How to Measure and Prove Your Content Marketing ROI: Top 13 Metrics to Track

Ask any marketer what’s most important about a marketing plan, and you’ll likely get many different answers. But we’re here to tell you the one all-encompassing truth.

The most important thing about a marketing plan is that it works. 

When you launch a massive content marketing strategy, you’ll want to know it’s working and you’re generating a return on your investment. But you shouldn’t wait until the campaign ends to gauge these results. Your ROI isn’t some big surprise that’ll come out to shock you at the finish line. 

Instead, closely track several key content marketing metrics that will inform you about your plan’s progress. But how do you measure the ROI of content marketing? And what metrics help you determine whether you’re succeeding or failing?

In this article, we’ll address all that and more.   

What do we mean by content marketing ROI? 

Before jumping headfirst into your content marketing ROI, let’s iron out what we mean when we say “content marketing.” 

Content marketing is a strategy focused on creating and distributing content to a specific target audience. 

If that seems like a broad definition, that’s because it is. The concept of content is in-and-of-itself extremely broad. You’ll find many different types of content in a marketing plan. 

First, you have written copy, which most people think of when discussing content marketing. That content includes blog articles, landing pages, eBooks, interviews, and anything else written. This article is an example of written content. 

Then there’s video marketing, which might be an informative how-to guide, a webinar, a short film, or a commercial or digital ad. Video content appeals to visual learners and draws people in more easily than written copy. 

You also have audio content like podcasts and radio interviews. Infographics are another form of content that combines visual aids with written copy. 

Then, social media content includes a variety of types of content—written posts, images, live-recorded videos, carousels, and more. Social media content engages and brings value to its audience. 

Content marketing represents a substantial financial investment. The content marketing ROI we calculate in this article measures the return you generate on that investment through content marketing efforts alone.

So, in the following sections, when we reference content marketing, we’re referring to a marketing strategy composed of content planning, creation, and distribution.

Why content marketing is so effective

We’re a content-driven society. Social media (and before that, TV and radio) has seen to that. There’s more information at our fingertips now than at any other point in human history. 

Content is how we take in the world around us. It influences who we vote for, where we eat, what we’re looking forward to, and even what we want to buy. 

It’s effective because it allows marketers to leverage the power of storytelling while reaching their audience. It’s a creative endeavor that plays on emotions and seeks to reach and reassure prospective customers. 

They have pain points. You have a solution. And you’ll show them why you’re the right option over your competitors. 

But don’t take our word for it. Numbers don’t lie. 

An eye-popping 97% of brands^[1] use content marketing to reach their audiences. It also brings in higher-quality leads than other marketing channels. Content marketing even makes ranking on popular search engines like Google easier. 

How to calculate content marketing ROI 

Clearly, many businesses worldwide have seen tremendous success through content marketing. But simply creating content doesn’t guarantee success. 

Content isn’t cheap, especially if you’re outsourcing. You need to make sure that the costs don’t eclipse the benefits of this campaign. 

In the following sections, we’ll walk you through determining your content marketing ROI. 

Determine content marketing KPIs

Before launching any content marketing strategy^[2], you must identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). 

Your content marketing KPIs^[3] are measurements of success. Of course, when people hear the word success, they immediately think that the number one KPI should be money generated. However, that isn’t always the goal of a marketing campaign. 

Some campaigns revolve around brand awareness. They intend to bring your brand to light so more prospective customers find you. 

In this case, dollars earned might not be the best KPI to track. Instead, measure success by hitting a certain number of website visitors, leads generated, or email newsletter sign-ups. 

Just keep these KPIs realistic. 

KPIs help you define what strategies you’ll use. And when setting realistic goals, results from previous strategies will be your most effective/proven guide. Look at past successes and failures and use that as your goal barometer. 

Calculate your content creation expenses

The next step in determining ROI is calculating your content marketing costs. 

These are the costs accumulated through the production of content. That includes hiring freelancers, generating content ideas, paying video editors, purchasing software or tools, etc. 

Determine distribution costs

Now we determine our distribution costs. This number encompasses the money you spend pushing content out to the public. 

That includes advertising costs, paying influencers, boosting social media posts, purchasing airtime on a popular podcast, etc. 

