You can use many metrics in Google Analytics to determine the success of search engine optimization (SEO). You can monitor traffic, referral sources, conversions, and countless other metrics. But in order to determine the true value of your campaigns, one metric that should take priority: Return on investment (ROI).

Measuring SEO’s return on investment puts the impact of SEO into perspective. You can show company decision-makers how SEO has generated traffic, leads, and sales, for example, which can lead to continued investment in this strategy.

If you had any questions as to how to measure the ROI of SEO, this article will show you how to calculate SEO’s ROI with Google Analytics, whether as e-commerce or lead-based business.

• What is SEO ROI?
• The Anatomy of True SEO ROI
• How to Calculate the ROI of Your SEO Campaigns Using Google Analytics
• The ROI Calculator
• What Are The Challenges Of ROI?
• What Is A Good Marketing ROI?
• 7 Ways to Increase Sales Using SEO
• How do You Calculate ROI For SEO?
• How do You Forecast Marketing ROI?
• How do You Measure Success in Content Marketing?
• What is Roi in SEO?
• Content Marketing ROI Statistics
• How to Measure Content Marketing Performance
• Content Marketing ROI Calculator
• What Metrics Are Used to Measure Content Marketing ROI?
• Content Marketing Analytics
• What is Content Performance?
• Content Marketing Measurement Framework
• Which is The Best Measure of Content Marketing Effectiveness?
• What is KPI in SEO?
• What is ROI Formula?
• What is a Good ROI Percentage?

What is SEO ROI?

Return on Investment (ROI) is what every client wants from a search marketing agency. It’s an easy thing to calculate if you’re doing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. If your revenue is higher than your spend, PPC management fees and cost of goods, then your client is getting a return on their investment. Although it’s simple to figure out ROI for PPC, the same cannot be said for search engine optimization (SEO).

Search marketing agencies that provide SEO services have traditionally reported ROI in a variety of ways. The most common approach to SEO ROI has been search engine ranking. If a company can get a client to perform well in organic SERPs, often times focusing on a handful of short-tail keywords, then they’ve done their job. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly SEO ROI. Instead, it’s a trophy that may not be worth anything at all.

The fallacy of short-tail search terms is the assumption that it provides a return on investment. For example, if a company is spending $5,000/mo to an SEO agency to build up and maintain short-tail keyword phrases, that agency may report those SERPs as SEO ROI. Agencies have been training their clients to believe that highly ranked short-tail SERPs is ROI, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

More often than not, clients already have some short-tail keyword phrases that perform very well in SERPs. They covet their short-tail SERPs and believe that by simply being number one or number three, their website will somehow magically profit from it. However, looking deeper into their analytics can sometimes reveal a much different story. Short-tail SERPs can suffer from being too broad.

For example, a site may perform well for “blue widget” but it doesn’t necessarily mean that people who want to buy the widget will search with that short-tail term. Instead, qualified and targeted traffic may search for “best price on blue widget” more often than simply typing “blue widget” in their search query. If that’s the case, and if the website doesn’t perform well on those targeted long-tail keywords, the short-tail SERP becomes useless.

The same concept applies to referral traffic. A successful link building campaign may get a lot of high-quality inbound links to the client’s site and may improve their short-tail SERPs. However, if those referrals aren’t driving targeted traffic and if they’re only propping up poor performing short-tail keywords, then is there really any ROI to report? The answer is probably not.

The Anatomy of True SEO ROI

True SEO ROI involves driving targeted traffic from SERPs, regardless of how long or short the keyword tail is. It also includes targeted referral traffic. Targeted traffic means traffic that accomplishes the purpose and goals of the website. That could be any of the following:

• Subscriptions
• Repeat Traffic
• Community Involvement
• Registrations
• Newsletter Signups
• Purchases

What’s tricky about reporting SEO ROI is that you have to connect the links that have been built with referral traffic from websites and search engines, and then connect that data with conversion results. Although Google Analytics can help connect the dots, it’s still difficult to sync, analyze and report on that data. This is something that Raven has spent a great deal of time on — creating a relationship between Link Manager data, Analytics and our conversion tracking code. The result is what we call true SEO ROI.

True SEO ROI can show you the effectiveness of any SEO campaign. For example, if a campaign is focused on building links in forums that link to widgets on the client’s online store, then an SEO ROI report would show the success of that campaign. That report might include a list of inbound links that resulted in purchases, including details from related organic search engine traffic (matching or similar keywords used in the anchor text or within the context of the pages the links were built on) that resulted in purchases.

Each SEO ROI report should focus on and report the following key elements:

• Conversions related to the campaign
• Overall increase in conversions over time
• Conversions related to search engine traffic
• Overall increase in search engine traffic
• Overall increase in unique users and traffic

How to Calculate the ROI of Your SEO Campaigns Using Google Analytics

It can be difficult to determine the exact monetary value of SEO.

A successful SEO marketing strategy typically results in more search traffic and better rankings, and those things are what lead to more money in sales.

So how do you convince a company to hire you for SEO services without being able to promise them an exact dollar amount increase in their sales?

The answer is simple: you calculate ROI, or return on investment. But before you can calculate ROI, you need to get some conversion data from your potential clients.

Conversion Tracking for Ecommerce Sites vs. Lead-Based Businesses

It’s important to understand that tracking conversions (and ultimately ROI) will look different if you’re an e-commerce site (you sell a product) or a lead-based business (you provide a service).

Ecommerce sites have data from their online transactions that show exactly how much they make from web sales, whereas lead-based businesses have to assign a monetary value to their types of conversions.

While it’s easier and more accurate to track conversions for e-commerce, it certainly is possible for lead-based businesses.

It’s just a little more complex and the set up itself looks different. Regardless of which type of business you run, the first step in determining ROI is to set up conversion tracking.

1. Set up Conversion Tracking

Ecommerce Sites

For an e-commerce site, the first thing you want to do (if you haven’t already) is set up e-commerce tracking in Google.

Even if you aren’t planning to start an SEO campaign, you’ll need this data to determine the overall success (or failure) of your website.

After you set up tracking you’ll have access to information like your conversion rate, total number of transactions on your site, your average order value, and your total revenue.

By doing this, you can determine the exact amount of revenue generated on your website. Click here for instructions on how to set up e-commerce tracking through Google.

Lead-Based Businesses

Setting up conversion tracking for lead-based businesses is a little trickier because there aren’t actual “transactions” going on on the website that result in dollars.

BUT all you have to do to get around this is to figure out what actions your clients are taking on your site and figure out how much they’re worth.

For example, if someone lands on your site and fills out a form to request more information, you could assign that a value of $100 (how you determine this number will be explained later on).

If a potential customer signs up for your newsletter, that could be worth $50. You could assign a value based on how much time they spend on your site, or how many pages they click through. ‘

All of these actions are considered your company “goals” and should be entered into the “goals” section in Google Analytics (Admin- View- Goals in Analytics).

In the “goal details” section you’ll turn the value marker to “on” and then type in an estimated numeric value. How do you determine how much a lead is worth in dollars?

Follow these next steps:

How You Determine the Actual Worth of Your Conversions in Dollars

Let’s say for example you get 100 people each month to sign up for your company newsletter. If 25 of those customers end up hiring you to provide them with a service, then the conversion rate there is 25 percent.

If each of these 25 customers spends approximately $500 in services, then your average value of each sale is $500.

Finally, determine the value of each lead by dividing your total number of conversions by your original number of leads (people who signed up for the newsletter).

For this example, if you have 25 customers and they each spend $500, then you make $12,500. Divide that total by your original 100 leads, and you can determine that each lead (a.k.a. newsletter sign up) is worth an average of $125.

Do this for each of your “goals” and plug in the dollar value so that you have some concrete data to work with in order to calculate ROI.

