Evaluating Content Marketing ROI Guide

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Content Marketing ROI Guide

A guide to measuring, evaluating and reporting

your content marketing performance

Authors: Stephen Bateman and Dave Chaffey

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

A Guide to measuring, evaluating and

reporting your content marketing performance

Contents

3 Introduction

5 ONE: Introduction to calculating the ROI of content marketing

9 TWO: Setting Content Goals & Metrics

21 THREE: Calculating the cost of content

25 FOUR: Calculating Content ROI

29 FIVE: Using analytics to evaluate content marketing

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

Introduction

The importance of content marketing ROI

Most marketers are now aware of the potential of content marketing to generate awareness

and new business for a brand. Indeed it has been voted the best potential new form of

marketing investment by Smart Insights readers for two years now1.

However, since this is a relatively new marketing approach, there seems to be a lack of

condence in how to calculate ROI. In our recent research with Hubspot2 we asked marketers

for their perceptions on how valuable content marketing is and the ease of measuring ROI.

The chart shows that nearly half of marketers saw the measurement of ROI as limited.

We have also received requests from members for more guidance on evaluating content

marketing ROI, so this guide is here to help.

The aim of this guide is not to present “XX metrics to measure your content marketing

performance”, because that is too simplistic. Instead our aim is to focus on sharing

techniques that help you PROVE the effectiveness of content marketing to your colleagues or

clients, a key issue as more marketing budget is invested into content marketing.

How is this guide structured?

The ve sections in this guide are:

þONE: an introduction to ROI calculation. An explanation of marketing ROI for readers

without a background in the concept.

1 Smart Insights: Marketing trends article

2 Hubspot / Smart Insights: Content Marketing Success report

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

þTWO: Setting content goals and metrics. In this section we show how you can set

goals for content marketing and measure them through KPIs. This section should be read

together with the nal section on using analytics which explains goal setup.

þTHREE: Calculating the cost of content. Content marketing is certainly not free, so to

calculate ROI for content we need to break out the component costs. This section has

worked examples of how to do this.

þFOUR: Calculating Content ROI. Building on section three, this section gives example

of ROI calculations.

þFIVE: Using analytics to review content marketing. Techniques to analyse and report

content marketing effectiveness using Google Analytics.

If you use Google Analytics and already have the basics right such as setting up goals

and goal value to evaluate content marketing, don’t miss the advanced sections on “First

content interaction analysis” on page 33 and Basic Channel Groupings that follows.

Recommended resources Content marketing guides

Our content marketing resources are collected in our Content Marketing Toolkit. We have a

summary guide and longer guides advising on content marketing which give more depth on

strategy and management for content marketing:

þ1. Strategy - 7 Steps content marketing strategy guide

þ2. Management – Managing content marketing guide

þ3. Scheduling - Editorial calendar spreadsheet template

þ4. Evaluation – Content marketing ROI evaluation guide

þ5. Summary – Content marketing Fast Start Checklist

About the author

Stephen Bateman is the Smart Insights expert commentator on Content

Marketing. He is director and co-founder of Wise Up Media (part of

GreenWise Business) and Concentric Dots, both specialist content

marketing agencies, as well as co-founder and MD of iGlimpse, a leading

educational mobile apps publisher. His strengths are in content planning,

content creation and content ROI, with specialist knowledge of the

sustainable business sector.

He offers expert training and and content marketing consultancy, including social media

training, to ambitious businesses. Before going independent Stephen worked as Business

Director for a number of large corporates including Pearson (Dorling Kindersley), Hachette

Book Group, and F&Media International, where he learned a thing or two about reporting

business performance to the managing board. Stephen is co-author of Smart Insights’

Content Marketing Strategy Guide and a scholar of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. You

can connect with Stephen through any of these social networks: Twitter | LinkedIn | Google+.

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

ONE

An Introduction to calculating the ROI of content

marketing

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), which publishes a yearly summary on

the state of content marketing, as many as 90% of marketers are experimenting with content

marketing in one form or other, yet fewer than 50 per cent of marketers feel condent in the

effectiveness of their content marketing1.

The aim of this guide – proving content marketing ROI

In this guide we aim to explain a range of techniques to help marketers evaluate and prove

their content effectiveness, through assessing the commercial value of content marketing

measured through its protability and Return on Investment (ROI). So, let’s get straight

into understanding these terms since these denitions are not always well understood by

marketers.

What is it? Prot

Simply put, prot accrues when the revenue obtained from a commercial transaction is

greater than its cost:

Revenue less cost = Prot

What is it? Return on investment (ROI)

Return on Investment shows prot compared to cost

ROI % = 100 * Return from investment (Net Prot) / cost of investment

1 Content Marketing Institute: Research listing

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

Let’s take a simplied example for a transactional Ecommerce site selling products with an

Average Selling Price of $100. Let’s assume that half (50%) of this $100 ASP is margin, i.e.

what’s left over after the cost of the retailer buying products from suppliers. It costs another

10% of the $100 for the retailer to process, pick and ship the order plus deal with returns. So,

subtracting the product and process costs from the sales revenue gives a prot on the sale of

$40.

Consider an investment of $1,000 into a content-based campaign to sell more of these

widgets. What we need to isolate is the incremental sales from the content investment. If you

sell 30 additional products at a prot of $40 each, that gives a total prot of $1,200 on the

campaign, but campaign costs need to be subtracted too, leaving $200. The ROI here is 20%

($200/$1000).

So far, so straightforward, but this example is for a retailer with clear visibility of sales

revenue. How can we calculate prot for a non-transactional website where the aim of

the site is to generate leads rather than sell products; a common situation in marketing,

particularly B2B marketing? In these cases we have to nd an equivalent value for leads

based on the conversion rate to sale.

Let’s take an example of a luxury travel company that doesn’t have online sales, instead

brochures are used to generate interest, with sales then occurring by phone or in store. If the

typical prot for a holiday is $4,000 and we know that the conversion rate from lead to sale is

10%, the value of a lead on average is also $40. In this case, a similar ROI calculation for the

retailer can then be calculated.

We will go into more detail of how to calculate the costs and ROI for content marketing in

sections 3 and 4 where we look at some worked examples.

Previously these types of marketing campaign ROI calculations have focused on comparing

costs against sales revenue for paid media marketing, but today’s marketers also need to

demonstrate how owned and earned media spend is directly accountable as a measurable

impact on sales.

This greater need for accountability has arisen since we are seeing a much larger investment

in content marketing that supports and impacts all the stages of the customer buying cycle. In

other words ownership of the “funnel” is shifting toward marketing. This is especially true for

B2B marketing where lead generation and sales cycles are more complex.

