How To Measure The Return On Investment Of Your Blog Content

How to measure the return on investment of your blog content

Nearly every company produces content for its website and socials. Whether it is blogs, videos, animations, or photos, content creation is a must for every business and business owner.

However, statistics show that 43% of businesses don’t measure the ROI on the content they are producing, meaning they are actively and consistently creating content blindly, not knowing what is working, or where to focus their efforts moving forward to get the best results and return on investment (ROI).

Why is it important to measure the ROI of your content?

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So, how do you know what content is working and what isn't and what content is generating revenue, and what isn’t?

Vanity metrics like page views, social likes, and impressions are no longer an acceptable way of measuring your outputs. You should be measuring the ROI and the lifetime ROI of your content to inform future content creation and marketing efforts.

You may find that your users resonate with a certain theme of content you produce and it increases their propensity to purchase, therefore you should produce more of this style or topic to maximise revenue and lead opportunities. Thinking and measuring content like this will begin to make you a more efficient and profitable company over the long term.

Working Example

Imagine you write an article for the blog on your website, initially you may promote it on your Facebook, Linkedin, get some PR behind it. If your advertising and analytics system is set-up well you will be able to measure how much impressions, web traffic, leads, and revenue that piece of content has generated you over the first few days or even weeks.

But after that initial boost, you will forget about that article. However, it remains on your website, and over time (months and years) users will continue to read it and (hopefully) find value. This blog article will be directly doing 2 key things:

1. The page will be showing up in Google Search for 'non-branded searches', therefore generating visibility and traffic to your website, which ultimately should lead to more purchases.

2. Users will come to your website via other channels but navigate to the blog and read it. This action of them reading the blog will impact their online purchase decision. Therefore that page has a value associated with it that directly correlated to ROI.

Have a long term view

When people produce content, most people look at the short term return on investment that it produces. A better approach would be to look at recouping your production costs in the initial few weeks, and then continuously check key ROI metrics on the content after 3 months, 6 months, and beyond. If the content is truly good and resonates with its audience you will be able to measure the ROI of your content over a lifetime, watching it compound, much like interest in a bank account.

What are the key metrics inside Google Analytics you should be looking at?

Inside Google Analytics, there are a few metrics to look at over time that will begin to let you know how your content is performing.

1. Landing page view - This is where users are landing on your website, if they are landing on your desired content, it’s likely that it’s getting good visibility across the internet.

2. Total page views - This is the total page views your content has had over a period of time.

3. Page value - This is the value that Google assigns a specific page.

4. Visibility inside Search Console - Look at the specific content page inside Google Search Console. This will let you know how much visibility the page has inside Google Search and SEO.