2. Analyze Your Conversion Tracking

Once you’ve tracked your conversions using the above steps for approximately a month or two, you can begin to examine the data to see what kind of ROI you’re getting from SEO.

If you run a conversions report through Google Analytics, you’ll receive data on all your website traffic (i.e., how many conversions come from paid search, organic search, emails, referrals, social media, and more).

You’ll see a tab with the number of conversions listed as well as the value of these conversions. The value is essentially how much revenue has been generated from each search channel.

Compare these values with the amount of money you’ve spent on SEO during the same time period, and you can start to get a sense of your ROI.

For example, organic traffic comes from customers typing keywords into Google or another search engine, so this is directly related to SEO.

If your revenue from organic traffic is $100,000 in one month, and you paid an SEO company $20,000 to do keyword research and publish new content during that same time frame, then your ROI is $80,000.

You can do the same thing with social media channels or paid advertising – whatever area you focused your SEO efforts on (or you paid someone to focus on) is what you should be analyzing.

3. Calculate Your ROI Percentage

If you want your ROI percentage, use this formula:

(Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment.

Then, multiply the resulting number by 100 to get your ROI in terms of percentage.

For the above example, you would do:

• 100,000 – 20,000 / 20,000
• 80,000 / 20,000 equals 4
• 4 x 100 = 400

Your ROI is 400 percent.

Once you know your percentage of ROI, you can take it back to your clients and show them what the return on their investment is.

If they invested $20,000 in your SEO services, they don’t want to know that they got a 300 percent increase in organic traffic; they want the dollar amount of that traffic.

And with conversion tracking, you can give that to them. ROI typically changes from month to month, and it’s pretty common to have a negative ROI in the beginning.

It’s important to keep clients informed of the progress and to give them detailed reports of your SEO efforts vs. ROI every quarter, if not every month.

The ROI Calculator

Content marketing is an investment – particularly for driving organic traffic. It takes time. But after you continuously build the best content in your industry, search revenue from content marketing is the gift that keeps on giving; aggregating thousands, if not millions, of additional dollars each month.

This is what the Content Marketing ROI Calculator helps you discover:

You’ll get a 15-year timeline of data, filled with expense and revenue estimates, total profit to date, an ROI ratio and graphs for each year.

In order to get this data, you’ll need to input nine numbers, which are marked in red on the first tab:

You’ll input numbers based on the following questions:

1. How many linking root domains (LRDs) are needed for the domain?
2. How many LRDs do you average per piece of content?
3. How many pieces of content do you create per month?
4. How many LRDs do you get per month for all other reasons?
5. What is your estimated link attrition rate?
6. What are your content marketing expenses per month?
7. What are your SEO expenses per month?
8. If you’re creating a new web business, how much will the first, fully-completed version of your website cost? (Optional)
9. What is your target traffic value, as based on SEMRush’s “Traffic Cost” metric?

This tool was developed for you to experiment with different scenarios and give you a rough idea of what it takes to compete in search.

It’s not 100% accurate because there are several areas you can attribute different costs, and also, profit from search is obviously not a linear path. But to get you thinking and to do our best to get close to the answer, we kept it as simple and useful as possible.

It’s meant to start getting you thinking about bottom line, which may inform a more complex analysis for your own business with the variables discussed in detail in the guide. If we’ve accomplished that, we’ve done our job.

What Are The Challenges Of ROI?

When you spend $1 on marketing, how much should you expect in return?

When someone asks you, “is your marketing working,” what do you think they’re really asking? Are they asking if it’s generating awareness, generating foot traffic, or generating sales?

Anyone responsible for spending money to generate revenue (e.g. marketers) should have a simple way to know if their activity is generating business. This is why return-on-investment (ROI) is such an important metric for any business activity.

ROI is calculated using two primary metrics: the cost to do something, and the outcomes generated as a result (typically measured in profit, but for this discussion, let’s use revenue).

The standard answer to “how to calculate ROI” is a formula:

(Attributable Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

There are a few challenges with calculating return on marketing investments this way.

For one, calculating ROI for marketing can be tricky, depending on how you measure impact and costs. Figuring out what portion of sales growth is attributable to a marketing campaign can be difficult. Large corporations have complex ROI formulas and algorithms which factor dozens of different variables. 

Secondly, measuring marketing ROI manually for each marketing campaign takes time and access to company financials.

Thirdly, this approach requires patience. It could be months before knowing if a campaign was profitable.

In a nutshell, calculating marketing ROI the “traditional” way isn’t always practical. We need a better method.

So let’s shelve the complex formulas, attribution models and algorithms and focus on one simple metric: the revenue to marketing cost ratio.

What Is The Revenue To Cost Ratio?

The revenue to marketing cost ratio represents how much money is generated for every dollar spent in marketing. For example, five dollars in sales for every one dollar spent in marketing yields a 5:1 ratio of revenue to cost.

What Is A Good Marketing ROI?

A good marketing ROI is 5:1.

A 5:1 ratio is in the middle of the bell curve. A ratio over 5:1 is considered strong for most businesses, and a 10:1 ratio is exceptional. Achieving a ratio higher than 10:1 ratio is possible, but it shouldn’t be the expectation.

Your target ratio is largely dependent on your cost structure and will vary depending on your industry.

Why Use A Ratio?

Ratios are easy to understand and easy to apply. Before any marketing program or activity is started, everyone understands what it needs to generate to be successful.

Also, as long as the right tracking mechanisms are in place, everyone can quickly determine if a campaign was successful or not.

What Is Counted As A Marketing Cost?

When calculating your ratio, a marketing cost is any incremental cost incurred to execute that campaign (i.e. the variable costs). This includes:

• pay-per-click spend
• display ad clicks
• media spend
• content production costs
• outside marketing and advertising agency fees

Because full-time marketing personnel costs are fixed, they are NOT factored into this ratio.

The ratio is meant to give campaigns a simple “pass/fail” test, so the costs factored into the ratio should only occur if the campaign runs.

Why Is 5:1 A Good Ratio?

At an absolute minimum, you must cover the cost of making the product and the cost to market it.

A 2:1 revenue to marketing cost ratio wouldn’t be profitable for many businesses, as the cost to produce or acquire the item being sold (also known as cost-of-goods-sold, or COGS) is about 50% of the sale price. For these businesses, if you spend $100 in marketing to generate $200 in sales, and it costs $100 just to acquire the product being sold, you are breaking even. If all you accomplish with your marketing is break even, you might as well not do it.

Companies with higher gross margins (their COGS are LESS than 50% of the sales price) don’t need to achieve as many sales from their marketing before they become profitable. Therefore, their ratio is lower.

Meanwhile, companies with lower margins (their COGS is MORE than 50% of the sales price) need to stretch their marketing dollars further before it becomes worth doing. Their ratio would have to be higher.

Why Lifetime Value Is Critical When Calculating ROI

Lifetime value refers to the value a customer brings a business over their entire life as a customer, NOT just through their first transaction with you. Many businesses only think in terms of first transaction value and call it a day. But the customer life can be far more fruitful than that, so to accurately calculate return on investment, we need to understand the full return. 

For example, we worked with one client to set up a tracking a reporting system for the paid search campaign (PPC). Previously, we would only attribute the first sale generated from a PPC click back to the campaign. In reality, these customers would come back several times, usually from other channels, to make additional purchases. Since that customer came from the PPC campaign, PPC should continue to get credit for incremental sales made. 

Remember that chart at the beginning of this post showing $500k in revenue on $112k spend? This client had achieved the 5:1 revenue to spend ratio, but that’s not the whole story. Prior to adding repeat purchases to this chart, the return on PPC looked a lot different. And it wasn’t pretty.

When we only counted first sale revenue from PPC and not lifetime value, we weren’t even achieving a 2:1 ratio.

