How to measure your content marketing ROI

Return on Investment or ROI can usually be calculated fairly easily by using the following formula.

ROI (in %) = (Return – Investment / Investment) x 100

So, for instance, if you have spent $2,000 on a project and you get $6,000 worth of new customers because of that project, you get an ROI of 200%. You can also use this free online calculator.

However, when it comes to measuring ROI for content marketing, things aren’t always that simple.

Depending on how attribution works in your company, directly attributing MQLs to specific content pieces can be tricky. That’s especially because content supports the sales cycles at many different points. Potential customers and leads engage with content in some way, shape, or form at several different stages.

In addition, measuring the cost of content is also nuanced and must encompass a variety of things.

In this blog post, we share a few tips on how to measure your content marketing ROI and highlight a bunch of things that you should be aware of.

Calculating the cost of your content marketing efforts

Before you proceed any further, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the total costs of your content marketing efforts. Some of the broad categories that you should look into are:

• The salary of all the content creators you have
• Images you are buying for your content
• Video production costs
• Cost of the work done by other departments (e.g., Design department)
• Recurring costs of any paid subscriptions or software needed for content creation and marketing, e.g., Grammarly, Yoast SEO Plugin, keyword research tools like SEMRush, etc.

Once done, you’d have to total the cost it requires for you to create content. However, you still need to include the cost of promoting and distributing your content.

Therefore, if you spend any money on Facebook sponsored posts or Google Ads to promote content pieces, you should add the total spend for all such campaigns. The good news is that if you have separate campaigns for these promoting these content pages, it would be very simple to come up with the total cost. Just add the spend for all such campaigns for the time period you want to calculate the ROI for.

Measuring leads and sales

Once you have the total costs of content marketing, it is time to measure the leads and sales you have generated with the help of that content.

The easiest way to do that is to set up Google Analytics conversion goals and then measure the leads you have generated from each content piece.

Once the goals are set and active, you can view the report by logging into your Google Analytics account, selecting the Behavior report, and then browsing to Site Content > Landing Pages.  There you’d be able to select the conversion goal you want to track.

For different businesses, the value per conversion is different. For some businesses, conversions can have multiple values (e.g., tiered offerings). Similarly, for many businesses, a conversion does not necessarily mean a sale. Usually, it just refers to an MQL that the sales team later pursues.

In that case, you will need a CRM (e.g., Salesforce) to accurately measure the revenue attributed to those leads by monitoring them throughout their sales journey, i.e., MQL > SQL > SQO > Customer.

Metrics to help measure content marketing ROI

Oftentimes, you want to measure performance beyond the dollar amount you have generated. That can sometimes give you a clearer picture of how a department is performing.

In that case, here are a few metrics that you should monitor to measure how your content is performing.

• Organic traffic — You want long-term sustainable traffic and, for content, that almost always comes from organic search.
• Organic conversions — That organic traffic, however, does not matter unless it’s converting and serving the right people with the right search intent. Measure conversions (as mentioned above) after selecting ‘Organic’ as the dimension to filter out this data in Google Analytics.
• Average page on time — The average time visitors spend on a content page can reflect the quality of the content.
• Page one keyword growth — For how many keywords is your website ranking on Google’s first page? Ideally, you want a 2-3% MoM growth to ensure that you are always targeting new keyword groups and trying to expand to new groups of people with your content.
• Organic CTR — Having pages appear on Google’s first page isn’t enough. The main goal is to convert those impressions into clicks. That’s why organic CTR is one of the most important metrics to monitor and improve.

All these metrics can have a direct impact on your content marketing ROI.

We hope these tips help you measure the performance and ROI of your content. Reach out to us if you need help or have any questions.