Find the difference

Next, add your content creation expenses and distribution costs together. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say each cost you $500. 

That means your total expenses for this campaign equaled $1,000. 

Now you need to reflect on your KPIs and determine whether you met them. If you’re tracking gross revenue, that’s simple. If it’s something less concrete, like the total value of leads generated, you first need to determine a lead’s average value. 

Let’s say the average customer spends $100 with you. Of course, not every lead you generate will turn into a customer. That’s why you have to know your average conversion rate. 

If you’re converting 20% of your leads and your campaign has generated 1,000 leads, you can estimate you’ll convert 200. 

At $100 per average customer, your campaign generated a total value of $20,000.

Generate your ROI figure

With that information, we’ll figure out our ROI. There’s a simple formula to generate your results.

(Value Gained – Total Expenses) / Total Expenses X 100

In our example, we have (20,000 – 1,000) / 1,000 x 100.

20,000 minus 1,000 gives us 19,000. When we divide that by 1,000, we get 19. Then, after multiplying by 100, we’re left with 1,900.

That gives us a 1,900% ROI, which is pretty darn good! 

13 content marketing metrics you should track 

Now, let’s go through some of the metrics that’ll help you determine the success of your content marketing strategy. 

We chose these metrics because they’re windows into the effectiveness of your content, distribution, website, and sales funnel. We’ll explain each of these metrics before explaining how to track them. 

You can track most of the metrics listed here with Google Analytics. It’s a free tool that gathers information from your website and provides actionable data. 

1. Total traffic

Total website traffic is the first metric that gives you a window into your content marketing effectiveness.  

Obviously, the total number of people coming to your site isn’t solely generated by your content marketing strategy. That’s why knowing your average website traffic from before your campaign started is important. 

If you averaged 10,000 visitors before your campaign, that’s your control number. Then we introduce the variable, which is the average number of visitors coming in after you’ve started your content marketing plan. 

For example, you’ve averaged 10,000 visitors ‌a month before content marketing. Now you’re seeing 25,000. We could infer that your content marketing generated an additional 15,000 website visitors. 

That’s an increase of 150%, so great job! 

Of course, this metric alone doesn’t give us the complete picture. To get an accurate view of your content marketing effectiveness, we need to dig into the quality of these visits. 

2. Unique versus repeat views

How many people visiting your site are new, and how many are repeat visitors? 

Why does this matter? 

If someone visits your site 10 times a month, that counts as 10 visits in your total website traffic. If you believe your content marketing generates an additional 15,000 visits per month, this metric will help you carve that number down. 

Your unique views are what matter here. Again, you should know this metric’s average before launching your campaign. That’s easy to look up in Google Analytics.

Above, see how Google displays this metric. You have 12,000 users and 14,000 visits. That means 2,000 of those visits were repeat users. 

3. Unique pageviews

Unique pageviews represent the total number of pages potential customers visited when they were on your site. 

So, for example, someone clicks on your page. They enter the site through blog content that was part of your content marketing campaign. 

From there, they check out two more articles through your internal links. Then they go to your pricing page before leaving. 

That user had four unique page views. 

Here’s how that metric appears in Google Analytics.

This metric is vital for content marketing. It shows how effectively the content navigates the user to the rest of the site. It could indicate various things if people arrive at a blog post and the vast majority click away without exploring further (see 10. Bounce rate). 

For starters, the content might not be engaging or provoke additional interest. Your internal linking or calls to action could also be lacking. Either way, this metric is a great indicator of content effectiveness and performance. 

4. Average time-on-page

The average time-on-page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the average amount of time users spend on your content pages. 

This metric helps you determine what content engages users and what doesn’t. If content keeps users on the page for an average of 20 minutes, they’re interested in what you’ve created. On the flip side, if one of your articles has an average time-on-page of less than two minutes, something isn’t resonating. 

It could be that the targeting or outreach method you used to distribute the content was off. That would mean the people clicking through aren’t your target audience. 

When you pair this with our last metric, it informs you what content engages users and keeps them invested through multiple unique page views. 

This metric presents an opportunity to compare high and low-engagement pieces. 

What about the high-engagement pieces resonating with your audience? What was it about those low-engagement pieces that drove them away? 

Use this information to improve your content creation efforts in the future. 

