Metrics to Measure Content Marketing ROI. Are you wondering how to measure your content marketing ROI?

You’re not alone. In 2019, most content marketers are trying to prove their return on investment (ROI) for what they’re doing. It isn’t enough to create and promote your content nowadays; you also need to measure its effectiveness.

In other words, you have to be able to understand if what you are doing actually makes a difference.

Here’s what we’ll be covering:

• How to measure your content marketing ROI
• Why measuring the ROI of your content marketing efforts is important
• What the best practices and metrics are to measure your content marketing ROI

Ready? Let’s dive right in!

Content marketing ROI – what is it?

ROI stands for return on investment and is essentially the difference between an investment you make and the return you get based on your investment. But this is an oversimplified explanation of the term.

With content marketing, measuring the return on investment is not as easy as with other marketing activities, such as pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you can take into account all the costs of your PPC campaigns and focus on improving key metrics (e.g. conversion rate) that are tightly related to revenue.

The same doesn’t apply to content marketing.

Most people would assume that if they create a piece of content and that piece ranks well, they’ve now succeeded as content marketers.

Here’s the disappointing news: looking at your increasing Google Analytics traffic is not enough to tell you whether or not your content efforts are paying out.

For example, let’s take a look at the following graph. 

Source: Google Search Console

At first, it seems like a success. However, if you were to dive a bit deeper into the data, you’d see that this particular piece of content – despite being a high-quality content piece with many page views on a monthly basis – has no ROI for the company.

Simply put, it is a great content asset that nonetheless brings no money to the company that created it. In other words, getting pages views, generating brand awareness, gaining social shares, and having inbound links or website visitors consume your site content is not enough. You have to find a way to monetize your content performance. 

Content marketing ROI

Content marketing ROI is when your content efforts have a positive contribution to your business goals and objectives, and is connected to substantial metrics (KPIs) (i.e. number of leads or recurring revenue), rather than vanity metrics like the number of social shares you got from a piece of content.

Before moving to the next section, let’s make one thing very clear. We are not saying that things like the number of social shares or page views are not important to your content marketing success, it’s just that these content marketing metrics are not enough to define your content marketing success.

Producing, maintaining and promoting content costs a lot, and you need to be able to monitor your return on investment based on that cost. Let’s move on to the next section, which describes some basic ways of ROI calculation for your content efforts.

How to measure the ROI of content marketing

Simple though it may sound, measuring the ROI of Content Marketing is not easy.

You can measure the return on investment of content marketing in three different ways: 

Source: https://learn.g2.com/content-marketing-roi