And here’s how the cumulative difference between first sale value and lifetime value looks over time. 

The spend never changed, but our perception of the campaign’s impact on revenue (and ultimately ROI) changed dramatically.

How Do I Calculate My Target Marketing ROI Ratio?

A CMO, CFO, or CEO will be able to calculate your target ratio. They will factor in the company’s gross margin targets, overhead expenses, and what it takes for money to hit the bottom line (the ultimate goal).

Keep in mind that achieving a 10:1 ratio every time is unrealistic, and shouldn’t be the expectation for your marketing campaigns. For most businesses, a 5:1 ratio will be the target, and anything beyond that is gravy.

It is not easy to calculate revenue generated for all marketing activity. Certain tactics like social media, content marketing, video, and display ads for a targeted audience starts long before a purchase takes place.

Marketing software platforms such as Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot do a good job of connecting early engagement to a final sale, but they are not perfect.

Just because a marketing activity can’t be measured perfectly, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered.

That being said, marketers should always work to connect the dots between activity and revenue. Advances in web analytics software and methodology provide better insight for measuring activity over time and across different devices.

Finally, marketing is about generating revenue. It’s not about art, humor, or creativity.

Marketers who aren’t serious about tying their activity back to revenue are missing the bigger picture.

Implementing a ratio, and treating it as the “golden metric” for marketing activity, will focus the team on the ultimate outcome: growing the business.

7 Ways to Increase Sales Using SEO

The survival of every business depends on sales, and in the modern climate, increasing sales requires having a strong digital presence. In 2017, E-commerce accounted for $2.3 trillion in global sales, and that number is expected to increase to $4.88 trillion by 2021. If you want your business to get a piece of those sales, then it’s critical to have a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place.

It goes without saying that the world of E-commerce is cutthroat, and learning and implementing cutting-edge SEO techniques can give you the leg up you need to get noticed online, convert more prospects into loyal customers, and ultimately boost sales. But SEO is constantly evolving, and best practices change over time, so it can be difficult to know if you’re doing everything you can to increase sales with SEO.

If this has you feeling overwhelmed, then don’t fret: there are plenty of time-honoured techniques you can implement, and today you’ll learn some great tips about the best ways to use SEO to increase sales.

1. Be Keyword Clever

Keywords in SEO aren’t used the way they once were, but they’re still a crucial part of the equation. Without keywords, prospects might never find you when they go looking, and this is why keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO strategy.

Let’s say, for instance, that your business sells handmade fly-fishing lures. An obvious keyword phrase that you’re going to want to rank for is, well, handmade fly-fishing lures. However, there are other keywords and phrases that customers are surely using to locate products just like yours, and it’s up to you to determine what they are and to start implementing them in your:

• Content
• Web pages
• URLs
• Headings
• Image descriptions
• Metadata
• Page titles
• Emails

Google AdWords is a great place to start with keyword research, but there are plenty of other keyword planning tools out there you can use. Don’t forget about longtail keywords as well, because half of all search queries are four-plus words in length, there’s less competition for these phrases, and they have higher conversion rates. When you have the right keywords in your toolbox, they’ll help connect you with prospects who are looking to buy what you’re selling.

2. Create Stellar Content

Keywords, however, are nothing without great content: instead, they’re nothing but a word salad. But content is more than just a vehicle for keywords, and instead, it is a tool you can use to convert prospects, is something valuable you can offer customers, and is a shareable resource you can use to reach new audiences.

Here’s how content can work to increase sales: when prospects search the internet for information about a product or service similar to what you offer, they’ll come across social media posts, blogs, web pages, and other content that was designed to answer their questions, provide information, and otherwise facilitate a purchasing decision.

When you work to have the best, most relevant, most engaging, and most authoritative content on the internet, prospects will find your brand before all others, and this gives you an opportunity to build relationships and convert leads into customers.

Great content comes in many forms, and your goal should be cultivating and creating content in a variety of them, including:

• Blogs
• Video (which can boost organic search results by 50 times more than text-based content)
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Animations
• User-generated content
• Guest blogs
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• How-to guides
• Lists
• Product reviews

Content is at the centre of inbound marketing, and when you have a robust inbound strategy in place and great content to drive it, then you’ll have customers knocking down your E-commerce door. However, it’s important to remember to optimize all your content with relevant keywords, and to ensure the keywords you use are pertinent to the piece and type of content you’re presenting.

3. Use Social to Grow Your Audience and Reach

Social media is one of the fastest growing elements of a comprehensive and modern SEO strategy, and this is because an increasing number of consumers are turning to these platforms to engage with brands. Nearly 80 percent of people turn to Facebook when they want to find interesting content, and this means there’s a huge opportunity there for you to reach new audiences, attract more prospects, and develop lasting relationships with customers.

Beyond that, social media is also a great way to show a more human side of your organization, it can be used as a direct marketing tool thanks to resources like Facebook Ads, and you can even use social sites to bolster your customer service efforts.

4. Go Local and Go Mobile

Two of the most significant changes to SEO best practices that have arisen in recent years are the emphasis on mobile and local content, and the two go hand in hand. Local SEO is becoming increasingly important as more consumers use mobile devices to search for businesses because 30% of all mobile searches performed today have a local intent.

Moreover, over 70% of people will visit a nearby business after conducting a local search, so if you want to drive business to your physical or E-commerce store, then you must focus on local content (including local keywords and landing pages), and you have to make sure your digital footprint is entirely mobile-friendly.

5. On-Page SEO

There are many reasons why on-page SEO is crucial to your success, so if you want to boost sales, then you must pay attention to on-page techniques. Here are a few of the reasons, briefly: on-page SEO makes your site more user-friendly, makes it easier for search engines to index your pages, will increase your search ranking, and will help you focus on optimizing essential elements like visuals. If you’re not familiar with on-page SEO, here are some of the most critical steps involved:

• Creating unique and descriptive title tags
• Increasing your page load speed to reduce bounce rates
• Writing descriptive and keyword-optimized alternative text for the images on your site
• Optimizing headings with keywords and relevant descriptions
• Linking site content with internal links to improve navigation and indexing
• Using sensible and easy-to-read URLs
• Writing meta descriptions to improve visibility on a search engine results page and improve relevance

6. Manage Your Reputation Carefully

Reputation management isn’t always something people talk about when they discuss SEO, but it’s an important element that shouldn’t be ignored. Reputation management is all about controlling what people see when they look for your business online.

For instance, say you were a restaurant that received several bad Yelp reviews in a row and got into an immature spat with a customer on Facebook. After that, any potential customer who uses the internet to decide whether or not to dine at your establishment is going to encounter the bad reviews and the social media argument before anything else, and that’s the reputation your restaurant will have from then on.

Reputation management, therefore, is all about making sure you put your best foot forward online when customers go looking for you, and you can do this by:

• Always being professional when engaging with customers online
• Regularly reviewing online reviews
• Responding to negative reviews quickly, calmly, and professionally
• Encouraging positive reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers

7. Develop an Integrated Strategy to Keep You on Track

When you want SEO to work for you, it can’t be something you do part-time or with minimal effort. To boost sales with SEO, you have to be intelligent with and dedicated to your efforts, and that means having a solid strategy that integrates all the components discussed here today. To accomplish this, you’ll need a team in place that’s familiar with SEO best practices and who can examine your company goals to create and implement a long-term strategy that will help you achieve them.

SEO is key to the success of any modern business, not only because it can increase your visibility and reach online, but also because it can help you boost sales by driving more traffic to your site, providing you with more opportunities to convert leads into customers, and giving you the tools you need to increase conversion rates. But SEO is a multifaceted creature, and the main points to focus on if you want to boost sales include:

• Researching, selecting, and implementing relevant keywords
• Using keywords strategically everywhere you can
• Creating engaging and exciting content that will delight and inform
• Making use of social media to grow your audience and develop relationships
• Focusing on local SEO
• Making sure your digital strategy is mobile-optimized
• Working hard at on-page SEO that will make sure you have a site that will attract and retain prospects
• Keeping your online reputation squeaky clean

How do You Calculate ROI For SEO?