5. Social engagement (likes, shares, and comments)

Social engagement is a trickier metric to track. It’s the total number of likes, shares, comments, and conversations that pop up around social media content. This metric isn’t something that Google Analytics measures. You’ll have to use a social media tracking tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social. They’ll compile your engagement analytics and show which posts are performing well.

It’ll give you an excellent window into how your audience interacts with social media content. 

For example, are you getting more engagement on content that features your unique brand colors or logo? Are certain images inviting more shares? Are people responding when you ask questions in your social media posts? 

Since social media management tools watch multiple platforms, you’ll also know which social media channels you get the most engagement on. 

6. Conversion rate

Your conversion rate is a crucial content marketing metric. It measures your conversions against the site’s total number of visitors. If your conversion rate goes up after launching your content marketing campaign, something is going right, and you should stay the course. 

Calculate your conversion rate with a simple formula. 

(Conversions / Total Visitors) x 100

If you had 10,000 visitors and 2,000 sales, your conversion rate would be 20% before your content marketing plan. If your conversion rate is now 30%, you’ll attribute that additional 10% to the content marketing campaign. 

However, suppose you see an increase in the total number of visitors, unique page views, and average time on the page. That could be a great sign. 

Then you notice a stagnant or falling conversion rate. That indicates your content is doing its job of bringing people to the site. However, something on your page is preventing people from converting. 

This issue could be your pricing, the page layout, or maybe even an ineffective call to action. 

7. Organic traffic

When you measure organic traffic^[4], you’re measuring the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. SEO and content marketing work together to facilitate business growth. 

Your SEO campaign optimizes your content for search engines like Google. The goal is to move your content up in the search engine rankings so that you generate more traffic from organic searches. 

Google Analytics will break down your traffic, showing how many people found you through organic searches. Get more specific analytics and dial in your SEO game even further with tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. 

These tools will give you much of the same information as Google Analytics but also tell you what specific keywords you’re ranking for and what your competition is doing. 

Even with the best tools, don’t expect your organic traffic to shoot through the roof right away. SEO takes time, especially for newer websites and pages. You need to build up authority and get Google’s attention before it gives you the time of day. 

When you see growth in this metric, note which content pieces bring in the traffic. These are your SEO success stories. If you continue optimizing it, this content will produce the greatest returns. 

Remember, SEO is a continuous process. Just because you succeed in getting onto the first page doesn’t mean you’ll stay there. It requires consistent effort and adjustment to maintain rankings.

SEO isn’t a cheap process, so you want to make sure that you start seeing a healthy return on investment over six months to a year. 

8. Paid traffic

The paid traffic metric measures the effectiveness of ‌paid ad campaigns centered around your content marketing plan. These measurements include pay-per-click advertising initiatives like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. 

Let’s say you shared a blog article from your page on social media and boosted the post with a targeted ad. You’d need to measure the ad’s effectiveness. 

How many people clicked on it? What value did it bring in? 

Measure the generated value against the cost of the ad to determine the advertising ROI associated with this piece of content. If you see a great return on Facebook but not much of anything from Google, then you’ve learned something valuable about your audience. 

Clearly, Facebook ad messaging resonates more with them and deserves more of your content marketing efforts. Focus your marketing budget on profitable ventures.

9. Click-through rate

Your click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who clicked on your page after finding it. This could be via impressions generated by organic searches or one of your ads. It measures those clicks against the total number of impressions generated.

This metric is important for content marketing because it showcases the effectiveness of your distribution tactics. An abnormally low click-through rate means something about your ads or meta description on the Google SERP didn’t resonate with the target audience. 

You determine your click-through rate with yet another simple formula.

(Clicks / Total Impressions) x 100

If you got 10,000 impressions and 3,000 clicks, you’d solve the following equation. 

(3,000 / 10,000) x 100 = 30

The click-through rate for this content would be 30%. 

It’s also possible to measure different click-through rates against one another to compare traffic sources. For example, suppose you have a 30% CTR from organic searches and a 5% CTR from social media. In that case, you’d focus on improving your SEO and getting even more out of those profitable organic searches. 

10. Bounce rate

A page’s bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to a page and immediately leave without taking action. 

A bounce rate shows how effective (or ineffective) your content is at drawing people in. It could also indicate that you’re targeting the wrong people.