Fournaise2 reports that “just 20 percent of CEOs consider their top marketers to be ROI

marketers”. This means that “80% of CEOs do not really trust and are not very impressed

by the work done by marketers, while in comparison, 90% of the same CEOs do trust and

value the opinion and work of CFOs and CIOs.” 75% of CEOs think Marketers misunderstand

(and misuse) the “real business” denition of the words “Results”, “ROI” and “Performance”

and therefore do not adequately speak the language of their top management: these CEOs

fail to understand why Marketers cannot zoom in on a few critical key business performance

indicators to precisely measure, quantify and report on the level of customer demand they

are asked to deliver, instead of drowning everybody with data and analyses that are too

remote from the P&L.”

Strategy Recommendation 1 Dene the need to evaluate content marketing ROI

If you don’t evaluate content marketing, then you can’t make the business case for future

investment effectively and it’s likely you won’t have enough resource to manage your

content marketing output so your content marketing efforts will wither and die.

2 Fournaise: Marketing Performance survey

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

Agencies and consultants also want to prove the value of content marketing to their clients,

so the techniques we cover will help here too.

What do we want our content marketing to achieve?

The rst step towards presenting content marketing ROI is to review what you’re looking to

achieve with content marketing as an organization.

Strategy Recommendation 2 Start by reviewing the organization goals of content marketing

Before organisations can evaluate their content marketing effectiveness they should agree

what they are looking to achieve through content marketing, in other words, dening actions

they want their consumers of content to complete.

If you’re discussing the goals for content marketing within a company or with clients, this

Content Marketing Institute denition is a useful starting point for thinking about what you

want Content Marketing to achieve since they link the ‘what?’ to the ‘why?’.

What is it? Content Marketing

“Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing

relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly dened and

understood target audience – with the objective of driving protable customer action.”

Content Marketing Institute

Here “creating and distributing content” requires spending on media creation and distribution

to generate new leads (attracting and acquiring new customers) and drive protable sales

(customer actions). “Engage” refers to engaging existing customers who are often the

best advocates for a brand who will share content. Developing prospect and customer

relationships is at the heart of developing a return on marketing investment (ROMI) from

content marketing.

A less formal denition of content marketing states: “Content Marketing is owning, as opposed

to renting media. It’s a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently

creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.”

This denition implies content marketing is a trade off (one thing but not the other) and

that “owning media as opposed to renting media” provides a more permanent return on

investment. This implies a decision to pursue content marketing over other lead generation

activities such as Paid Search, Advertising and PR which needs to be justied via some

form of comparative benchmarking. The same would go for claims published by online lead

generation platform Eloqua and Kapost who claim that “the average cost per lead drops 80%

after 5 months of content marketing” and “content marketing is 31% cheaper than paid search

advertising”. Tall claims for which claimants need to provide clear metrics.

Recommended resource Delivering Results from Digital Marketing

For advice on setting broader goals and KPIs for digital marketing see our Delivering Results

from Digital Marketing Guide which focuses on goal setting.

In section 5 we show how to set goals using analytics - it’s in: “Step 1. Dene goals with a

specic value for conversion to different outcomes” on page 29.

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

Applying content marketing to B2B and B2C markets

Buying cycle complexity depends on product and service categories, but in general, B2B

buying cycles tend to more complex, requiring content to be created for each persona

and stage of the buying cycle. Measuring the impact of that content could, in some cases,

be difcult, or it could be easier if your marketing and sales teams are using a customer

relationship management system (CRM) to record tactics and their impact on lead nurturing,

thus allowing you to accurately record content downloaded by contacts and its impact at each

stage of their buying journey.

This guide won’t make a specic distinction between B2C and B2B marketing since content

marketing aims to achieve similar goals in both cases, and we won’t specically examine

the role of CRM systems, but we will focus on measuring content marketing performance in

complex buying cycles.

What is it? The difference between B2C and B2B content marketing?

Both B2C and B2B aim for the same outcome, but each uses a different content mix and

puts a different emphasis on channels and tactics. B2B often involves more complex buying

cycles, but this does not necessarily translate into more complex measurement.

See section 5 of our best practices guide on Marketing Automation for ideas on how to use

these systems to score lead quality - another technique for content marketing.

Benchmarking your content marketing capability

How well you measure your content marketing is just one aspect of your overall effectiveness

in using content marketing. To help argue for more focus on measurement it can help to

talk to colleagues about the bigger picture. We’re fans of using capability auditing tools to

assess your use of different digital marketing techniques like content marketing against

where you’d like or need to be. A useful tool to help with content marketing evaluation, which

we introduced in our guide to content marketing strategy, is Altimeter’s Content Marketing

Maturity Model.

Strategy Recommendation 3 Review and communicate your content marketing

measurement capability

Assess your content marketing capability, including evaluation, to communicate to

colleagues the improvements you need to make.

This guide is designed to assist content marketing professionals at stages 2 to 4 (“Stretch”

moving to “Walk” & “Jog”). At the more mature stages of content marketing, managers need

more accurate performance evaluation and ROI calculations to help them report the results

of their content marketing to senior management, and thereby get the buy-in and support

they need in order to maintain or increase their content marketing investment to grow their

business in cost effective ways.

The stages in the Altimeter capability model are:

þStand: You haven’t yet realised the value of content marketing as a key component of

your marketing strategy.

þStretch: You understand the benets of content marketing and have started to create

content.

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

þWalk: Now with a solid foundation organisationally that supports content creation, your

content strategy is more fully rened and tweaked. There is also a concerted effort to

connect content development with all parts of the organisation’s communication teams.

þJog: Your company is seriously committed to content marketing and has a clear strategy.

þRun: Companies at this stage have production and creative as full, standalone business

unit, and your company is creating content that is sold and licensed based on its

standalone merit.

What stage of content marketing maturity are you?

Source: “Content: The New Marketing Equation” - The Altimeter Group 20123

3 Altimeter: The New Marketing equation

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

TWO

Setting Content Goals & Metrics

If you read blog posts advising on content marketing evaluation, you will often see long lists

of measures which can be impressive, but to help make sense of them in the context of

business goals we suggest that choosing the best framework to structure them is essential.

We will also see this in this section, that considering a hierarchy of measures from more

strategic and commercial to more tactical is useful; CEOs and CFOs do not care very much

about content campaigns or everyday metrics, but they do want to know that their marketers

are striving to improve ROI.

Strategy Recommendation 4 Select Content Marketing KPIs within a framework

A measurement framework helps you review that you have the right measures for different

purposes and helps you communicate them to others. A hierarchy of top-level strategic

goals and more specic tactical objectives can help make sense of the multitude of

measures.

Goals: What do we want our content consumers to do?