By now, you hopefully know why it’s so important to be able to calculate your ROI from SEO. So how do you go ahead and calculate this?

1. Calculating Your SEO Investment

First, you need to calculate the cost of your investment in SEO. How do you accurately measure ROI? You need to combine the costs associated with the channel and use this as your investment figure. Typically, these costs include:

• In-house SEO resources
  Assigning the cost of in-house resources is simple if it’s people who work on SEO 100% of the time. Still, if not (let’s say roles such as developers and copywriters who likely work across multiple teams), you’ll need to break down their cost to an hourly or daily rate based upon their tracked time. So long as your team is tracking their time spent on SEO tasks, this shouldn’t be too difficult to calculate. 
• Agency resources
  If you work with an SEO agency (or are an agency looking to demonstrate the ROI of your activities to a client), then this becomes easier. The majority of agency engagements are on a retainer model, usually with a fixed monthly fee. Take any agency fees that are associated with SEO straight into your investment calculation. 
• Investment into Tools
  Tools are often the SEO investment that’s forgotten about. While some businesses put down the cost of tools and software as a technology cost, to truly understand the ROI of your SEO activity, you need to make sure you’re calculating the value of your investment by including tools. As an example, if your team uses SEMrush, take the monthly cost of the tool into your calculation, alongside any other paid-for software that you use. If there are costs involving software used by different departments, consider taking a percentage that’s attributable to the amount your team uses it compared to others. 

Combine these costs, and you should have a figure that can feed the ‘investment’ part of your ROI calculation. Just remember that these costs might change monthly, and that’s O.K. Just be sure to account for these changes when evaluating this success metric every month. 

2. Tracking and Analyzing Conversions

Calculating your ROI from SEO doesn’t involve complex formulas, as long as you know the figures to input. Since you’ve already calculated the cost of your investment, now you need to track and measure the value of your conversions. 

This isn’t the same across every website. However, there are different methods and calculations needed for eCommerce and lead generation sites. That being said, Google Analytics is your best friend here; it can help you quickly and easily capture your business’s revenue from organic search. 

Tracking eCommerce Conversion Values

If you have eCommerce tracking properly set up in Google Analytics, you’ll have access to the metrics you need. If you don’t, it’s pretty simple to set up. Head to your Analytics account and navigate your way to:

Admin > View > eCommerce Settings

A simple toggle will show you whether or not this is turned on. If it’s not, go ahead and turn it on and follow this guide to add the necessary code to your site to collect your eCommerce data and send it to Analytics.

You might need to work with your developer to do this, depending on the access you have and your level of experience. Enabling this report gives you access to a set of eCommerce reports under the Conversions tab of your Analytics view.

You can then segment these by channel to see specific data, in this instance, for organic traffic (SEO).

The key metric that you’ll want to use here is revenue.

Tracking Lead Generation Conversions Values

When you’re working with a business where the primary type of conversion is leads, it’s a little more challenging to track your conversion value. Unlike eCommerce transactions, a lead typically doesn’t have an associated value because the actual conversion usually takes place offline, as well as the fact that not every lead that’s generated will turn into a paying customer. 

At least, not unless you assign one. And you can do this in Google Analytics. Head to:

Admin > View > Goals

When setting up a new goal, you’ll either be able to choose from a template, a smart goal, or a custom goal.

Choose ‘custom’ here. Choose your goal type and you’ll then see an option for ‘Value’ on the Goal Destination screen where you can assign a monetary value to every goal.

You can use this to help you to calculate the ROI of your SEO, based on the average value of a generated lead to your business. 

Every time a goal completion is tracked, this will assign the given monetary value. But how do you go about figuring out the value to enter here? The simplest (and usually the most effective) way to do this is by using a calculation of:

Customer Lifetime Value x Lead Conversion Rate

Customer LTV is the average spend that a customer makes with a business over time, and the lead conversion rate is the percentage of leads you generate that turn into sales.

If the average lifetime value of a customer is $20,000 and your closure rate is 15%, your goal value should be set at $3,000. 

Of course, this is making certain assumptions. However, it’s a proven way to calculate the return for a business where leads are the main source of conversions. You can then grab the value of organic leads generated by heading to:

Conversions > Goals > Overview

Then, filter by organic traffic and take the ‘Goal Value.’

By this stage, you should have both the cost of your investment into SEO as well as the revenue (or value) generated. You’re ready to calculate your SEO campaign’s ROI.

3. Calculate Your Return on Investment

Once you’ve got the data you need, calculating your ROI from SEO is actually really easy.

You can do so using this formula:

(Value of Conversions – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

Let’s work out an example. Assuming that over a month, your SEO campaign generated $200,000 and that the costs associated with this were $40,000. 

Put these figures into the formula above and we get:

($200,000 – $40,000) / $40,000 = 4

For every $1 you spent on SEO in this scenario, you saw a return of $4. 

In other words, your ROI here is 400% (4 x 100 to get a percentage). That’s all there is to it. 

You can use this formula to calculate the ROI of your SEO campaign across any period you choose, so long as you know the costs and the returns.

How do You Forecast Marketing ROI?

The most basic way to calculate the ROI of a marketing campaign is to integrate it into the overall business line calculation. You take the sales growth from that business or product line, subtract the marketing costs, and then divide by the marketing cost.

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

So, if sales grew by $1,000 and the marketing campaign cost $100, then the simple ROI is 900%.

(($1000-$100) / $100) = 900%.

That’s a pretty amazing ROI, but it was picked more for round numbers than for realism.

Calculating Campaign Attributable ROI

The simple ROI is easy to do, but it is loaded with a pretty big assumption. It assumes that the total month-over-month sales growth is directly attributable to the marketing campaign.

For the marketing ROI to have any real meaning, it is vital to have comparisons. Monthly comparisons – particularly the sales from the business line in the months prior to the campaign launching – can help show the impact more clearly.

To really get at the impact, however, you can get a little more critical. Using a 12-month campaign lead up, you can calculate the existing sales trend. If sales are seeing an organic growth on average of 4% per month over the last 12-month period, then your ROI calculation for the marketing campaign should strip out 4% from the sales growth.

As a result, it becomes:

(Sales Growth – Average Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

So, let’s say we have a company that averages 4% organic sales growth and they run a $10,000 campaign for a month. The sales growth for that month is $15,000. As mentioned, 4% ($600) of that is organic based on historical monthly averages. The calculation goes:

($15,000 – $600 – $10,000) / $10,000 = 44%

In this example, taking out organic growth only dropped the number from 50% to 44%, but that is still stellar by any measure. In real life, however, most campaigns bring much more modest returns, so taking out organic growth can make a big difference.

On the flip side, however, companies with negative sales growth need to value the slowing of the trend as a success.

For example, if sales dropped $1,000 a month on average for the previous 12-month period and a $500 marketing campaign results in a sales drop of only $200 that month, then your calculation centers on the $800 ($1,000 – $200) you avoided losing despite the established trend.

So even though sales dropped, your campaign has an ROI of 60% (($800 – $500) / $500) – a stellar return in the first month of a campaign allowing you to defend sales before growing them.

How do You Measure Success in Content Marketing?

Once you have a fair idea of your content marketing’s “why,” you can dive into the following metrics that any content marketer worth their salt should be monitoring closely.

1. Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of online content. If nobody is landing on your website, it doesn’t matter how amazing your blog posts are – nobody will read them, so they won’t be doing you any good.

