Content Marketing ROI: How to Put a $ Value on Your Content

If you want to talk convincingly about ROI to your boss or your clients, it helps to understand these three points:

If all of your content marketing is outsourced from freelancers or agencies, it’s relatively easy to work out how much it costs: it’s the amount they bill you.

If you have an entirely in-house team, with team members dedicating 100% of their effort to content, costs are similarly straightforward: it’s their salaries.

But things can get a little complicated if you source content from multiple sources (like a combination of freelancers, agencies, and in-house team members), or if multiple people contribute to your content in relatively small ways (like a designer dedicating a third of their time to content, and two thirds to product marketing).

But this is still simple compared to our next complication:

Many of these benefits are virtually invisible—how do you measure support queries that content stopped from existing?—but very real. No matter how you calculate ROI, there’s a good chance you’ll be undervaluing its impact.

Which brings us to our next complication:

Working out the role content played in a sale is called “attribution”, and it’s pretty tricky to pin down.

Did someone convert because of an article or in spite of it? When they read multiple articles, which had the biggest impact? If someone buys because of an advert, should we still credit the blog post they read beforehand?

Customer journeys are also rarely as straightforward as we’d hope. One person might read 50 articles and never buy anything; another might read a single article, disappear for a year, and immediately buy. What role did content play in those journeys?

There are different ways of measuring attribution to help with some of this uncertainty:

• First-touch attribution credits the first piece of content a visitor engages with before converting.
• Last-touch attribution credits the last piece of content.
• Multi-touch attribution tries to credit every piece of content that was involved in the buying process.

But in all cases, attribution is never perfect: we just can’t measure every interaction someone has with our content.

In a perfect world, we would know exactly how much revenue each and every blog post generated for our business. To calculate ROI this way, we can use a formula as follows:

Return from content marketing = (New customers from content * ACV)

In most cases, visitors won’t buy directly from your blog post, so you’ll need to track:

• The number of conversions generated by your content (e.g. free trial signups or demo requests), and
• The number of those conversions that went on to become paying customers.

In the image below, we can see which pages visitors land on before purchasing a product. We can also see the conversion rate and the revenue attributed to the conversions:

Next, we need to calculate ACV: average customer value. This refers to the typical amount that customers spend with our company over the course of their relationship with us.

If we sell one product, and most customers buy just once, our ACV will be the price of our product. If we offer multiple products or add-ons, and customers buy regularly or set up subscriptions, then our ACV will be a lot higher.

Let’s assume that our conversion analysis shows that we had 1,000 free trial signups from our content in February, and 100 of those free trials became paying customers. If our ACV is $2,000, we can plug these numbers into our formula to calculate a return from content of $200,000:

(New customers from content * ACV) = 100 * $2,000 = $200,000

This method is the gold standard of ROI calculations, but (because of the problems mentioned above) calculating ROI like this can be extremely complicated.

Below, we can see that it would cost an estimated ~$44k to “replace” the traffic to our list of free SEO tools using ads:

If we add up the traffic value of all the pages in our blog, we have an estimated monthly traffic value of $790,000:

Put another way, if we used paid advertising to get the same amount of visits from the same keywords, we’d need to spend around $790,000 on ads, each and every month.

Most content is useful for longer than a single month, so we can multiply this monthly traffic value by the expected useful “lifetime” of our content. If we use two years as a starting point, that gives us a lifetime traffic value of $18,960,000:

(Monthly traffic value * content lifetime) = $790,900 * 24-months = $18,960,000

We have over 2,000 blog articles at Ahrefs, and we were probably never going to spend $19 million on paid advertising. But this calculation allows you to assign a dollar value to your content in a matter of seconds. It’s particularly useful if your company recently switched from a heavy reliance on paid advertising to content marketing, letting you show off the money you’ve saved from the switch.

Let’s wrap up with a best-of-both-worlds approach, very similar to how we calculate ROI at Ahrefs:

Return from content = (% of signups attributed to content * total signup revenue)

Whenever a new customer signs up for Ahrefs, we ask them a question: Where did you hear about us? 

There are tons of ways to measure content marketing ROI, and none of them are perfect. But for practical purposes, they don’t need to be.

Metrics, like content marketing ROI, are most useful as directional indicators. Instead of obsessing over perfect calculations, it’s better to choose a simple methodology, stick to it consistently, and see how it changes over time.