Many marketers produce content and dub it “content marketing” without having mapped it

to business goals or to the customer buying cycle. This is evidenced in a lot of blog content,

where brands decide to have a blog and then churn out posts that are at best “cool and

trendy”, but which do nothing to impact on business goals. This is what content marketing

guru, Doug Kessler, famously calls “the deluge of crap”4 which, if unchecked, risks being

content marketers’ downfall.

So, the rst step toward creating ROI content is to turn your content creation process on its

head: by that I mean think less about producing content and think more about how you can

use content to turn your readers or viewers into leads, sales, and advocates all along the

buying cycle.

Strategy Recommendation 5 Select Content based on your goals

FIRST map your content to the customer buying cycle, THEN create content that moves

people toward your goals.

In section 5 we show how to set goals using analytics - it’s in: “Step 1. Dene goals with a

specic value for conversion to different outcomes” on page 29.

Applying the Smart Insights RACE framework to content marketing

Dening goals without context can be tricky, so the Smart Insights RACE framework can

help here. The Smart Insights RACE framework helps you dene goals and subsequent

measurement for your content across the customer buying cycle (similar to the AIDA buying

stages from Awareness to Interest, Desire and Action). Here is how it works:

4 Slideshare: Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

þStep 1 Reach. Reach means building awareness of a brand, its products and services

on other websites and in ofine media in order to build trafc by driving visits to different

web presences like your main website, micro-sites or social media outposts such as

Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ Business Pages.

For Content marketing evaluation we need to understand how content individually and

collectively supports reaching larger and different audiences.

þStep 2 Act. Act is about persuading site visitors or prospects to take the next step on

their journey when they initially reach your site or social network presence. It may mean

nding out more about a company or its products, searching to nd a product or reading

a blog post. It’s about engaging the audience through relevant, compelling content and

clear navigation pathways so that they don’t hit the back button.

For Content marketing evaluation, we need to understand how content encourages

interaction and leads as shown in the next table.

þStep 3 Convert. Conversion is where the visitor commits to form a relationship which will

generate commercial value for the business. It’s where marketing goals such as leads or

sales on web presences and ofine can be achieved.

For content marketing evaluation we need to link specic content against its impact on

sales volume and creating value for the business.

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

þStep 4 Engage. Build customer relationships through time to achieve retention goals

For content marketing we need to determine which content is shared and how the

amplication effect generates additional leads and sales.

Examples of KPIs by RACE

To help you select the right KPIs within RACE, we’ve taken the full range of measures

covered, from hard sales measures to softer engagement metrics, and combined them into

the table below. We recommend grouping measures like this as you nd out the ones to

select:

1. Commercial measures: These are the harder business or commercial measures

that usually takes the longest to be demonstrable. These are the measures for

the senior managers although they may well also be keen to know about Likes!

Think audience share, sales, leads or at least clear indicators from people such as

satisfaction ratings or percentage that fed back. Remember that these need to be

incremental and ideally attributable to your content marketing.

2. Tactical measures: These include the views, clicks and interactions with your

content – so involves the social shares such as Likes and Tweets. You might also

use link shortening tools to help measure.

3. Brand measures: These are easier for bigger brands or where there’s less

competition, simply because the tools seem to work better in that space. Think brand

or keyphrase mentions, sentiment, share of market mentions over competitors and

certainly site trafc. These are the bigger needles to get moving and often require a

bit more momentum.

Measure Reach Act Convert Engage

Brand measures



Unique visitors



New visitors



Brand/direct visits



Audience share (vs

competitors)



Lead volume



% product/service

interactions



Pages per visit



Sales volume



Lead volumes



Follower or fan volumes



Email list qality



Repeat transactions



Repeat visits



Exit surveys - 4Q

Content

performance

measures



Shake of audience



Key sites with your

content visible in search



Follower or Fan volumes



Share or search /

search presence

(ndability)



Inbound links



Reffering domains



Page engagement rate

(Bounce, pages per

visit, duration)



Shares by users

(sharebility)



PostRank score



Comments and site

interactions



Lead sign-up and

conversion rate by

engagement tool



Subscription to email or

RSS



Activity customers %

(site and email active)



Conversion to Fan or

Follower



% social interactions

with content such as

Fan page comments



Repeat conversion rate



Email open and CTR

Commercial

measures



Cost per click and cost

per sale



Brand awareness



Goal value per visit



Online lead contribution

(£, % of total)



Cost per lead



Customer satisfaction



Goal value per visit



Online lead contribution

(£, % of total)



Cost per lead



Customer satisfaction



Retained sales growth

and volume



Revenue per visit



Revenue per channel

and category



Lifetime value of

customer / loyaltya

Use this table to select the most relevant KPIs which are relevant for you in a content

dashboard. For example, the next example shows a simplied dashboard taken from our

The next example shows our recommendation of a general digital dashboard taken from

our guide to Delivering Results from Digital Marketing. You could create versions of this

dashboard for specic content types as we will explain in the nal section.

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

Best Practice Tip 1 Isolate your dashboard for specic content assets

You should set up reports ltered using Advanced Segments for specic content types e.g.

blog, content page, so you can see which sections of a site and types of content create

value.

So use Advanced Segments in analytics to identify the proportion of each metric that can

be attributed to content marketing and channels related to inbound marketing by reviewing

specic channels or content on the site.

Content fuels social media sharing and content fuels SEO which together comprise inbound

marketing.

It’s that old adage that says the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. That’s why you

need to think about how social can help achieve your goals and how you can measure the

effectiveness of both your content (likely to be on your own turf) AND your social activity

(most likely in social channels). For an explanation of the how social media and content

marketing work hand in hand read this post5.

This approach also make sense as increasingly, we see combined responsibilities for SEO,

content marketing and social media marketing within a company.

Strategy Recommendation 6 Measure content marketing, social media and SEO

effectiveness together

Measure content marketing, social media and SEO effectiveness together. It’s difcult to

isolate the different components and they all support each other, so group their contribution.

With this established, you can review the contribution from these two perspectives, media

and content:

5 Smart Insights: How content marketing and social media can work together

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

1. Digital media channels that attracts visits to content created as part of content marketing

These channels will typically include:

þSEO

þSocial media

þAdWords of Display advertising (if used to promote content assets)

þDirect (Note that some Social media trafc will be from apps such as Facebook and

Twitter that don’t show the source). If you promote content through ofine trafc, then this

will be evident too.

2. Content groups or types on your site that attract visits through digital media.

Content groups that you can use to evaluate of your content marketing through analytics

include:

þA blog

þA specic section of site devoted to resources (for example the hub pages on Smart

Insights)

þContent related to products and services used to encourage visits through SEO or

conversion

Whether you use the rst or second approach, you can then use analytics to show the

Volume, Quality and Value measures related to content marketing!