For example, if one article has a high bounce rate, consider whether the paid ad copy matches the article’s content. If not, that’s why people navigate away as soon as they arrive at the article from the ad.  

Another reason for high bounce rates is misalignment – with either your target audience or the users’ search intent. 

To ensure you’re targeting the right audience, create a detailed buyer persona for each audience segment you want to reach. 

Search intent is often ignored or misunderstood, leading to poor traffic or high bounce rates. To prevent this, check the search intent of your keywords when creating your content. 

There are three intents:

• Commercial – intent to purchase; used in eCommerce
• Navigational – intent to find a specific place, website, or brand
• Informational – intent to learn; used in content marketing

When practicing content marketing, you want to choose keywords with informational search intent. That means ‌people searching for those keywords want to learn more about that topic. 

By writing content on those topics, you’re supplying them with the information they want. That signals to Google that:

• You’re an authority on the topic
• Your information is relevant to the topic 
• More users would benefit from your information

The results of this are:

• More traffic
• Lower bounce rates
• Higher SERP rankings

Pretty simple, right? 

Keep in mind that just as a lower bounce rate signals to Google that your content is valuable and increases your SERP rankings, a higher bounce rate will do the opposite. 

If Google sees visitors leaving your site right away, it assumes the content isn’t helpful. As a result, your rankings drop. 

Find your bounce rate using this formula: 

(Bounced Visitors / Total Visitors) x 100

If your page received 10,000 visitors, and 100 of them bounced away in under a minute, the formula would be:

(100 / 10,000) x 100 = 1

In this example, your bounce rate for the page would be an acceptable 1%. 

11. Leads generated

If you’re running a lead generation content marketing campaign, you’ll want to measure the number of leads you generate. 

Becoming a lead could take many forms based on the business and campaign. Your lead generation criteria might be filling out a contact form or signing up for a newsletter. It could also be a request for more information or downloading a resource like an ebook. 

Let’s use the ebook as our example. 

A physical therapist might offer a free pain management ebook as part of their content marketing efforts. They’d base the campaign’s success on how many downloads they got. 

Everyone who downloads the ebook has to provide their contact information and answer a questionnaire about the pain they’re experiencing. 

If that ebook generates an explosion of new leads, it shows that your audience finds this content useful and relevant. You’re also using the right marketing channels to generate interest. 

12. SERP growth

This metric measures the success of your SEO efforts over time. As we said, SEO takes between six months to a year to generate a return, especially for sites with lower domain authority. That means your organic reach metric will be low for some time. 

It’s a good idea to track your content through the SERPs to see whether its rank has increased or decreased. 

Sites that already have high domain authority (think: Hubspot, Content Marketing Institute, and Forbes) can rank higher more quickly because Google already knows they’re reliable sources.

Therefore, if high authority sites write a well-optimized article with a high-volume keyword and low difficulty, they’re basically playing the SERPs like a fiddle.

However, that doesn’t mean that high authority sites will automatically rank on page one every time they publish. There are still many other factors like backlinks and topical authority that contribute to SERP growth.

And that growth occurs gradually over time. 

After a month, you might see that the content has moved up four places. Maybe in another month, it’ll be on a lower page. 

If you see consistent movement in the right direction, you’ll know your content optimization is on point and you’re generating positive attention from Google. If you’re stagnant or losing ground, something about your SEO strategy isn’t working. 

It could be that you chose a keyword with the wrong intent or too much competition. It could also mean you haven’t generated enough backlinks to establish your authority with Google. 

Speaking of backlinks… 

13. Backlinks generated

This metric measures the number of backlinks your content generates. When another site links to your content, it generates a backlink. It’s a major aspect of SEO and one of the main criteria Google has for judging authority. 

Because it’s so important to SEO success, you need to understand how many backlinks you’ve generated and where they’re from.

Generating backlinks isn’t easy to do at scale. And your content will need a high volume of quality links to achieve major success.  

There are several free link-building tools^[5] online. If that doesn’t work, consider outsourcing to a link-building agency. 

One of the best ways to generate backlinks is by guest blogging on relevant industry websites. Simply include a naturally placed link to your content, and you’ve created a quality backlink to strengthen your search engine optimization.