If you want to strip it back to basics, traffic is one metric that you must measure. Of course, you can split this traffic up into different categories. In Google Analytics, the metrics you want to be looking at are:

Users – the total number of unique visitors to your page

Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed

Unique pageviews – If a single user has viewed your page multiple times, these visits are combined into one pageview to calculate this metric.

You can use the raw data from these metrics to get a rough idea of the amount of traffic coming to individual pages on your site. You can also break down the data to see where your traffic is coming from (geographically and how they found your site online) and the type of device they used to view your site.

This information can be useful to know for your future content strategy. For example, if you target U.S. customers primarily, but you’re getting a significant amount of traffic from the U.K., you can tailor future content to your U.K. visitors. Or, if a large proportion of your traffic is coming from one of your social media channels, you can tailor your content based on your social media followers’ data.

2. Conversions

So people are visiting your site and reading your blog – excellent. But what else are they doing when they’ve finished reading? Are they clicking your links and reading more? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Completing an e-commerce transaction?

For B2B brands, the ultimate conversion is leads or even direct sales. Few buyers will move from not knowing who you are to buying directly from a fantastic article. So, B2B brands should track all the way down the buyer journey from lighter conversions like subscriptions or click-throughs to deeper conversions like offer registrations.

It’s up to you what counts as a conversion. In some cases, the goal of your content might be to make a physical sale, while in others, it just might be to raise awareness of your brand and increase your authority. If this is the case, you might want to focus more on social shares and engagement metrics.

However, if your blog is primarily a sales tool, you’re going to want to track how many sales it generates. You can do this after activating ecommerce in Google Analytics by viewing the page value of all your content under the behavior section.

This will give you the average revenue that each page has generated when users have gone directly to make a purchase or complete another goal you’ve set.

3. Engagement

Sometimes the amount of traffic your content gets is more a measure of how effective you are at getting people to click your links, rather than how good your content is.

To really find out if people are engaging with your content, you’ll need to track how long they’re spending on your site and how many pages they’re visiting in each session.

Obviously, the goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible so they can read more of your content (unless, of course, you want to funnel them to a sales page as quickly as possible.)

You can see this information under Audience Overview in Google Analytics. Here, as well as seeing your total number of sessions and visitors, you can see the average number of pages per session, the average session duration, and your bounce rate.

Ideally, for content that’s designed to be read, you want a high number of pages per session, a long average session duration (depending on the length of your content), and a low bounce rate.

Another effective way to measure your content engagement is to see how well it performs on social media.

While there are various metrics you can track here, the most important is how many times your content has been shared on multiple social networks. A share shows that others are finding your content valuable.

This information isn’t available in Google Analytics, but if you have social share buttons on each piece of content, they will show you how many times that content has been shared on each platform.

BuzzSumo is another tool for tracking social media shares and is an easy way to identify the top-performing content on your site quickly.

You can also track the amount of traffic you’re getting from social platforms, which is another good way of measuring engagement. More clicks from social media mean that more people are sharing and interacting with your content. You can find this information under Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals in Google Analytics.

4. SEO Performance

Not all your traffic will come from social media. You must be getting plenty of visitors from search too. You can track the proportion of your site visits that come from search in Google Analytics, but this doesn’t give you much insight into whether your site is performing well in search engines or not.

Instead, you’ll need to measure your SEO performance. There are a few different metrics you can track here. SERP ranking is probably the most important one – this is your page’s position in the search engine results for a particular keyword phrase.

Rankings aren’t static and tend to fluctuate a little, but when you’re tracking your ranking over time, you want to see it either static (if you’re already in a good spot) or improving, which shows you are gaining trust and authority.

You can use Google Search Console to identify the terms you’re ranking for and keep an eye on how your ranking changes over time.

Better SEO will lead to higher traffic numbers, more leads, and hopefully more sales and conversions.

5. Authority

Authority is not quite as easy to measure as most of the other metrics, but it’s still important to try to increase your authority over time.

High authority will not only improve your SEO, meaning you get more search traffic, but it will also help to build your brand, increase trust, and improve your conversion rate.

Moz has its own authority metrics that you can use as a rough guide for how Google might judge your page and site’s authority. These DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater authority.

There’s no definitive answer on what’s a “good” DA and PA to aim for – you basically just want a higher score than your competitors.

What is Roi in SEO?

Return on Investment (ROI) is what every client wants from a search marketing agency. It’s an easy thing to calculate if you’re doing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.

If your revenue is higher than your spend, PPC management fees and cost of goods, then your client is getting a return on their investment. Although it’s simple to figure out ROI for PPC, the same cannot be said for search engine optimization (SEO).

Search marketing agencies that provide SEO services have traditionally reported ROI in a variety of ways. The most common approach to SEO ROI has been search engine ranking.

If a company can get a client to perform well in organic SERPs, often times focusing on a handful of short-tail keywords, then they’ve done their job. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly SEO ROI. Instead, it’s a trophy that may not be worth anything at all.

True SEO ROI can show you the effectiveness of any SEO campaign. For example, if a campaign is focused on building links in forums that link to widgets on the client’s online store, then an SEO ROI report would show the success of that campaign.

That report might include a list of inbound links that resulted in purchases, including details from related organic search engine traffic (matching or similar keywords used in the anchor text or within the context of the pages the links were built on) that resulted in purchases.

Each SEO ROI report should focus on and report the following key elements:

• Conversions related to the campaign
• Overall increase in conversions over time
• Conversions related to search engine traffic
• Overall increase in search engine traffic
• Overall increase in unique users and traffic

Content Marketing ROI Statistics

The Internet is full of research and data on content marketing, and to help you make your case, we’ve pulled 37 stats that are sure to resonate with your C-suite.

1. According to an Ad Age study, the top hiring barriers employers cited are finding skilled talent (65%), the cost of quality staff (30%), attracting top talent (21%), retaining top talent (16%), and culture fit (26%).

2. “You are more likely to complete Navy SEAL training than click on a banner ad.”

3. Every day, 27 million pieces of content are shared.

4. 86% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers use content marketing.

5. 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did one year ago.

6. 48% of marketers use dedicated content to support three to five buying stages.

7. 4 of every 5 marketing leaders have integrated content into their advertising programs, typically as part of their brand messaging.

8. 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content.  

9. 70% of consumers say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company.

10. 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement.

11. 68% of consumers spend time reading content from brands they are interested in.

12. “The Future of Digital Marketing” — a study of 262 digital marketing executives — revealed that only 42% of companies are made up of 100% permanent workers, and that number is expected to decrease to 23% in the next 12 to 18 months as companies continue to outsource key roles.

13. 60% of those who have a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness, compared with 32% who have a verbal strategy.

14. 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content and say it’s the most effective social media platform.

15. 58% of B2B marketers use search engine marketing, making it the most commonly used paid method for promoting and distributing content.

How to Measure Content Marketing Performance

All good content marketers know that it’s vital to monitor and analyze the performance of individual pieces of content on a regular basis.

This data will help to not only identify poor-performing content that can be improved, but also to find your best-performing content. Sometimes the content that you think is the best quality just doesn’t resonate with your audience.

Data analytics can help you to find the perfect “recipe” for your content marketing, so you can rinse and repeat to ultimate content marketing success.

1. Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of online content. If nobody is landing on your website, it doesn’t matter how amazing your blog posts are – nobody will read them and so they won’t be doing you any good.

If you really want to strip it back to basics, traffic is one metric that you must measure. Of course, this traffic can be split up into different categories. In Google Analytics, the metrics you want to be looking at are:

• Users – the total number of unique visitors to your page
• Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed
• Unique pageviews – If a single user has viewed your page multiple times, these visits are combined into one pageview to calculate this metric.