Best Practice Tip 2 Tag campaigns and content to help track content effectiveness in a

more granular ways

To help you track the performance of specic content types better you can structure or tag

them to make them more measurable, so you can tag specic content or campaigns with a

specic content convention.

For example, you can show links obtained from a PDF to a site in this way to show the

volume of referrers:

http://www.domain.com/landing _page.php?utm_campaign=<campaign-name>&utm_

medium=pdf&utm_source=<site or partner name>&utm_content=<PDF name>

For more detail on how to tag your content see our 7 Steps Google Analytics guide or this

post6.

Alternative measurement frameworks content marketing

We have shown how we recommend using the RACE framework to dene the effectiveness

of content marketing, but thought readers would nd it useful to review other content

marketing metrics.

In the remainder of this section we will review alternative frameworks that you could use. Of

course, we recommend the RACE framework, but you may nd the other alternatives t the

way of working or way of thinking in your organization or your clients better.

6 Smart Insights: Tagging marketing campaigns

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

Jay Baer’s four data “buckets”

Jay Baer’s “four primary buckets” framework offers a holistic and pragmatic content

marketing measurement model. He recommends using four types of content marketing

metrics: consumption, sharing, leads, and sales. It doesn’t have a hierarchy related to the

buy cycle, although he suggests that most marketers overvalue the rst two (blog page views

and retweets, for example) and undervalue the last two (email subscriptions from people who

rst read the blog and, ultimately, sales from among that group). If you focus your metrics

on behavior, rather than on data aggregation, you’ll be measuring points of greater business

value.

Examples of measures within each of the four “buckets” include:

1. Consumption metrics. This fundamental data point is easy to derive through

Google Analytics, YouTube insights or similar. The metric tells you how many people

consumed your content, measured as page views, downloads or views.

2. Sharing metrics. This metric tells you how successful your content is at getting

consumers to share it with others through social sharing like tweets, Retweets,

‘Likes’, LinkedIn shares, Google+ shares, etc. Free social sharing monitors like www.

sharedcount.com will provide with an accurate real-time measure of how often your

content is shared with others across all social networks.

3. Lead generation metrics. Whether you require registration before allowing people

to read/watch/download your content, or whether you’re measuring leads generated

after content is consumed, this is the metric that determines whether or not your

content marketing effort is making nancial sense.

If you host a lead form on your site, you can measure this by determining how many

people went to the lead form immediately after consuming your content. You can also

set a browser cookie and track when someone lls out that lead form after viewing

your content, even if there is a 30- or 60-day interval between those events. If your

leads are handled via phone, you can install a simple script that shows a different

(trackable) phone number when people have rst watched a video, downloaded a

presentation, etc. This metric tells you many content consumers on your website turn

into leads.

4. Sales metrics. This metric will tell you how often your content consumers turn into

customers. If you’re using a customer and prospect database, such as Salesforce,

1 Introduction

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you’ll want to note in the prospect record that the potential customer consumed

content pieces X, Y and Z. Then, when your sales team turns that prospect into a

sale, determine the projected revenue and prot (lifetime value if you can) of that

customer, and assign it to the content pieces that drove the sale.

Avinash Kaushik’s Social media metrics

Although these measures from Google’s Digital Marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik7 are

specic to social media we have included them here since they show the effectiveness of

content marketing in generating incremental awareness on social media and they also can be

used to review blog effectiveness. The four key measures are:

þ1. Conversation Rate. Measure by:

Conversation Rate = # of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post

þ2. Amplication Rate. Measure in this way

On Twitter: Amplication = # of Retweets Per Tweet

On Facebook, Google Plus: Amplication = # of Shares Per Post

On a blog, YouTube: Amplication = # of Share Clicks Per Post (or Video)

þ3. Applause Rate. Measure as follows:

One Twitter: Applause Rate = # of Favorite Clicks Per Post

On Facebook: Applause Rate = # of Likes Per Post

On Google Plus: Applause Rate = # of +1s Per Post

On a Blog, YouTube: Applause Rate = # of +1s and Likes Per Post (or video)

4. Economic Value.

Economic Value = Sum of Short and Long Term Revenue and Cost Savings - measured

through goals.

7 Avinash Kaushik: Best social media metrics

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This is measured through the ROI calculations explained in sections 3 and 4 of this guide and

goal value from analytics in section 5.

It’s a great framework, but suffers in that manual calculations of comments per post or shares

may be needed, but tools such as Hootsuite can help in collecting this insight.

Three categories of data for reviewing content marketing effectiveness

When working at Velocity Partners, Ryan Skinner, now senior analyst of Content Marketing

at Forrester advocated three broad categories of data that help us dene what we need to

measure, each with a corresponding period or duration:

The beauty of this framework is that it reminds us that we need to package data to suit the

needs of different target audiences (as we do in content marketing). In this case we need to

have in mind the a) the C-suite (Business), b) the Division (Strategy) and c) the operational

Team (Tactical), and for each group we customise reporting.

Altimeter Social media ROI pyramid

Altimeter iterate this process of packaging metrics for different audiences in a report8 related

to social media marketing, which recognises that “the seasoned professional provides

executives with business metrics rst. They know fans and followers aren’t a business goal,

but what you do with them is.”

8 Altimeter: Framework: The Social Media ROI Pyramid

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Here’s how this model helps us:

þBusiness Metrics (top of pyramid) are for executives, and everyone else who supports

them, which is everyone. The pyramid is smaller at top as there are fewer metrics to

give to busy executives. There are really only three: increased top line, reputation, and

reduced costs.

þSocial Media Analytics (middle pyramid) is for the Corporate Social Strategist and

the internal stakeholders and internal clients. This a synthesised higher level view of

the Engagement Data (in the tier below), there are no industry standards, so pick one

and benchmark over time. Choose from the metrics in Jay Baer’s model to create your

formulas.

þEngagement Data (bottom of pyramid) is for the teams deploying social media:

community managers, social media managers, developers etc..Collecting this data is

done using social tools tracking tools (Appendix), not forgetting of course your traditional

web analytics. Don’t give this to the top level executives, they’re not interested.

Content performance across the buying cycle

Measuring content performance across all the stages of the customer buying cycle will help

you identify what is working and what is not and ultimately what content marketing tactics

warrant support. Start by mapping the buying cycle from the customer’s stand point (if you

need help with this, see our buyer persona toolkit). Give each stage a name then measure

and evaluate key metrics across the buying cycle. Focus on these critical metrics:

þa) Volume metrics, the number of people you have in each stage, how fast they are

growing over time, and how many are being added each period. iGlimpse, an educational

app developer, observed that more than half of the people who bought its nautical apps

consumed a demo video early in their journey to purchase. That led iGlimpse to multiply

the social touchpoints where consumers could link to the demo video (email blasts,

facebook pages, linked in forums, blog posts, afliate websites etc ...)

