What Makes Measuring Content Marketing ROI Difficult?

What Makes Measuring Content Marketing ROI Difficult?

First, it’s important to know the formula for calculating ROI. Here it is:

(Revenue – Investment) ÷ Investment = ROI

Looks simple, right? And it is when you’re tracking conversions from, say, a blog post written internally. However, very few customer journeys are that straightforward, especially in B2B marketing, where sales cycles can be very long, and attribution is hard to define accurately.

Generally speaking, marketers run into three major struggles when working with content marketing ROI, including:

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Some content marketing campaigns are not tied directly to revenue. Various marketing efforts aim to create awareness or a buzz for a product rather than directly resulting in a sale.
Some sales cycles are too long to count. How long should attribution be tracked? This is a tough question to answer for B2B marketers. The sales cycles for some products can be more than a year.
There isn’t a standardized method to determine what’s included in marketing costs. This seems to be one metric where marketers go rogue. They may feel it’s necessary to omit certain costs in the Investment variable because the higher the costs, the lower the ROI. There is a huge potential for creative accounting here.

You can see that calculating content marketing ROI isn’t as simple as it seems. You would need a long list of data and a sophisticated attribution model to get anywhere close to an accurate ROI.

That’s why it’s important to look at some other key metrics along with your content marketing ROI to get the full picture.

Get the Big Picture When You Measure These Metrics with ROI

To truly understand your content marketing ROI, monitor the following metrics:

Web Traffic

This metric is easy to track with analytics software. Many marketers use Google Analytics to do so, but you may have a different solution. Look at various aspects of web traffic, including overall web traffic, views per page, source of traffic (which channel), time spent on page, popular landing pages, referral traffic.

Use this information to identify the channels driving the highest amount of traffic, and then use those channels for future content marketing campaigns.

Qualified Leads

This metric is important to track, especially for B2B marketing, because this number can help determine content marketing performance.

Use this information to see if you are attracting prospects and if they are interested in purchasing your products. You can do this by tracking content downloads, white paper requests completed, and completed sales.

Click-through-rate

You can tell if your site visitors are taking action by monitoring your click-through-rate (CTR). This metric shows you how many potential customers click on specific links out of the total number of visitors to your site, email, or ad.

CTR helps with ROI because it measures the performance of ad campaigns on your site, emails, and social media.

Sales Volume

This metric is useful because it tells you how many of your leads turned into customers – which is the goal.

You have to monitor several sales components to determine if your content is working, including:

Time to purchase – how many days it took for a visitor to make a purchase
Page value – which web pages drive the most revenue
Conversion rate – the percentage of site visitors that make a purchase

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