Hi, Lauren Kaye here for this week’s Content and Coffee. Companies invest in content marketing for a lot of different reasons. Some are looking to add search value, which others are focused on engagement or generating quality sales leads. One thing they all have in common is a need to see hard value.
Our strategists use this formula to track just how much money our clients are making from their content.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Set up a filter for content visits
Look at all of the visits where the content you’re measuring was the landing page for traffic. This gives you the number of times your content served as the landing page for traffic (meaning it was the reason people came to your site).
Step 2: Find a way to track your conversions.
If you have an ecommerce site, this should be relatively easy. Just keep track of how many conversions you get from each landing page – and the total dollar value earned from those conversions.
If you run a site with some other kind of conversion, such as resource downloads, demo requests or video views – you need to assign a value to these actions and set up Goal Tracking in Google Analytics to measure how much money you make from them. Keep this information in your back pocket for a minute.
Step 3: Calculate the cost per content session
Take the number of landing page visits from step one (you can do this on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis) and divide them by the amount you spend for content marketing services. This gives you the cost per content session.
Step 4: Determine the value per content session
Now take the number of landing page visits you got and divide them by the total revenue generated to get the per session value. This shows you how much money you’re making for every content reader.
Compare the two numbers to see how much of a return you’re getting on your content. I’d recommend that you look at how it’s changed over time. Of course, this formula only works if you know how much each of your conversions is worth to your business. If you don’t, you should sit down with your sales team and figure out the value so you know what your efforts are bringing to the table.
What other methods do you have for measuring value? Let us know what you do in the comments section below or by Tweeting at Brafton.