þb) Visitor quality or conversion metrics: how buyers move from one stage to the

next. Example: Hubspot, the inbound marketing solution provider, provides valuable

white papers and eBooks for download (I’m sure you know them) and analyses its

conversion rates from marketing lead to sales-accepted lead so it can rene the criteria

for “sales-ready”, which ensures the sales team then emails or calls the leads with the

highest likelihood of conversion.

þc) Visitor value: This is the value of sales generated that can be attributed to content

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marketing. For Hubspot, they dened how content played its part in helping the company

grow its customer base to 8,440 and revenues to $52.5 M in 2012.

þd) Rapidity will tell you how long an average sale takes to close, how fast people are

moving through the stages, and how their time spent in the stages accelerates over

time. Tracking velocity through the stages helps identify the effectiveness of content

used: the content that accelerates the purchasing cycle and that which slows the

buyer’s purchasing down.

Throughout this process you’ll be tracking visits, page views, video views, email open

rates, tweets retweeted, wall posts shared as described in Avinash Kaushik’s framework,

but the key is to know where this data serves its purpose and for which audience it is

destined so that you do not drown your bosses in irrelevant metrics when you meet to

report performance at the quarterly reporting meetings!

Time

Remember to ensure you put your content analysis against sales trends that correspondent

with your typical sales cycle. This is especially true for complex sales cycles of 9-18 months

(not unusual in B2B). For example, if your sales cycle is typically 10 months, deploying a

content marketing pilot across one quarter will be difcult to track. Furthermore your rst

content marketing efforts will always be your worst. And your past and current efforts will be

eclipsed by your later efforts. So measure the rate of improvement.

Frequency of reporting Short term and long term return on content marketing investment

The above frameworks demonstrate that reporting on content marketing ROI needs to create

a reporting system that encompasses both short term fast-cycle returns on tactical execution,

midterm strategic returns and longer term trends that demonstrate content marketing’s return

on investment to all stakeholders.

Tactical Level

(fast-cycle)

Strategic Level

(mid-cycle)

Corporate Level

(longterm)

Report Frequency Punctually, weekly,

bi-weekly, monthly

Bi-weekly,

bi-monthly, quarterly

Quarterly, annually

Content Data Visits, views, clicks,

shares, RTs, fans,

followers, immediate

conversion events

Awareness, overall

trafc volume,

conversions, sales

cycle velocity, SEO

impact of keywords

on SERPs (oragnic),

WOM, social

media penetration,

inbound links

and syndications

achieved by

content, high

prole placements,

conversion events,

new customer

acquisitions, up-sells,

cross-sales

Revenue, Reputation,

PR impact & reach,

Thought leadership,

growth in branded

keyword volumes

from organic search,

invitations to speak

at conference,

invitations to

comment /

guest blog, new

connections with

key inuencers, new

partnerships,

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Tactical Level

(fast-cycle)

Strategic Level

(mid-cycle)

Corporate Level

(longterm)

Example 

increased lead

generation from

white paper

download by 20%

over previous

week



added 1500

names to

newsletter list



15% growth in

sales of basic

software package



talking head on

The Bottom Line

(BBC Radio)

The rst level of success is measured by initial fast cycle reach, trafc, leads and

conversions. Strategic level and long-term success is also measured by growth of

relationships with inuencers, publications and the ability for the brand to inuence messages

through those relationships. Growth and cyclical engagement with online networks and

communities expands the company’s ability to grow the reach of its distribution channels

creating a network effect for it’s online marketing.

If incremental and short term increases in new revenue are the only measure of content

marketing success, that will make it difcult to justify the cost of long term creative content

campaigns, social engagement and relationship building. A focus on simultaneous goals

of direct customer acquisition in the short term as well as growing the community at large,

can result in tremendous inuence and momentum in the long term. The investment in an

approach that doesn’t simply measure immediate ROI but aims for category dominance

is strategic. And increasingly, that’s what it takes to achieve the key success factors that

successful companies run their businesses on.

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THREE

Calculating the cost of content

Before we can properly evaluate the returns of content marketing we need to know how much

content marketing costs. This chapter will walk you through a simple but effective costing

model, similar to the one used in publishing. Let’s start by reviewing different types of costs

relevant to content marketing.

Different cost types for content marketing

1 Variable costs

The cost of content marketing varies according to the sophistication of content, the time

spent on researching it, creating and distributing it, and the number of skilled people needed

to work on it.

2 Operational costs

Broadly speaking, the content marketing operation can be divided into 5 cost components:

Plan

Create strategic

structure

Ideate

Generate ow of

ideas

Produce Distribute and

Nurture

generate trafc,

leads, sales

Measure &

Optimise

Customer

Needs

Business

Goals

Personas

Buyer

cycles

Keywords

Content

Assets

Internal

External

Buyer

journeys

Themes

Editorial

plan

Editorial

Style

Format

Promotion

Moderation

Nurturing

Evaluation Optimisation

Purpose Audience Audit Map & Gap Manage Create Market Justify Improve

Some of the costs in content marketing are one-offs or irregular costs, whilst other costs are

recurrent costs incurred on every content project. The point here is that some costs need to

be grouped into overhead.

3 People costs

Working on content marketing activities is very manual, although a degree of automation can

be bought in (this also has a cost) which is easier for larger organisations that want to scale

the process and gain economies.

For the purpose of this guide we’ll consider the team of people needed to run the content

marketing operation to deliver and distribute content. In some instances, the team might also

be outsourced.

Senior Team Middle Management Workforce

Content Strategist

Managing editor

Creative Director

Editorial Manager

Project Manager

Community manager

Graphic designer

Social media manager

Editor (copy)

Proof reader

Social media exec

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4 Production costs

Production costs depends on the type and frequency of content creation. To calculate

product or creation costs, content can be viewed as being either

a) lightweight, frequent and by denition less demanding to create, and

b) heavyweight, with greater, longer lasting impact.

The table shows some typical examples. In Step 4 of our 7 Steps Content marketing strategy

guide we explain that it’s helpful to review content strategy by looking at these two key types

of content.

In his book ‘Launch’ Michael Stelzner, founder of the Social Media Examiner website,

attributes his marketing success to two forms of content that he created and gave away to

attract customers: ‘Primary fuel’, content he created to keep his business moving forward

and ‘Nuclear fuel’, the special content he used to attract the hundreds of thousands of visitors

per month, many of whom later gladly purchased his services (to create a $3 million turnover

business).

What is it? Primary fuel / Lightweight content

Primary fuel is regularly published, free or low-cost content that meets the needs of your

audience. The goal of your primary fuel is to help solve your readers’ problems so they will

become fans and advocates.

