Re-opening a saved run is free, and See example renders a stored sample for nothing. See How credits work and Result caching and freshness.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Promote → Influencer Analysis

Inputs#

The card's own three steps summarize the flow: STEP 1 Enter a niche or brand, STEP 2 Ranked by real authority, STEP 3 Outreach-ready shortlist.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Dashboard → Promote → Influencer Analysis.
2. Press See example to view the report shape at no cost before spending 8 credits.
3. Type a niche phrase in the field marked e.g. fitness or a brand.
4. Click Find Influencers · 8 reports, or press Enter.
5. If you have run this niche before, choose Open saved result (free) or Run fresh (8 credits).
6. Work down the Top Creators & Outlets table from the highest influence score.
7. Export the table with Export CSV from the export row above the tool, then pitch from the Outreach Plan at the bottom.

Reading the Results#

The header names the niche and carries an Influencer Analysis · DataForSEO badge with Scanned just now.

The four KPI tiles.

• Creators Found — how many distinct publishing domains surfaced, captioned actively publishing. Below five is a thin result and the recommendation panel will say so; the niche is probably too narrow.
• Top Channel — the page type most creators publish in, with the creator count beneath. This decides the shape of your outreach: a news-heavy niche wants a press angle, a blog-heavy one wants a relationship.
• Positive Lean — the share of surfaced creators whose coverage leans positive, captioned friendly creators. Above 50% is friendly territory. Below 30% means the conversation is critical and outreach needs a different opening.
• Citation Reach — the summed page-authority signal across every creator, captioned either with the number of countries or summed authority. It is a relative size figure, not an audience count.

Top Creators & Outlets is the core of the report — up to 25 rows, ordered by influence score. The columns are #, Creator, Channel, Influence, Citations, Reach, Lean and Top piece.

• Influence is the composite score out of 100. It is tiered by color: 66 and above is strong, 33 to 65 is moderate, below 33 is weak. Because the citation half is log-scaled, the gap between the first and second row is usually meaningful and the gap between the tenth and eleventh usually is not.
• Citations is the raw count of indexed pages from that domain citing your niche. This is the honest measure of how much they cover the subject.
• Reach is the summed page-authority signal of those citations. A domain with few citations but high reach publishes rarely and ranks well — often the best pitch target of all.
• Lean is Positive, Neutral or Negative. Negative does not mean avoid; it means read the piece first.
• Top piece is a real article title with its date, linked to the live URL. Open it before writing. It is the difference between a pitch that gets read and one that does not.

The practical read: sort your effort by Influence, but choose your opening by Lean and Top piece. The top five get bespoke outreach; rows six to twenty-five get a template.

Creator Channel Mix is a donut of creators per channel, captioned by creator count, with the total creators in the center. If one channel holds nearly everything, your campaign is really a single-channel campaign.

Country Reach is a horizontal bar of up to eight markets by mention volume. Use it to decide whether a regional push has any existing coverage to build on.

Key Insights is a short set of statements generated from the same measured data — how many creators were found and who leads, which channel the mix skews to, the positive-lean percentage, and the country spread. Each is tagged with a tone.

Outreach Plan closes with the recommended sequence: open with the top five creators, lead with their highest-scoring piece, tier your offers by influence score, and re-run monthly to catch newly active creators. The Get recommendations panel can expand this — see Get Recommendations — though its rule only fires when the shortlist is thin or empty.

When nothing surfaces you get an explicit empty state rather than an invented list: No creators surfaced for <niche>. Try a broader niche keyword (e.g. fitness apparel rather than a specific product name).

Examples#

Screenshots#

Tips#

• Seed broad, then narrow. One broad run at 8 credits usually beats three narrow ones that each return four rows.
• The seven-day cache is an advantage here: run the niche once, then work the list for a week rather than re-running.
• Sort your shortlist by Reach, not Influence, when you care about link value rather than coverage volume.
• Export to CSV immediately. At 8 credits per run you want the list outside the app.

Best Practices#

• Pitch from the sample piece. Every row gives you one, and referencing it is the single strongest signal that the pitch is not automated.
• Re-run monthly, not weekly. New creators enter a niche slowly and the cache holds for a week anyway.
• Use a competitor's brand as a second seed. The creators covering them and not you are your clearest gap.
• Combine with Brand Monitor: the influencers there are the domains already citing you, so the two lists together separate existing relationships from new ones.

Common Mistakes#

• Expecting follower counts or social handles. There are none, by design. The rows are publishing domains.
• Seeding a product name. Narrow branded seeds return the empty state and still cost 8 credits.
• Re-running inside the cache window. Seven days of identical results, charged each time.
• Reading Citation Reach as audience. It is summed page authority.
• Ignoring rows with low citations. A high-reach, low-volume outlet is often the most valuable target on the list.

Limitations#

• The shortlist is capped at 25 creators, built from a 20-row citation sample plus the summary's top domains.
• Country Reach shows up to eight markets.
• Coverage is news, blog and organization pages in the Content Analysis index. There is no social-platform data, no contact details and no email addresses.
• Influence scores are comparable within one run, not across different niches.
• A niche with no indexed coverage returns the empty state and still charges.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

Why 8 credits when most tools cost 1? The run is priced on real backend cost. This tool sits in the heaviest tier alongside Shopping Ads (PLA). See Credit cost table for the full table.

Why are there no follower counts? Because they cannot be verified from this data, and an unverifiable number on an outreach list is worse than no number. Influence here is citations plus page authority, both measured.

Can I get email addresses for these creators? No. The tool returns domains, sample pieces and URLs. Contact discovery is not part of it, and Outreach + CRM — which would track outreach — is not built yet.

Does a cached result still cost 8 credits? Yes. Only re-opening your own saved result from Saved Work and See example are free.

Should I enter a niche or a brand? A niche gives you the field. A brand gives you the people covering that brand, which is the right seed when you want a competitor's press list.