You can use the raw data from these metrics to get a rough idea of the amount of traffic coming to individual pages on your site. You can also breakdown the data further to see where your traffic is coming from (both geographically and how they found your site online) and the type of device they used to view your site.

This information can be useful to know for your future content strategy. For example, if you target primarily US customers but you’re getting a significant amount of traffic from the UK, you can tailor future content to your UK visitors.

Or if a large proportion of your traffic is coming from one of your social media channels, you can tailor your content based on your social media followers’ data.

2. Sales or Conversions

So people are visiting your site and reading your blog – great. But what else are they doing when they’ve finished reading? Are they clicking your links and reading more? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Completing an e-commerce transaction?

It’s up to you what counts as a conversion. In some cases, the goal of your content might be to make a physical sale, while in others it just might be to raise awareness of your brand and increase your authority. If this is the case you might want to focus more on metrics such as social shares and engagement.

However, if your blog is primarily a sales tool, you’re going to want to track how many sales it generates. You can do this after activating e-commerce in Google Analytics by viewing the page value of all your content under the behavior section.

This will give you the average revenue that each page has generated for you when users have gone directly to make a purchase or complete another goal that you’ve set.

3. Engagement

Sometimes the amount of traffic your content gets is more a measure of how effective you are at getting people to click your links, rather than how good your content is.

To really find out if people are engaging with your content, you’ll need to track how long they’re spending on your site and how many pages they’re visiting in each session.

Obviously, the goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible so they can read more of your content (unless of course, you want to funnel them to a sales page as quickly as possible.)

You can see this information under Audience Overview in Google Analytics. Here, as well as seeing your total number of sessions and visitors, you can see the average number of pages per session, the average session duration, and your bounce rate.

For content that’s designed to be read, ideally, you want a high number of pages per session, long average session duration (depending on the length of your content) and a low bounce rate.

4. Social Media Engagement

Another effective way to measure your content engagement is to see how well it’s performing on social media.

While there are various metrics you can track here, the most important is how many times your content has been shared on various social networks. A share shows that others are finding your content valuable.

This information isn’t available in Google Analytics but if you have social share buttons on each piece of content, they will show you how many times that content has been shared on each platform.

Buzzsumo is another tool for tracking social media shares and is an easy way to quickly identify the top performing content on your site.

You can also track the amount of traffic you’re getting from social platforms, which is another good way of measuring engagement. More clicks from social platforms mean that more people are sharing and interacting with your content. You can find this information under Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals in Google Analytics.

5. SEO Performance

Not all your traffic will come from social media, so it’s important that you’re getting plenty of visitors from search too. You can track the proportion of your site visits that come from search in Google Analytics, but this doesn’t give you much insight into whether your site is performing well in search engines or not.

Instead, you’ll need to measure your SEO performance. There are a few different metrics you can track here. SERP ranking is probably the most important one – this is the position of your page in the search engine results for a particular keyword phrase.

Rankings aren’t static and do tend to fluctuate a little, but when you’re tracking your ranking over time you want to see it either static (if you’re already in a good spot) or improving, which shows you are gaining trust and authority.

You can use Google Search Console to identify the terms you’re ranking for and keep an eye on how your ranking changes over time.

Better SEO will lead to higher traffic numbers, more leads, and hopefully more sales and conversions.

6. Authority 

Authority is not quite as easy to measure as most of the other metrics, but it’s still important to try to increase your authority over time.

High authority will not only improve your SEO, meaning you get more search traffic, but it will also help to build your brand, increase trust, and improve your conversion rate.

Moz has its own authority metrics that you can use as a rough guide for how Google might judge the authority of your page and site. These DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) scores range from 1-100, with higher scores corresponding to greater authority.

There’s no definitive answer on what’s a “good” DA and PA to aim for – you basically just want a higher score than your competitors.

While these scores can be a handy thing to keep track of, there are other less definitive ways of tracking your real-world authority. Metrics such as links to your content, mentions of your brand on social media and media coverage are all indications that your authority and brand presence is growing.

Content Marketing ROI Calculator

To determine the value of content marketing efforts, marketers would benefit from a content marketing return on investment (ROI) calculator. A content marketing ROI calculator removes a lot of the friction associated with determining content marketing return on investment.

According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, 47% of B2B marketers and 34% of B2C marketers don’t measure the ROI of their content marketing efforts.

Let’s say you head up marketing for an enterprise brand, and you want to measure the ROI for your company blog. The first step is to calculate your investment.

Content Marketing Investment

The largest expense is labor costs. Let’s say you have 15 content writers, four editors, two designers, a social media coordinator, a head of content, and a head of SEO, all of whom work predominantly on producing and promoting content for your blog.

You pay your content writers a total of $70,000 per year, including salary, benefits, and equipment. Your editors make $95,000 per year, your designers make $80,000 per year, your social media coordinator makes $80,000 per year, and your head of content and head of SEO make $110,000 per year each. 

That’s roughly $1.9 million per year on labor costs alone, or roughly $157,500 per month.

But then there’s also promotion. Maybe you spend another $50,000 per month promoting your blog through ads. Maybe you also work with an agency on promotion, and they charge $10,000 per month. Plus another $5,000 per month for your content management system, and $15,000 per month for your content intelligence software. 

Combined, you’re looking at an Investment of $237,500 per month on your company blog.

Now you need to figure out the return.

Content Marketing Return

Calculating content marketing Return requires understanding which actions lead to sales. Let’s say your blog averages 1.5 million pageviews per month. 

If you consider the industry average conversion rate from pageview to lead is 2.35% via organic search, that means you’re generating 32,250 leads per month.

Your sales team’s conversion rate from a lead is 2%. That means your blog generates 705 new sales every month.

The average selling price for your product is $6,750, and your average profit margin is 10%. To find how much each customer is worth to your business, multiply your profit margin by your average selling price. In this case, the average customer is worth $1,200 ($20,000 x 12%).

If your blog generates 705 new customers a month, that means it creates $475,875 per month on average in net revenue. That’s the Return.

To calculate the ROI, you’d then subtract the investment in your blog from the Return, and divide that number by the investment. 

Your ROI for your blog is 100.4%.

Not bad.

Keep in mind that this example applies more to a B2B business, where there’s lots of visibility into each sale. With B2C companies, it can be more difficult to determine ROI, because the customer journey isn’t always clear. 

For a B2C business, you may need to survey your customers to find out how many are reading your blog, and if the blog readers have a higher average selling price than the non-blog readers. You’d then figure out the average selling price of the blog-reading customers, and divide that by your profit margin to find the Return.

Once you have the ROI for every content channel, add them all together and divide by the number of content channels, you can determine the overall ROI of your content marketing efforts.

For example, if your blog has a 58% ROI, your podcast has a 34% ROI, and your webinar series has a 15% ROI, your overall ROI would be 35.6%.

What Metrics Are Used to Measure Content Marketing ROI?

To measure ROI, there are seven key metrics you need to monitor. These are: 

1. Web traffic

This is a volume metric that is the easiest to measure. 

It involves looking at the flow of traffic on every page of your website. Monitoring web traffic enables you to know which content is popular among your audience. The easiest way to measure this metric is through the use of analytics software. 

Google Analytics is preferred by most people, but you can explore other options. In measuring web traffic, analytics software provides data that enables you to evaluate varying traffic aspects. These include:

• Overall web traffic
• Source of traffic (communication channels)
• Views per page
• Average time spent on page
• Referral traffic
• Popular landing pages 
• Unique sessions

This information is invaluable when it comes to making content promotion decisions. For instance, if your site’s overall traffic is low, it means you need to focus more on promoting your content. 

To effectively do this, use the source of traffic data to identify communication channels that drive the highest traffic to the site. Use those channels in future content promotion campaigns. 

While web traffic can show you how successful your content marketing efforts are, it has its own limitations. For instance, traffic to your site can fluctuate because of variables like changes in SEO trends, site updates, promotional offers, and holidays. 