What is it? Nuclear fuel / Heavyweight content

Nuclear fuel is carefully designed content with a higher production cost that is designed

to have a lasting impact on signicant numbers of your ideal reader base and possibly

experts.

The dilemma for content marketers is that lightweight content is likely to be cheaper to

produce it typically has less impact and cut-through. Meanwhile heavyweight content is more

costly to produce and will typically have a greater impact – it is more sharing and engaging

if you get right. However, that’s an unknown – depending on the type of content, its impact

maybe less predictable – you can design a viral video, but it won’t necessarily ‘go viral’.

Lightweight content

Largely primary fuel

Heavyweight content

Largely secondary fuel

Blog post

Simple article

Checklist

Article / Interview

Press Release (media announcements)

Podcast

Handheld video

Case Study

Basic Slideshare

Webcast

Infographic

White Paper

Research study

eBook

Professional Video

Mobile App

Event

Table. The two broad categories of content

Your content marketing goals and strategy will dictate whether you choose to put more effort

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on lightweight or heavyweight content. That should be a big question for you! Let’s now

examine the cost of producing and distributing both lightweight and heavier content.

Costing lightweight content

Let’s assume your company decides to invest three solid, 600-900 word, blog posts per

week, sourced either from experts, or from members of the senior team.

rA solid blog post takes an average ve hours to research, write, and edit.

rLet’s assume that the average annual earnings of a solid blogger (external or on the

senior team) is £45,000 annum

rIf that person works 45 weeks in the year and 48 hours per week their hourly cost is

£45,000/2160 hours = £20.83 per hour

rHourly expense of solid blogger = £20.83 (NB this includes no charges or overhead)

rTherefore, the cost of one blog post is equal to £20.83 x 5 = £104.15

rThe annual cost of blogging at this frequency is £104.15 x 3 blogs week = £312.45 x 45

weeks = £14,060.45 per annum (not including overhead)

Best Practice Tip 3 Consider the role of content curation

It’s not the case that unique, original content always gives the best returns. Curating content

sharing infographics, data and visuals from others may be more cost effective and can still

present a brand well if it adds value.

Heavyweight content

Let’s now assume your company also decides to invest 4 heavyweight projects per year.

rA white paper or eBook takes an average 50 hours to research, write, design, edit,

publish, and market.

rLet’s assume that the average annual earnings of a heavyweight contributor (external

such as a well-known inuencer or internal) is £65,000 annum

rWe assume once again that person works 45 weeks in the year and 48 hours per week

so their hourly cost is £65,000/2160 hours = £30.09 per hour

rHourly expense of heavyweight contributor = £30.09 (NB this includes no charges or

overhead)

rTherefore, the cost of researching, writing and editing one heavyweight piece (sometimes

also called epic or nuclear content) equals £30.09 x 50 = £1505

rThe annual cost of heavyweight content at this frequency is £1505 x 4 pieces per year =

£6,019 per annum (not including overhead)

Best Practice Tip 4 Evaluate the value and savings from repurposing and spin-outs

Heavyweight content can have a hidden benet is in that it can repurposed and atomised to

provide a number of lightweight content items. Therefore, focusing resources on fewer big

projects that can “spin out” repurposed content is worth considering.

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5 Content promotion and outreach costs

Promotion includes a wide range of activity from community building activities such as

moderating discussions and commenting on inuential blog posts to tweeting and building

relations with inuencers on Twitter and LinkedIn. There is also paid promotion of content

through Google AdWords and advertising on the social networks.

In essence promotion is executing a plan that uses content as social bait to build customer

relations, customer leads, sales and advocacy. As dened at the beginning of this guide.

For the sake of this costing exercise let’s assume two members of your team spend 90

minutes on content promotion per workday, each.

rLet’s assume that the average annual earnings of a social media / community manager

(internal or agency) is £40,000 per annum

rHourly cost of that person is £40,000/2160 hours = £18.52 per hour (without charges or

overhead)

rTherefore, the cost of promoting content is £18.52 x 1.5 x 2 (people) x 225 days =

£12,501 per annum (in this case there is no paid content promotion)

rTo this cost we’ll add an hour per week for measuring, evaluating and reporting on

metrics £18.52 x 45 weeks = £833

You may also add in some cost for graphic design and for more junior contributions. The

point is this method of cost calculation offers an effective and exible costing framework for

both content marketing and social media promotion. Smart Insights has developed some

hard-working actionable costing and charging spreadsheets that can help you further with the

practical aspects of putting together accurate costing models for your content marketing.

Lightweight content = £14,060.45

Heavyweight content = £6,019

Content Promotion = £12,501

Measurement = £833

Subtotal = £33,413.45

Overhead @ 25% = £8,353.56

Total Cost £41,766,81

Viewed from this perspective, your content marketing investment is equivalent to £42,000/

annum, which is an average annual salary for a mid-level manager. With this cost in mind you

need to decide what your content marketing investment needs to achieve to get a positive

return.

This will generally be the number of incremental leads and so sales achieved in any given

period and for which content marketing has played a role in driving those sales. Having in

place a system that measures throughput and attributes to original referring tactics is the key.

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FOUR

Calculating Content ROI

In section 3, we looked at how you can calculate content marketing costs using the example

of assessing blogging.

In this chapter we’ll look at a calculation framework for evaluating the return on investment

(ROI) of different aspects of content marketing. We’ll stay focused on blogging for business

as a content marketing tactic, because it’s widely achievable for most businesses,

irrespective of size. Then we’ll look at two content marketing success stories to see how the

results were evaluated for Content Marketing ROI (CMROI).

Let’s begin by putting the cost of blogging above into context against the goals, metrics and

KPIs of business blogging:

Example blogging goal Metrics Tools

Initiate / foster / maintain

customer engagement

and provide a platform for

interaction

Track reader comments

(engagement)

Communicate with

customers

Comment tracking tools

Improve search visibility and

SERPs ranking with deeper

more frequent content

Improve SERPs for key

words

Link analysis tools

Social media monitoring

Generate new leads online

Build thought leadership

Funnel trafc toward a

conversion page

Shorten buying cycle

by building early brand

credibility

Jay Baer examines business blogging ROI across 3 distinct categories of business blogging

outcome:

1. Blog for content 2. Blog for commerce 3. Blog for community

What: Increase trafc to

website

Improve SERPs

Emphasise lead generation,

rather than trafc generation

Build brand allegiance and

afnity

How: Write with emphasis

on search optimisation with

Keyword inclusion

Educate potential customers

to take action.

