Can I shortlist influencers by their past campaign performance?

Partly, since you can shortlist on visible signals like engagement quality, audience authenticity and content consistency but the private results a creator drove for other brands are confidential and no tool can hand them to you.

The best proxy at the shortlisting stage is a real, engaged, well-matched audience, because that is what actually makes a creator perform, so you rank on those signals rather than hidden third-party outcomes.

The one place you get true past performance is your own history, so record results from creators you have worked with and shortlist on those numbers directly.

Partly and it helps to separate two kinds of past performance. The first is public, observable performance: how consistently a creator gets genuine engagement, whether the audience is real, how steady the content output is and how well past sponsored posts seem to land. These are visible signals you can rank a shortlist on. The second is private: the actual sales, clicks and conversions a creator drove for some other brand. That data is confidential to those brands and no discovery tool can give it to you, so you cannot literally shortlist on the campaign results a creator produced for a competitor. What you can do is use the public signals as a strong proxy, since the thing that makes a creator perform, a real and engaged audience that trusts them, shows up in the observable data.

The one place you do get true past-campaign performance is your own history. If you have worked with a creator before or run them through a tracked campaign, you have real numbers and you should record them and shortlist on them directly. So the practical approach is to rank candidates on audience authenticity, engagement quality and niche fit, treat those as the best available predictor of future results and overlay any first-party results you already hold from working with them. That gives you a shortlist weighted toward likely performers without pretending you can see confidential outcomes. So you can shortlist by performance in the sense that matters, audience quality and your own recorded results, even though the private campaign numbers of other brands stay out of reach.

The proxy signals that best predict performance, audience authenticity, engagement quality and niche fit, are exactly what Flinque surfaces for shortlisting. It lets you assess whether the audience of a creator is real and engaged and whether it matches your target, then rank candidates on those signals, which is the most reliable performance predictor available before you have run anyone yourself. The actual past results of campaigns for other brands stay private and the tracking of your own results is your analytics work but the selection signals that drive performance are what Flinque gives you. So use Flinque to shortlist on audience quality and fit as your performance proxy and record your own campaign results to refine future shortlists.