How to measure content ROI without a data team
A simple way for a small team to measure content ROI with the tools it already has, one spreadsheet and an honest count of hours and results.
Content ROI is the return a blog post brings back for the time and money it cost to make. You do not need a data team or an expensive dashboard to measure it. You need a spreadsheet, an honest count of hours, and an agreement on what a good result is worth.
This post shows the method we use with small teams. It takes about an hour to set up and a few minutes a month to keep.
Decide what a result is worth #
Before you count anything, agree on what a post is for. A blog post can earn its keep in a few ways:
- Leads. A reader asks for a demo, books a call or fills in a contact form.
- Sign-ups. A reader joins your newsletter or starts a free trial.
- Sales help. Your sales team sends the post to a prospect to answer a question.
- Support saved. A help question gets answered by a post instead of a person.
Pick the one or two that matter most to your business, and put a rough value on each. Content ROI only works when everyone agrees on these values first. If one in ten demo requests turns into a customer worth a known amount, a demo request is worth a tenth of that. Rough is fine. A rough number you use beats a perfect number you never agree on.
Count the cost honestly #
The cost side of content ROI is mostly time. Count every hour, not just the writing:
- Planning and the brief
- Research and interviews
- Writing the first draft
- Editing and fact checks
- Images, layout and publishing
- Refreshing it later
Multiply the hours by a fair hourly cost for the people involved. Add anything you paid for: freelance help, stock images or tools used only for that post. Teams that skip the editing and planning hours make their content look cheaper than it is, and then wonder why the numbers do not add up.
The formula for content ROI #
The sum is the same one any investment uses. Take what the post brought in, subtract what it cost, and divide by what it cost:
A result above zero means the post paid for itself. A result below zero means it has not yet, which is normal for a young post. Search traffic grows over months, so judge a post on its first year, not its first week.
Track content ROI in one spreadsheet #
Make one row per post and one column per thing you count. Keep a column for the publish date, the hours, the cost, each kind of result, and the value. The return column then works itself out. If the value of results sits in column E and the cost in column D, the return for a row is:
=(E:E-D:D)/D:D
Most spreadsheet apps accept whole-column ranges like these. Write the formula once and fill it down. Every month, add the new results from your analytics and your sales notes. It takes ten minutes when the habit is set.
Read the numbers with care #
A spreadsheet can mislead as easily as it can help. Three habits keep content ROI honest:
- Give each post time. Compare posts of the same age. A two-month-old post will lose to a two-year-old one every time.
- Count assists. A reader may find you through a post and buy weeks later through another page. Ask new customers how they found you, and give the post credit when they name it.
- Count the cost of refreshing. An update has a cost too, and it often has the best return of any work on the blog.
That last point is why we budget time for old posts. Our playbook for refreshing posts that slipped explains how to choose which ones to update first.
Pros
- Uses tools the team already has
- Takes about an hour to set up
- Makes the case for content in plain numbers
Cons
- Values are rough guesses at first
- Misses readers who buy much later without saying how they found you
- Needs a monthly habit to stay current
Turn the numbers into decisions #
The point of measuring content ROI is to choose better next time. Once a quarter, sort the sheet by return and look at the top and the bottom.
- Top posts. What do they share? A topic, a format, a kind of question? Plan more posts like them.
- Bottom posts. Were they the wrong question, or the right question answered badly? A weak answer can be refreshed. A wrong question can be dropped.
- Missing posts. Which questions from sales and support have no post yet? They are often the cheapest wins.
Feed those choices straight into your content calendar for the next quarter, so the plan follows the evidence instead of the loudest idea in the room.
A worked example #
Here is how one row looks for a fictional software company. A how-to post took eighteen hours from brief to publish, at a fair cost per hour. In its first year it brought six demo requests and forty newsletter sign-ups. The team valued each demo request and each sign-up using their own sales numbers, added the two values, subtracted the cost and divided by the cost.
The content ROI was well above zero. The post paid for itself about three times over in its first year. The same sheet showed that two other posts had not earned their cost, and both answered questions nobody had asked the sales team. The team dropped one and rewrote the other around a real customer question.
For the wider theory of measuring marketing returns, Google's guide to setting up key events in Analytics explains how to count the results you choose.
To see where the readers behind those results come from, our three monthly search traffic charts show the visits by month, by page and from AI search.
About the author
Research editor at Larkspur Studio
Experience MSc in Statistics, runs the yearly Larkspur content benchmark
Priya turns questions about content into numbers you can trust. She designs the yearly Larkspur content benchmark, checks every statistic we publish against its source, and writes about measuring what content earns and how AI search chooses what to quote.
Reviewed by