Funnel trafc from blog post

to another destination, such

as a lead form

Write to be a resource, not

to sell or convert. When it’s

time to purchase, readers will

think of you rst

Measure: lift in visits,

measure percentage of new

visits, measure lift in visits

from organic search

Measure lift in average

length of visit and lift in

pages viewed per visit

Measure lift in referral visits

from other sites

Measure lift in repeat visits

Lift in RSS subscribers

Lift in comments

Referrals from social media

outposts

We also saw how “Avinash Kaushik’s Social media metrics” on page 16 can be applied to

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blogging.

We will now look at some examples showing how content marketing can be reported on.

Content Marketing ROI Example #1: B2B - Sage

When Sage decided to engage UK micro-businesses with content in the form of blogs, the

results in these different categories were noteworthy. Here is how they reported them:

Content Marketing ROI Example #2: Not for prot - Rehabs.com

To showcase its “Your Face On Meth” campaign for Rehabs.com, Fractl produced an

Infographic summarising the measurement approach used entitled “The unmatched power of

big content”. This summarised the key success factors and KPIs resulting from the creation

and distribution of powerful content to drive public awareness and engagement of its client’s

brand and organisation. All the stages of the project are visible here9 (LINK), but for our

purposes we’ll focus on the nal stage, stage 6, of the campaign where we can examine

the project KPIs (views, organic shares, links, tweets, RTs etc) and the commercial values

Fractl used to calculate the return on marketing investment (ROMI) achieved by the content

marketing project.

9 Frac.tl: Rehabs.com case study

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Fractl used its own estimates of commercial rates for sharing to apportion value to the

content’s ability to generate a link, a like, a tweet and a view: $20 for a link, $2 for like, $2

for tweet, $0.05 for a view. We would caution that this approach is subjective as Augie Ray

of Forrester rightly shows in this post10. In his posts estimates from $3 to $300 are given

depending on how the lifetime value of a fan might be mentioned.

Best Practice Tip 5 Place a monetary value on social sharing? Warning!

This approach does allow companies to benchmark different content marketing activities,

but why not just report on the number of shares if the value is so subjective. We show in

section 5 that a better method is to work back from conversion to calculate revenue per

visit for content which is accurate although it doesn’t include the long-term or amplication

value.

10 Forrester: What’s the value of a Facebook Fan? Zero?

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You can see that activities that increase Reach are rewarded most – so sharing is higher than

views. You may argue that these values are excessive, but the method does give a consistent

way to value content.

By giving each sharing result an estimated commercial value, Fractl was able to calculate

that the total value of links, tweets and social shares amounted to $873K, and that additional

value was garnered from celebrity tweets ($30,000), whilst two minutes of air time for the

video clip on TV generated $166,000 worth or media exposure for the Rehabs.com brand.

Altogether the content and social media value generated amounted to $1,069,707, which,

when measured against $35,000 marketing spend for the creation and distribution of the

content delivered a rate of 2956 % return on marketing investment - if you believe the

estimates of the values of shares! However, there was clearly a strong amplication effect

here which ultimately this resulted in an 850% increase in qualied trafc from people

searching for treatment and connecting with Rehabs.com treatment.

If you do believe in this approach, Fractl have made their content ROI calculator available

online, so that others can measure their content ROI in this way http://frac.tl/content-roi-calc.

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FIVE

Analysis and reporting techniques using analytics

The methods we have reviewed so far require some large assumptions about the value of

sharing. There is an alternative approach using analytics which looks specically at the real

benets generated by content on the site in terms of conversion to marketing outcomes, i.e.

leads and sales.

This approach has the advantage that it reviews the role of content in generating more

shares leading to visits to a particular landing page or site section. It also looks at how that

content supports conversion across multiple visits. However, it has the disadvantage that it

doesn’t review the intangible impact of content shared in other locations which may generate

awareness resulting in direct visits to the home page which can’t be attributed back to

specic content.

The analysis approach we share in this section involves these steps:

þ1. Dene goals with a specic value for conversion to different outcomes.

þ2. Dene the scope of evaluation – lter results to specic content such as a section on

site, or an individual piece of content.

þ3. Use measures available in Google Analytics to assess value.

þ4. Attributing social media marketing and content sharing using assists in analytics.

We will work through these steps showing examples of how to set up reports in Google

Analytics. This consists of individual product pages like the one you used to download this

guide. Here we’re excluding all blog content which is more important in driving sales.

Step 1. Dene goals with a specic value for conversion to different outcomes

The rst section in our 7 Step guide to Google Analytics explains how to setup goals in detail.

Since this is a short guide we can’t explain the full details here, but here is an example from

the Admin section on Google Analytics of setting up a goal for a thank you page with a value

associated.

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Best Practice Tip 6 Assign a value to key goals on non-Ecommerce sites

To assign a value to goals, you need to determine the value of different lead types based

on rates of conversion from lead to sale and average selling price as explained in section

1. For example, after someone downloads a brochure the value could be $5 while a phone

callback could be $10 since there is a higher propensity to convert in this case. These

values need to be assigned in value box for the goals pages as shown above.

If you are running an Ecommerce site and have Ecommerce tracking enabled, you don’t

need to assign goal value since sales value will automatically be assigned to the visitor who

purchased and then attributed to content and referrers that inuenced that sale.

Step 2. Dening the scope of evaluation – a specic section of content on site, or an individu-

al piece of content

By default, Google Analytics shows visits, leads and sales for content regardless of whether

it is a content marketing investment. To prove the value of content we need to isolate each

content type. This works best if content is labelled or named consistently.

Best Practice Tip 7 Group and group content marketing resources to help users

and for trackability

Through grouping content marketing resources you can both isolate their value to users

by just reporting on these in analytics and measure it more effectively. For example, all

resources, could be in folder /resources, all blog content under /blog or specic advice type

labelled.

If you are labelling content URLs or titles systematically, you can then use Google Analytics

‘Segments’ (formerly ‘Advanced Segments’) to limit reporting of value to this content. This is

again explained in more detail in our 7 Step guide to Google Analytics - see Step 4.

What is it? Google Analytics Segments

Different types of site visitors can be isolated to compare in their volume and quality to

others. You can select from standard segments or dene custom segments

Advanced segments are set up for content using different conditions based on Page (the

URL) as shown in the example below which restricts reporting to all pages within the Smart

Insights Answers forum.

If multiple segments are setup, for example for blog content and guide (product) pages in

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our case, we can then select multiple Advanced segments of different content types and

compare their relative contribution side-by side. You can review the contribution of specic

content types in this way using different reports in Google Analytics, for example:

þ1. Content - the landing pages or content drilldown reports under Behaviour in Google

Analytics

þ2. Referrers - different trafc reports shown below in the Acquisition reports in Google

Analytics

þ3. Keywords - show which content sections and pages attract visits, for example using

the new Webmaster Tools report - see below - which still work now Not Provided has

removed most Keywords data from analytics.

