Measuring your overall marketing ROI is hard enough (we covered that one in this article). It can be even more difficult to evaluate the impact of individual pieces of marketing content. How do you know what’s working and what’s not?

Content marketing tends to happen through three main channels: social media, email, and your website (in the form of blog posts). It’s easy to look at your analytics and tell if people are seeing your content. Social media impressions, email open rate, and website page views tell that story, but simply being seen does not necessarily lead to sales. It’s also true that if your content isn’t being seen, the content itself might not be the problem. It could be the case that your content isn’t answering the questions that your potential customers or leads are asking. It’s just difficult to get any clear answers from impressions or views alone. Here are the metrics that help tell the whole story and help you measure your content ROI.

Useful Metrics

Customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value are just as valuable for measuring content effectiveness as they are for measuring overall marketing effectiveness, and for the same reasons. The difference is that you’re looking specifically at the cost of your content marketing, not at the cost of all of your marketing and sales efforts together. For more on those terms, see this article on measuring marketing effectiveness and this article on customer lifetime value.

Conversion rate measures content ROI by dividing the number of customers converted by the cost of the content that affected the sale. Conversion rate doesn’t only have to apply to sales. You can apply the calculation to any action you want a customer or lead to take: sign up for a mailing list, request a quote, download a catalog, and so on.

Create Content With the Customer Journey in Mind

It is a common mistake to look at only the final click when calculating conversion rate: the last thing a customer looked at or clicked on before making a purchase. The most effective content strategy addresses the entire customer journey, from the moment they discover they have a problem that needs to be solved to the moment they make a purchase from you.

This is why it’s useful to measure conversion rate beyond the sale. Content created for the discovery stage will have different goals than content created for the decision stage. At the discovery stage, your content will be more educational than promotional in nature. A successful conversion might mean a click on a social media post that leads to an educational blog post or ebook download, whereas content created for the decision stage might direct leads toward booking an appointment with a sales rep.

When you break down conversion rate by type of content and the goal for that content, you can see exactly where your content is most and least effective. When you know where leads are ditching the customer journey, you know exactly which content needs to be strengthened.

Marketing Attribution Reporting

How do you know which content converted a lead? That’s where marketing attribution reporting comes in. A smart CRM like HubSpot can provide you with attribution reporting that tracks revenue generated through different channels. Attribution reports show you which content a customer interacted with through their customer journey. This isn’t really something you can track manually, so if you really want to get granular about your content marketing ROI, you’ll need a CRM.

Get the Full Picture With a CRM

Creating customer journeys and separating “conversions” by the purpose of the content are the keys to measuring the ROI of a given piece of content. It’s important to remember that not all content leads directly to a sale. Understanding the purpose of a piece of content—which part of the customer journey it belongs to, what kind of customer problems it is intended to solve—makes it easier to judge its effectiveness in moving a lead further along their journey.

A customer relationship management system (CRM) is the most efficient way to accomplish all this. Your CRM becomes your single source of truth for all data analytics and customer interactions. Integrate your website, social media accounts, email, and any other marketing channels you use with your CRM and collect all of your data in one place to get the full picture of your marketing efforts.