5 tips to measure the ROI of your marketing effort
For those of you that don’t know how to measure ROI from your marketing efforts, rest assured, you are not alone.
You already know that content marketing is effective for bringing in new leads and converting them into sales.
Digital Authority confirms this with the fact that about 93% of the most successful B2B content marketers say their organization will be ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ committed to content marketing in 2019.
But the question is, how do you know which content has the biggest impact on boosting your bottom line?
This article will show you 5 tips to measure the ROI of your marketing effort.
1. Quality Of Leads
As a general rule of thumb, high-quality content attracts a bigger audience that generates better leads. On the other hand, content that gets a lot of traffic but a high bounce rate and low conversions indicates that the leads are low quality.
There are many ways to measure the quality of leads.
For example, if you have created an awesome blog post, you can measure leads by either the number of people that are reading it, the number of visitors that click related resources or how many of them contact the customer service or sales teams.
However, you can then narrow down and see if they are really interested in your product or service by seeing if they are visiting your price pages. This can be done by using an analytics tool like Google Analytics (GA).
“Analytics tools provide granular information about the groups targeted by various marketing campaigns, such as how users behave and how they interact with a specific campaign.”
So, in order to do this in GA, you must set up goal tracking.
Head over to Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization to see which content is getting the most action and helping you turn visitors into leads.
2. Number And Value Of Sales
The next tip to measure marketing ROI is by monitoring how many leads are turning into sales and the value of each sale.
Quality leads that are satisfied and nurtured down the sales and marketing funnel are likely to buy from you.
Again, use GA to get precise numbers. Head to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
The Page Value column will show the average value each page is generating before completing the goals set in the previous tip.
You can get exact numbers on this in Google Analytics by navigating to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages if you’ve enabled eCommerce in Google Analytics.
There is a slight drawback here though… it tracks conversions from a single session.
As you probably know, there are some customers that enter their query in Google, find what they need from your content, compare it to other resources before coming back and completing the purchase on your site.
This can also be tracked in GA.
Head over to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions and click on each channel. You will find the number of conversions each channel has assisted with the sale at any point along the buyer’s journey.
3. Traffic
Traffic forms the basis of the success of all content marketing campaigns, be it B2C or B2B marketing. After all, if there’s no traffic, there’s no money to be made from a product or service.
To see the traffic each piece of content is generating, GA can also help with this.
Click Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and you will find all the pages that customers first land on. It will default to list the page with the highest traffic volume first.
Another way traffic can help measure your marketing ROI is by seeing where the traffic comes from. This tells you where to ramp up the efforts and where to stop wasting time.
To see where your traffic is coming from, click on the page you want to analyze from the same Landing Pages report.
From here, click Secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source/Medium.
4. Social Media Marketing
It’s just as important to measure marketing efforts from offsite engagement as it is onsite.
People that find content valuable will share it across social media to their friends or colleagues.
Tracking this engagement is useful because buyers trust recommendations made to them by people they know.
Here is how you can track it.
In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > Social > Overview/Network Referrals.
The Overview window will also show you how much revenue that channel is generating.
Other tools like Buzzsumo can show you how many shares your content has received.
Simply type the page’s URL and you’ll see how many people have shared it.
Alternatively, you can enter your website’s domain and see the top 10 most shared content across your entire site.
This will allow you to refine your marketing strategies to find the best performers across all major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
5. SEO
The final way to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts is by keeping track of how your content performs in terms of search engines like Google.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that most people only click on the top few results after searching.
This is why SEO is important. To measure the SEO impact of content, you need to make sure the content ranks well for your keywords, it’s relevant for search terms and you have authoritative links.
Here’s how to analyze content SEO performance.
Open an incognito browser and search for your keywords in Google. Scroll until you find your content. If it’s among the top 3 results, you’ll get great traffic. If not, you need to improve or work more on your SEO strategy so it climbs the rankings.
To measure the domain authority of your website, use the Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs. They will also show you the domain and page authority of inbound links.
Conclusion
These 5 tips will help you measure the ROI of marketing efforts. Track the quality of leads, how many translates into sales, how much traffic your site generates, the impact of social media and content SEO performance. Or you can work with an agency who can help you figure all this out (this is a great list to start!)