Best Practice Tip 8 Use Advanced segments or Advanced Filters to review the contribution

of different content through a common string

You can review behaviour across a page type such as all category pages, all pages within

a category or all product pages by specifying a range of pages which contain the relevant

string.

An example of applying this is ltering approach to see relevant content is available in more

depth in our SEO video tutorials (Tutorial 3. Using Google Analytics new Google Webmaster

Tools). This example shows how we just report on landing pages with the string “models”

which we featured in a series of 10 or so posts on this topic.

The chart shows we have recorded over 10,000 clicks in this month period for URLs

containing ‘models’. To see leads or sales revenue generated we could setup an Advanced

segment for trafc entering the site as these URLs.

Step 3. Use measures available in Google Analytics to assess value

Once we have the goals and goal values assigned and segments set up, then we can use the

reports to prove to ourselves, colleagues and clients how well different types of content work.

Here’s the thing that many don’t know about Google Analytics, once a goal completion page

1 Introduction

to ROI calculation

5 Using analytics for

analysis

4 Calculating

content ROI

3 Calculating

content cost

2 Setting goals

and metrics

Content Marketing ROI Guide

is visited OR an Ecommerce transaction is completed, Google automatically assigns the

value of goal or sale back across:

1. All previous pages a lead or purchaser visited previously in the session.

2. All previous visits from different media (recorded through a cookie).

This is powerful for reviewing content and promotion effectiveness! Once this assignment

from outcomes working back to previous touchpoints on or off the site has been completed

by Google Analytics11, then you can review effectiveness with Google’s 3 really useful

measures for assessing value.

Best Practice Tip 9 Use these 3 key measures to compare value for different content

þ1. Page Value. This shows the inuence of pages in generating value either through

e-commerce transactions or conversion goals with a value assigned.

Page value is available within the Top content reports.

þ2. Per Visit Goal Value. This is best for non-e-commerce sites which should have a

value assigned to conversion goals as have just explained. You can see per Visit Goal

Value in the Top Goal Set menu of the Explorer tab within the Trafc sources reports

like All Trafc, All Sources and Campaigns.

þPer Visit Value. This is best if you have a transactional e-commerce site. You can

see Per Visit Value measures within Trafc sources on the Ecommerce tab if you have

e-commerce tracking enabled.

Step 4. Attributing the impact of content distribution and different content types across differ-

ent sessions or visits to a site.

Until this point in our description and using these reports we have made a huge assumption

- that is that visitors to the site who convert, convert in their rst visitor session. Of course,

this may be true for some visits, but in many case it won’t be, particularly where high value or

high consideration products are involved.

Strategy Recommendation 7 Use multi-channel funnels to help prove the value of content

assets and content distribution throughout customer journeys

Use ‘multichannel funnels’ to show how social media marketing or display advertising

contributes ‘assists’ to sale earlier in the path to purchase.

11 Google Analytics: How Page Value is calculated

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This example12 shows how a B2B company is able to show the value in Referrals from

partner sites and social networks in generating leads:

You can access this report from the Conversions menu in the left sidebar – it is labelled

Multichannel funnels, Assisted conversions. In this case it shows the importance of organic

search in creating assisted conversion. It also shows some assists from Social Networks

where a rst visit is from social media, but conversion occurs in a later session.

First content interaction analysis

Extending this approach, Himanshu Sharma has written up an in-depth approach explaining

how to do this which you may want to explore13. This involves these steps:

þ1: Head to ‘Assisted Conversions’ Report (under Conversions > Multi Channel Funnels)

þ2: Click on the link ‘First Interaction Analysis’.

þ3: Click on the ‘pivot table’ button:

þ4: Create a pivot table with following specications:

Primary Dimension: Source/Medium

Pivot By: Landing Page URL

Pivot Metrics: First Click Conversions, First Click Conversions Value

12 Smart Insights: An example of applying Multichannel funnels to content analysis

13 Smart Insights: Building a content marketing dashboard in Google Analytics

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Content Marketing ROI Guide

You can see that rst click conversions are shown for different types of content - the third

page is a content page. He has further steps that involve a lter to review an individual

content type, group or page, but this could also be an advanced segment.

Using basic channel grouping analysis

This approach can be extended further by using a customisation option, again within

Multichannel Funnels. This Moz post14 shows how you can go beyond the basic Assists

report and report on content groups as well as channels.

Best Practice Tip 10 Use Basic Channel Groupings to review content impact

Through selecting a landing page URL for a particular type of content you can determine

which content impacted conversion from a rst visits where it was an entry or landing page.

The next example shows how you could create a content group called “Resource Centre”

14 Moz: Basic Channel Groupings analysis

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One you have dened one or more groups of content in this way, you can then see how they

generate assists. See the full post for details - it’s important to drag this custom grouping to

the top so that Google’s analysis picks up these entry pages rst.

Best Practice Tip 11 Setup dened content groups in Google Analytics

Since this Moz post was written Google has introduced another technique which should

make these techniques easier to apply - see this introductory post on Content Grouping

Settings.

Creating actionable dashboards

In his blog post The “Action Dashboard”15 (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards), Avinash

Kaushik tells us not to squirrel multiple metrics, but instead, to select the “critical few” metrics

that inform C-level management, and allow decision making.

This advice resonates perfectly with our recommendations in section 2, to create three levels of

content marketing reporting based around audience needs and reporting frequency:

To avoid the colourful “data puke”, Avinash Kaushik recommends an action dashboard

15 Avinash Kaushik: The Action Dashboard

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Content Marketing ROI Guide

comprising the following elements, laid out in a quadrant:

(Source: Avinash Kaushik)

An action dashboard like the one above comprises the following information:

1. The rst box (top left) shows the visual trend (up/down) for a chosen metric. This

satises executives early curiosity.

2. The information in Key Trends & Insights (top right) demonstrates that you know

what you’re doing, and where to focus attention, and wins you the condence of

executives.

3. The information in Actions / Steps To Take (bottom right) identies the root cause for

the trends in the metric and recommends solid action to take.

4. The Impact on Company/Customer (bottom left) helps those executives helps chivvy

those executives who may still be unclear about why the business needs to take

action.

With this form of reporting Avinash promises “you’ll gain a lot more trust from your executives

and all the crappy dashboards (you create) can die and be replaced with this one.”

Where to from here?

With a solid content marketing plan and content marketing evaluation model that aligns your

content marketing activities to your core business goals, you can demonstrate via metrics

how your content marketing activities contribute to demand generation and business growth.

Through knowing what works and what doesn’t, you can then focus your content marketing

efforts and optimise the approach.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the approaches discussed, please ask

us via our members’ discussion area.

Stephen Bateman and Dave Chaffey

Evaluating Content Marketing ROI Guide

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