Content Marketing Metrics: How to Measure ROI + 6 Pro Tips

Measuring the impact of your content is vital to a successful, growth-minded marketing strategy. But calculating content ROI isn’t an exact science. Read on to learn the ins and outs of content marketing metrics, and learn expert tips to try.

If you’re struggling to figure out what constitutes success in your content marketing initiatives, you’re not alone.

Returns on content aren’t as cut and dry as results from tactics like paid search. As a result, calculating the return on investment (ROI) for content marketing campaigns can be a struggle.

Luckily, we’ve got solutions. Keep reading for more on what content marketing ROI is, how you can calculate it, and six tips to keep in mind when doing your calculations.

What is content marketing ROI?

Content marketing ROI is a metric used to determine how much revenue you gained from content efforts compared to what you spent.

For content marketers, this means examining how much budget your efforts require and how much revenue they generate. Then, you present that number as a percentage or ratio.

How to measure content marketing ROI

You’re likely familiar with the ROI formula, and calculating the ROI of content marketing isn’t much different:

Content marketing ROI formula:

Content Marketing ROI = ((Revenue from Content – Content Marketing Cost) / Content Marketing Cost) x 100%

However, in content marketing, not all campaign results can be neatly assigned a dollar amount.

So why does calculating content ROI matter? Here are just a few reasons:

• Helps add tangible metrics to a more nebulous marketing tactic
• Can help identify strengths and weaknesses in efforts
• Can add transparency to other teams/higher-ups
• Helps direct campaign strategies
• Allows comparison of performance between content marketing and other channels

What is a good content marketing ROI?

This metric helps you make marketing decisions and better allocate your budget, resources, and time.

However, many marketers need clarification about how high they should aim with their ROI.

As with many marketing metrics, what makes a ‘good’ ROI can vary widely from industry to industry.

Any content marketing campaign operating at a loss is bad. However, calculating content marketing ROI is nuanced since it can be difficult to measure things like brand awareness or engagement.

With more than a decade of experience managing content marketing campaigns, we aim for a content marketing ROI of 500%, or 5 to 1.

Why so high?

At the very least, your business needs to cover the cost of making the product and what it costs to market.

Believe it or not, you’re not making a profit if you have a 200% ROI. 

This is because, for most businesses, the cost to manufacture or acquire their products (cost of goods sold, or COGS) is often around half of the sale price.

Let’s say your marketing team spends $500 on a campaign and generates $1,000 in sales. But then you have to subtract the $500 to manufacture the product, so you’re only breaking even.

To be fair, this estimate of a 500% ROI is just a ballpark figure, but it’s a good goal to start with.

If your business has a lower cost of goods sold (COGS) or is a service-based business, you will need fewer sales, but if your company has smaller profit margins, you’ll need more.

What are content marketing metrics?

Content marketing metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) marketers choose to monitor the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns.

Key metrics help you understand how your campaign is performing based on things like conversions, engagement, and achieving overall business goals.

The problem with content marketing metrics

That simple ROI formula probably makes the process seem easy since only a few metrics are involved.

In reality, arriving at those metrics is more complex than it first appears. (Cue sad trombone.)

The fact is that many marketers struggle with tracking their content marketing ROI. Much of this comes from a lack of confidence in knowing the right way to do it.

Another snag? Content-generated revenue is rarely a linear process.

As a result, some marketers focus on too many metrics and find it hard to paint a clear picture of a campaign’s impact.

Or, they focus on the wrong metrics, and it can feel like the content is having less (or more) of an impact than it actually is.

With those challenges in mind, what is the best way to measure your content marketing ROI successfully?

Measuring content marketing metrics: 6 expert tips

Let’s take a look at some expert tips to remember when measuring your content metrics.

1. Build your business case for content marketing

Justifying your marketing budget shouldn’t be your primary focus. Instead, you should focus on making the business case for content marketing.

Use ROI as a way to show the value that your content provides to your organization. Focus on how results impact business goals, and remember to keep an eye on the metrics that the overall business cares about.

Some examples might include high-quality content that boosts organic traffic, content pieces that rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs), effective email marketing campaigns, or awesome landing pages that attract new customers.

2. Think long-term

Revenue generated from your content will seldom be a linear process. You may continue to see the impact of a digital marketing campaign long after it has been completed.

For example, you may continue to see potential customers visiting that high-quality evergreen blog post you created. Or you might gain backlinks for a tool or calculator that you made.

Have a strategy in place to continue to monitor the long-term impact of your content. Knowing which types of content continue to generate revenue after a campaign is put to bed can help inform your strategy.

3. Understand that analytics tools are your friend

Analytics tools make measuring your content performance a breeze – and there are plenty of paid and free tools at your disposal.

Google Analytics is a favorite among marketers, as it offers a wide variety of tracking options and automation features that can be invaluable in attributing revenue to a piece of content.