2. Qualified leads

The main reason B2B companies engage in content marketing is to generate more leads. 

The success of content marketing efforts can, therefore, be determined by looking at the number of qualified leads generated.

But, why measure leads? Am glad you asked. 

Remember the content marketing goal we discussed earlier? 

B2B companies engage in content marketing to attract and retain prospects. After that, they encourage those leads to take actions that result in sales. 

The sole purpose of measuring leads is to answer two key questions – are we attracting prospects? And, are those prospects likely to buy from us?

When you craft your content marketing strategy around lead generation, you can generate three times more leads at 60% less cost. 

When measuring ROI, your focus should be on qualified leads. These are prospects that show interest in making a purchase.   

So, how do you measure qualified leads?

There are three main ways to do this:

• Keep taps of call-to-action (CTAs). For instance, looking at the number of white paper request forms completed 
• Track the number of content downloads
• Look at the purchases completed

3. Sales volume

Once your content marketing efforts generate more leads, the next thing you need to measure is sales.

The sales volume metric is at the heart of your content marketing goal because ultimately, you want to turn your prospects into customers. 

Once you have your leads captured, nurture them by sharing the right content. In the end, you should have some of them make a purchase. 

You will definitely need to optimize the sales pages on your site to drive conversions if you own an ecommerce site.  

So, how do you measure ROI using the sales volume metric?

You need to look at several sales aspects of your analytics software to do this successfully. These include:

• Page Value:  This is sales performance data that shows which pages on your website contribute the highest revenue
• Transactions: This is the number of purchases that are completed at any given time.
• Conversion rates: This shows the percentage of website visitors that actually make a purchase
• Time to Purchase: This shows you how many days visitors take to complete a purchase

If you own an ecommerce site, you can easily get this data on each of these aspects by enabling ecommerce on your Google Analytics. This way, you can tell how much sales revenue is generated directly from your site at any given time.

4. Click-through-rate (CTR)

If you are driving traffic to your content pages, you expect your visitors to take action. 

You can tell whether they are doing this or not by tracking your click-through-rates (CTR). The CTR metric shows you the number of visitors who click on specific links out of all those who visited your website, advert, or email. 

You can use CTR to measure ROI for advertising campaigns that you run on emails, social media, or websites.  

Calculating CTR is pretty easy, let’s look at an example. 

If you are running an online advert on Facebook and you establish that 5,000 saw it, but only 500 clicked it. 

CTR = 5,000 / 500 = 10

You can say your CTR is 10%. 

5. Social media shares

Want to know whether the content you are creating and distributing is of high quality? 

Check whether it is attracting social shares. 

Social media has become a major communication platform for both companies and customers. Measuring social shares gives you an idea of which content resonates well with your target audience. 

To measure social media engagement, you can track:

• Likes
• Comments
• Content shares
• Views for video campaigns
• Increase in followers

Interestingly, each of these social media elements has its place. 

Content shares expose your brand and content more to your audience. Likes and followers show you how popular your content is. Comments tell you how well your audience is interacting with the content

Social media engagement is easy to measure – most platforms come with inbuilt analytic systems. For instance, Instagram and Facebook use the Business Manager system to generate analytics for users. 

Even so, there are other options out there that can help you generate detailed analytics for your content marketing campaigns. 

For instance, BuzzSumo can help you find articles and topics that get shared more on social media platforms. Leverage this information to boost your content for more shares.

6. Search engine optimization (SEO)

This is certainly the most important measure of content marketing success – but it’s not that easy to nail. 

If you decide to measure ROI using SEO – the first thing you’ll need to do is conduct a technical audit on your site. This will show you which keywords are already being ranked and others that will be great to rank. 

There are three key aspects you need to pay attention to when measuring ROI with SEO:

1. Site authority

This involves looking at improvements in your site’s domain authority. Some pointers to this could be: 

• Increments in the time that people spend on your site
• People linking back to your site 
• Improved page scores 

2. Keyword ranking

This requires you to look at your site’s keyword performance. Ideally, your content marketing efforts should convert on certain keywords, long-tail phrases, and brand keywords for your SEO performance to improve. 

The best way to target keywords for your site is to find a tool that gives insights on keyword data like volume, CPC, and clicks. There is a host of free tools to choose from including:

• Google Trends
• Search Console 
• Google Keyword Planner

You can also use paid tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to boost your efforts. 

3. Backlinks

These are a huge deal in SEO tracking because they help you stamp authority in your industry. Though they may not generate conversions for you, it pays off to find out which inbound links are connecting to your content. 

7. Onsite engagement

To succeed in content marketing, you need to keep your audience engaged.

This metric enables you to measure engagement by transcending web traffic and beginning to look at how your visitors are interacting with your content. 

There are two aspects that you can use to track onsite engagement – bounce rate and time on page. 

The bounce rate shows how long your visitors stay on your site or how often they come back to it. 

A low bounce rate is good – it means people are taking time to explore your site and are even returning to it. 

It also tells you that your content strategy is working. With this kind of bounce rate, you should be able to generate more leads and ultimately, sales from the content you produce. 

For “Time on Page”, the focus is on the duration visitors spend on specific pages. It allows you to identify pages that are not generating the attention you wanted and improve them. 

The easiest way to track onsite engagements is to pay attention to engagement data that your analytics software generates. On Google Analytics, you will find this data on the ‘Audience Overview’ section.  

Content Marketing Analytics

To have a winning marketing strategy, you need to understand the analytics behind that strategy — analytics that highlight important things like: 1) the metrics you care about most, 2) how your current strategy is doing, 3) how close you are to reaching your goals, and 4) areas for improvement.

There are a number of marketing analytics tools available with customizable metrics, a variety of visualizations and dashboards, and integrations to help you measure the impact of your marketing strategy.

1. Buffer

Buffer’s content marketing analytics offers the option to build reports according to your goals. Add or remove custom metrics about the performance of numerous social media accounts. You can export those reports to share them easily.

Reports are updated daily so you can be sure you’re receiving timely data. Buffer’s analytics are designed to help you see channel performance at a detailed level on one dashboard.

The software also offers engagement metrics for each account individually. This helps you gain an intricate understanding of how customers are interacting with social content. Measure stories, posts, and hashtag performance as well as access the demographics of your audience across channels.

Price

Buffer’s Marketing Analytics product, Analyze, has two payment options with different features and flexibility that cost $35 per month or $50 per month.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics has an expansive system of tools for content marketing analysis. The intuitive interface is easy to navigate and can be used to understand the performance of your content across multiple platforms.

The analytics tool integrates with Google’s array of business software so you can access all of your insights in one place.

Price

Google Analytics offers a free and a paid plan. The free plan is ideal for SMBs and you can get started using it immediately. Meanwhile, the paid plan, called Analytics 360, is ideal for enterprise-level companies and requires you to speak with a sales rep for a quote.

3. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb provides traffic and engagement industry standards and tells you where your website stands among them. This information is useful for discovering how performance stacks up against the competition.

With SimilarWeb, break down your daily active users, sessions per user, use-time, and rank. Discover more information about your audience — such as repeated behaviors or interests — to improve your acquisition strategy.

Price

SimilarWeb offers two plans, one of which is free and another that’s meant for enterprise businesses and requires you to contact a rep for a consultation.

4. Moz

Moz measures the impact of your search-engine-optimized content. Gain insight into how your work is ranking among others in your industry and which keywords are the most effective to use in your strategy.

Moz’s software tracks your site’s keyword rank and how visible it is overtime to learn what is and isn’t performing well among audiences. Additionally, track how competitors rank on search engine results pages (SERPS) — this allows you to spot areas for improvement and the parts of your campaign you can use to target them. To help with this, use Moz’s detailed reports to see how your content is reaching audiences and what you can do to improve.

