How to put a dollar value on your content

The formula for calculating ROI is so simple that I will share it right here, in the introduction of the article:

 ((Return from content − cost of content) / cost of content) * 100

If your content marketing generated $10,000 in sales and cost $2,000 to create, that’s a 400% ROI:

(($10,000 - $2,000) / $2,000) * 100 = 400%

While the math is simple, performing this exercise in real life is complicated, for a few reasons. Most importantly: It’s pretty difficult to put a dollar value on every single benefit of your content marketing.

I’ll explain why and then show you 3 practical ways to quickly calculate the ROI of your content marketing.

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

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

If you have an entirely internal team, with team members dedicating 100% of their efforts to content, the costs are just as simple: they’re their salaries.

But things can get a little tricky if your content comes from multiple sources (like a combination of freelancers, agencies, and internal team members) or if multiple people contribute to your content in relatively small ways (like a designer who dedicates a third of their time on content and two thirds on product marketing).

But this is still simple compared to our next complication:

The most obvious benefit of content marketing: attracts new customers. In theory we can add up all the new customers who found and purchased our product thanks to our content marketing and calculate how much money they spent (I’ll explain how in the next section).

But content has many other benefits that are less easy to measure. Can:

• Encourage upsells and expansion. By sharing product tips and new use cases, content can provide the push needed to turn free users into power users or “Lite” plan customers into “Advanced” plan users, like my 5 Ahrefs use cases favorites for content marketers.
• Save money on customer support. Content can help answer customer questions before they become support requests, such as the many guides we’ve published to help users understand how metrics like Traffic Value are calculated and how they can be used.
• Build brand recognition and affinity. Content can give your brand a voice, sharing the motivations and beliefs behind the products or services you sell. We generally like to buy from companies we respect, so “brand affinity” can make a real difference to your bottom line.
• Makes paid search advertising more effective. Sending paid search traffic to articles instead of “traditional” landing pages can reduce the cost of clicks (something we’ve done for articles like our keyword research guide).
• Help other pages perform better. A page that generates lots of backlinks but no sales (like our SEO stats list) can still contribute revenue by helping other “money” pages rank better for their target keywords.

Many of these benefits are virtually invisible (how do you measure support requests whose content has stopped existing?) but very real. No matter how you calculate ROI, there’s a good chance you’re underestimating its impact.

Which brings us to our next complication:

Determining the role content plays in a sale is called “attribution” and is quite complicated to define.

Someone has converted because of an article or Despite It? When they read multiple articles, which had the greatest impact? If someone buys because of an ad, should we still give credit to the blog post they read earlier?

Additionally, customer journeys are rarely as simple as we hope. A person could read 50 articles and never buy anything; another might read a single article, disappear for a year, and immediately purchase it. What role did content play in those journeys?

There are several ways to measure attribution to help with some of this uncertainty:

• Attribution on first touch accredit the First piece of content that a visitor interacts with before converting.
• Last-touch attribution accredit the last piece of content.
• Multi-touch attribution try to give credit Everything is fine part of content involved in the purchasing process.

But in any case, attribution is never perfect: we simply can’t measure every interaction someone has with our content.

In a perfect world, we would know exactly how much revenue each 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)

To solve this problem, we need to calculate the number of new customers generated by our content in a given period. If you don’t know this figure, you’ll need to set up some sort of conversation tracking in software like Google Analytics, which allows you to track the number of people who complete a desired action on your blog post (like filling out a form or starting a free trial )

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

• The number of conversions your content generates (e.g. sign-ups for free trials or demo requests) e
• The number of conversions that became 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 revenue attributed to 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 a product and most customers only purchase once, our ACV will be the price of our product. If we offer more products or add-ons and customers regularly purchase or set up subscriptions, our ACV will be much higher.

Let’s say our conversion analytics shows that we had 1,000 free trial signups from our content in February, and that 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 $200,000:

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

This method is the gold standard for ROI calculations, but (due to the issues mentioned above) calculating ROI this way can be extremely complicated.

On the other end of the spectrum, here’s a quick and easy method that takes about 30 seconds using Ahrefs:

Return from content marketing = (monthly traffic value * content lifetime in months)

Instead of calculating how much revenue we have generated from our content, this method estimates how much money we have saved ranking organically for keywords instead of paying for advertising.

In Ahrefs, you can estimate the traffic value of any article: the amount it would cost to generate the same traffic through Google Ads, instead of SEO.

Below, we can see that it would cost around $44,000 to “replace” traffic to our list of free SEO tools using ads:

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

In other words, if we used paid advertising to get the same number of visits from the same keywords, we would have to spend about $790,000 on ads each month.

Most content is useful for more than a month, so we can multiply this monthly traffic value by the expected “useful life” of our content. If we use two years as a starting point, we get an overall traffic value of $18,960,000:

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

We have over 2,000 articles on the Ahrefs blog and would probably never have spent $19 million on paid advertising. But this calculation allows you to assign a dollar value to your content in seconds. It’s especially useful if your company has recently transitioned from a heavy reliance on paid advertising to content marketing, allowing you to show off the money you’ve saved from the switch.

We conclude with an approach that offers the best of both worlds, very similar to how we calculate ROI in Ahrefs:

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

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

Their response is broadcast in a dedicated Slack channel, #recordings, which gives us a real-time feed of new signups and, more importantly, how they discovered Ahrefs. Sam, our VP of Marketing, regularly uses this feed to calculate the percentage of total subscriptions that can be attributed to his YouTube content.

If I go to #recordings and we search for subscriptions that mention “youtube”, we can see over 34,000 people who directly attributed their discovery of Ahrefs to Sam’s video content:

We can use it to estimate the ROI of content marketing: if 33% of all respondents in a given month attribute their subscription to YouTube, it would be quite reasonable to assume that 33% All subscriptions came from YouTube and that 33% of all new revenue should be attributed to our commitment to video content.

If we assume a theoretical monthly revenue of $300,000 and that 1,000 out of a total of 3,000 subscriptions can be attributed to “YouTube”, we can plug these values ​​into our formula for a return on content of $100,000:

(33% of signups attributed to content * $300,000) = $100,000

This method will underestimate the number of subscriptions generated (people may misspell YouTube, or say “video” instead, or, most likely, not answer the question at all). The relationship between new signups and new revenue might also be more complicated than we assume here (if you have a lot of free users, for example).

But it has the advantage of facilitating comparison with other marketing channels. If I search “google” in the same #registration channel, I see 94,000 mentions, more than Sam’s 34,000 mentions on YouTube:

(Although it’s definitely catching up…)

Final thoughts

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 very 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.