Other popular marketing tools include Ahrefs, Semrush, HubSpot, and Moz. These are also incredibly useful for search engine optimization (SEO) and can help you track where you rank in the SERPs.

Once your tools are in order, you can develop an attribution model to track customer touchpoints and better understand the customer journey.

You can use the Model Comparison Tool to attribute sales to specific content better and set up multiple goals for each campaign.

It’s also wise to work cross-functionally with sales teams, paid media specialists, and the like, to share data and insights to help improve your bottom line.

4. Determine the number of leads or sales you need

The cost of content distribution and content creation is often overlooked in the ROI calculation.

In reality, you want to track costs as you go and have a clearly defined budget so you can quickly compare them to the revenue generated.

When calculating content cost, you need to think about more than simply the dollars spent. Consider costs related to tasks like:

• Tools and software use
• Employee time (in creation and ideation)
• Freelance rates
• Time spent meeting and brainstorming
• Photography, videography, and graphic design
• Distribution and promotion

This can help you determine the ideal number of leads or sales you need each month or quarter.

5. Track your progress

Regularly tracking progress helps you understand campaign content marketing successes and allows you to adjust your strategy when needed.

If you wait until the end of your content marketing campaign to look at your metrics, you could miss something that might influence you to put more budget into that campaign or change your strategy.

To track your progress, create an ROI spreadsheet for what metrics you’re focusing on and record them monthly or weekly.

Then make a simple line chart, being sure to add a fixed line for where you break even and your goals so that you can quickly visualize the progression of your campaigns.

6. Keep the unmeasurable in mind

There are a lot of things in content marketing that are hard to assign a monetary value to, for example:

• Brand awareness
• Trust and authority
• Organic social media engagement
• Earned press
• Guest publication that reaches your target audience
• Webinar attendees
• Podcast subscribers

Every one of these things has a high potential ROI, and some of them have a low cost of acquisition. But they are brutal to measure or report on.

But does that mean you should leave them out of your calculations? Definitely not.

Find the metrics that best correlate to each of these. This won’t be a perfect science but will be very useful in measuring content impact and ROI.

For example, for brand awareness, you can look at website visits, social media impressions, and monthly search volume for branded keywords.

Measuring content marketing ROI: 4 proven steps

Each business will need to tailor their process to its specific needs. Here are some general steps you can take to calculate content ROI (and avoid any missteps).

1. Define your purpose

Why are you measuring your content marketing ROI?

The answer to this question will guide your strategy and is often why marketers struggle with ROI in the first place.

Marketers can become misguided and focus ROI metrics solely on justifying their budgets.

If you focus your ROI on garnering a bigger budget for the next quarter, you will lose the big-picture view of how impactful your content is.

Experience tells us the best way to leverage ROI is to discover what works well, what doesn’t, and how you can optimize your content marketing strategy. Focus on strategy, and you’ll quickly start to see your campaigns improve.

2. Choose your metrics

There are a lot of key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. If you try to monitor them all, you’re likely to get lost in the data and less able to gain actionable insights.

The solution: Be strategic about the metrics you monitor.

Whether you’re an ecommerce business or a SaaS superstar, we recommend choosing around five KPIs that you can monitor over a campaign to understand its ROI. Popular content KPIs include:

• Website traffic
• Website visitors
• Total visits
• Unique visits
• Time on page
• Bounce rate
• Page views
• Downloads

3. Set your benchmarks

The next step in successfully measuring ROI is to set benchmarks.

Measure where your content marketing metrics stand now before you launch your campaign.

Then, when the campaign is over, you can quickly establish where there has been improvement or where things have declined.

You can also establish if goals were met and how much they were exceeded.

4. Define your content marketing goals

Content marketing goals are not the same as business goals. These smaller goals and content marketing metrics help you measure your content marketing efforts and weigh the role they play in the big picture.

Whether your goal is ecommerce sales or lead generation, taking stock of metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and keyword rankings will help you assess the effectiveness of your efforts.

It will let you know if things are headed in the right direction and alert you to any pivots that might be needed.

Your after-campaign analysis might analyze email newsletter opens, or qualified leads for case study downloads or white papers. You should be measuring, evaluating, and considering the next steps at each point in the funnel to maintain the highest level of content ROI.

The takeaway

When you first approach content marketing ROI, it can feel like trying to navigate your way out of a labyrinth. That’s where content marketing agencies like HawkSEM can swoop in to lend a hand.

Whether you have an in-house team or choose to work with an agency, the key thing to remember is not to get lost in the numbers.

Be intentional with which metrics you track. Focus on metrics that will influence your strategy and that correspond to business goals.

Remember that content impact can last for months after it is originally published, so have a long-term tracking strategy in place.

This post has been updated and was originally published in November 2023.