Price

There are two main Moz solutions, Local and Pro. Both Local and Pro have different plans ranging in features, flexibility, and price. Local ranges in price from $129-299 while Pro ranges in price from $99-599 per month.

5. Hotjar

Use Hotjar to track sessions on your site. Hotjar provides heat maps about how and where customers spend their time while on your website. In fact, there are real-time videos that capture how visitors are navigating and using your website.

This allows you to hone in on the content that’s catching your customer’s eye. You can also track conversions and make inferences about which stage of the buyer’s journey customers might be entering or leaving.

Price

Hotjar offers three types of plans. There are two options for those who want a Personal plan that are either free or $39 per month. These options are ideal for personal and low-traffic websites.

The Business plans range in price from $99-$989 per month depending on the number of sessions per day you receive. Lastly, the Agency plan requires you to contact a rep to chat about a plan for your team and clients.

6. Semrush

Semrush is used for search engine optimization (SEO) tracking and helps you track keyword performance in your content as well as monitor brand mentions cross-platform.

Additionally, the tool tracks Google rankings and which of your web pages receive the most traffic. This is helpful because discovering what drives visitors to your site allows you to adjust the content you’re presenting accordingly.

Price

Semrush offers three plans that range in price from $119 to $449 per month.

What is Content Performance?

Content production is great at face value, but ultimately, business results are what matter. Digital marketers are struggling to measure how their content performs, how it stacks up against the competition, and how it delivers quantifiable business impact.

Content performance marketing is reaching a tipping point where in order to justify continued investment, marketers need a systematic way to measure and continually optimize its performance.

BrightEdge defines content performance marketing as “quantifiable metrics that allow marketers to measure direct business results such as revenue, online conversion and ROI.”

Content Marketing Measurement Framework

Having identified your business goals, you can now dive deeper into the content marketing metrics that influence your content’s impact. For simplicity sake, let’s break these marketing metrics into four steps:

1. Discovery
2. Engagement
3. Conversion
4. Social Share

First, your content needs to be discoverable. If the content is pre-optimized by SEO best practices, its likelihood of discovery increases substantially. Then, the content needs to engage with the visitors that consume it. Internet visitors have a short attention span. If they don’t see relevant and valuable information within seconds, they leave your site.

In order for your content to support your business goals, you need to build a trusting relationship with your visitor. To drive business results, any of your content will need to be measured by how well it can advance the reader further into the Buyer’s Journey.

Use a Call-to-Action for each piece of content to guide them into establishing a deeper relationship with you and nurture them into a paying customer eventually. Lastly, don’t be shy with individuals who have interacted with your content and found it valuable.  Ask them to advocate on your behalf. This is where social sharing comes into play.

Which is The Best Measure of Content Marketing Effectiveness?

Measurement is the key to optimizing any process, and marketing campaigns are no exception. When you establish and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for your marketing campaigns, you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t.

You can then direct your marketing dollars toward the most effective campaigns to achieve marketing success. Here are some of the common KPIs you should measure for each of your campaigns, regardless of the type, channel or medium:

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on Investment measures the sales revenue a campaign brings on every dollar spent.  For example, if John spent $1,000 on a campaign that generated $5,000 in sales, John’s ROI is $4,000 or 400%. This is the best KPI to measure the effectiveness of all marketing campaigns because it also measures the quality of leads these campaigns generate.

Cost per Win (Sale)

Cost per Win measures the expense of each sale. Let’s say that John’s campaign resulted in five sales. With a $1,000 budget, that is $200 per sale.  This important metric compares the campaigns to each other.

Cost per Lead

Cost per Lead measures the cost-effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This metric focuses entirely on the leads generated by the campaign. Since it factors out the sales process it doesn’t measure the quality of leads.

Using the example from above, let’s say the five sales resulted from 10 leads. With the same $1,000 budget, that is a cost of $100 per lead.

Conversion Rate (or Goal Completion Rate)

Just as you measure your website’s conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who have converted into leads or customers), you should also measure the same for individual campaigns.

For example, if a campaign brought in 1,000 visitors, from which John got 10 leads, that is a 1% conversion rate. The conversion rate combined with bounce rate and other behavior information reveals a great deal about the quality of traffic to the website.

Incremental Sales

Incremental Sales measures the contribution of marketing efforts toward the sales numbers. Incremental sales show the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in generating sales, and are a great way to compare your marketing efforts. For example, if John’s sales for the month were $500,000, the campaign from above resulted in 1% of his total sales.

Purchase Funnel

Using Google Analytics (or a similar tool) you should also measure and analyze the sales process for the leads generated by each marketing campaign (for example, conversions and percentages for visits, interactions, leads and sale). This can help you find drop off points that can tell you more about your traffic or your sales cycle.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value measures the lifetime value of your customers by utilizing the following formula: “average sale per customer” multiplied by “average number of times a customer buys per year” multiplied by “average retention time in years for a typical customer.”

This data will certainly take time to compile, but by calculating the CLV, you can see which of the marketing efforts generate your best customers.

What is KPI in SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs are values used by marketing teams to measure the performance of their website for organic search results. Search engine optimization is a core function for any marketing team.

In order for teams to really understand their search marketing performance, it’s important to measure seo metrics and track changes month over month. This analysis can help determine top performing pages, top converting keywords, and areas of your website that need to be optimized for search.

What is ROI Formula?

The return on investment (ROI) formula is as follows:

ROI=Current Value of Investment−Cost of InvestmentCost of Investment/​ROI=Cost of Investment

“Current Value of Investment” refers to the proceeds obtained from the sale of the investment of interest. Because ROI is measured as a percentage, it can be easily compared with returns from other investments, allowing one to measure a variety of types of investments against one another.

Understanding Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI is a popular metric because of its versatility and simplicity. Essentially, ROI can be used as a rudimentary gauge of an investment’s profitability. This could be the ROI on a stock investment, the ROI a company expects on expanding a factory, or the ROI generated in a real estate transaction.

The calculation itself is not too complicated, and it is relatively easy to interpret for its wide range of applications. If an investment’s ROI is net positive, it is probably worthwhile. But if other opportunities with higher ROIs are available, these signals can help investors eliminate or select the best options. Likewise, investors should avoid negative ROIs, which imply a net loss.

For example, suppose Jo invested $1,000 in Slice Pizza Corp. in 2017 and sold the shares for a total of $1,200 one year later. To calculate the return on this investment, divide the net profits ($1,200 – $1,000 = $200) by the investment cost ($1,000), for a ROI of $200/$1,000, or 20%.

With this information, one could compare the investment in Slice Pizza with any other projects. Suppose Jo also invested $2,000 in Big-Sale Stores Inc. in 2014 and sold the shares for a total of $2,800 in 2017. The ROI on Jo’s holdings in Big-Sale would be $800/$2,000, or 40%.

What is a Good ROI Percentage?

There isn’t just one answer to this question. A “good” ROI depends on several factors.

The most important consideration in determining a good ROI is your financial need. For example, suppose a young couple is investing to pay for college tuition for their newborn child. A good ROI for them will be one that enables their initial and ongoing investments to grow enough to pay for college expenses 18 years down the road.

This young family’s definition of a good ROI would be different from that of a retiree who’s seeking to supplement their income. The retiree would consider a good ROI to be a rate of return that generates sufficient recurring income to enable them to live comfortably.

Of course, one retiree’s definition of living comfortably could differ from another’s, so their definitions of a good ROI could differ as well.

It’s also important to consider what you’re investing in to evaluate what would be a good rate of return.

Finally, remember that creating and maintaining a comprehensive strategy that prioritizes all of these elements is just as important as the elements themselves because that’s the best way to ensure you build a well-oiled SEO machine that will help you boost sales.