Content ROI (return on investment) compares what you spent creating and distributing content with the value that content generates. That value can be measured in direct revenue, or include other content marketing success metrics like traffic, leads, conversions, and engagement.
Many marketers use a mix of those signals to evaluate performance. For example, 40% of content marketers in the US and UK report measuring content marketing success through audience engagement metrics, while 38% track metrics such as brand awareness, website traffic, conversions, lead generation, and sales revenue.
This guide explains what content ROI is, how to measure it, and tips to improve your brand’s content ROI so that you can get the most out of your marketing budget and time.
What does content ROI mean?
Content return on investment (ROI) measures the value your content generates relative to the costs of producing and distributing it. It’s a data-driven approach that looks at how content supports business goals like increased revenue, audience engagement, and lead generation. Content that nurtures existing customers, rather than only acquiring new ones, can also raise customer lifetime value, or how much revenue a customer generates over the course of their relationship with your brand.
Measuring content marketing ROI helps you understand which content initiatives are worth the effort. That often requires content performance tracking tools like Shopify Marketing reports, which help tie content campaigns directly to business results. Shopify store owners can monitor sales, sessions, return on ad spend, and click-through rates across all their channels on the marketing performance dashboard.
Pashion Footwear, for example, used organic social media to achieve an impressive ROI. Founder Haley Pavone says on Shopify Masters that by filming TikTok content on her phone at no cost beyond her time, she gained hundreds of thousands of followers and grew top-line revenue by 85%.
Content marketing ROI formula
Here’s the formula to calculate content marketing ROI:
Content ROI = (Revenue from content – Content cost) / Content cost x 100
For example, if you could directly attribute $10,000 in sales to a content campaign and you spent $2,500 to create it, your formula would look like this:
(10,000 – 2,500) / 2,500 x 100
7,500 / 2,500 x 100
3 x 100 = 300
Content ROI = 300%
In this example, you’re generating $4 for every dollar you spend on content, or a profit of $3. If you have an ROI of 100%, this means you are getting a return of $2 for every $1 spent.
How to improve your content ROI
- Set measurable goals and KPIs
- Monitor content investment
- Double down on high-performing content
- Optimize underperforming content
- Repurpose content across multiple channels
Improving your content ROI is about understanding how to optimize what you’re creating and distributing. Use these steps as a guide to start improving your content marketing ROI.
1. Set measurable goals and KPIs
Saying you want to improve your sales through content is broad, making it difficult to measure progress. To get there, you likely also need to promote brand awareness, generate leads, or improve engagement with your product pages. Setting specific, trackable goals tied to a quantifiable metric can help you set a clear target to work toward.
To get specific, identify the content key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll track, such as:
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Impressions. The total number of times your content appeared on someone’s screen. You can find this metric in each platform’s native analytics, like Instagram Insights or TikTok Analytics.
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Follower count. How many followers you have on each platform, and combined across all of them. Each platform’s analytics dashboard tracks this number over time.
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Engagement rate. How much interaction your content receives, including likes, comments, shares, and views. Google Analytics calculates this automatically, dividing total interactions by reach.
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Website traffic. How many visitors land on your website after clicking a link—from your bio, a blog post, or elsewhere. Shopify Analytics’ channel performance reports show which sources drive that traffic.
Social media management tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite can help you track KPIs like these from multiple sources in one dashboard. This can be useful if you’re tracking the performance of a repurposed influencer testimonial or a single format, like user-generated content (UGC) across multiple platforms.
2. Monitor content investment
If you want to track your monetary content ROI, you need your total expenses. Add up the costs of creating and distributing your content to determine the denominator in your ROI formula. Your marketing spend might include hiring a photographer or designer, subscription fees for editing software, or studio rental fees, depending on the size and scope of your content operation.
Distribution and amplification costs can include subscriptions for email management tools and the cost of pay-per-click advertising. Group these costs by content piece or campaign so you can compare costs and ad spending against the revenue that piece generates.
To connect online sales and content, tools like Shopify Analytics and marketing attribution apps can help you generate detailed channel performance reports that draw on multitouch attribution models. These split credit across the touchpoints a customer had with your content before converting, so a blog post that drew in a site visitor can still get partial credit for a sale that happens weeks later.
3. Double down on high-performing content
Once you’ve identified which content is performing best, the next move is to invest more in the formats, topics, or channels driving that success. Shopify Analytics’ behavior reports show sessions by landing page, so you can see which blog posts or content pages bring in the most traffic before deciding where to invest further.
For Liquid Death’s vice president of creative, Andy Pearson, that means organic social media content. He says on Shopify Masters that his team uses a proprietary formula to measure the return on their organic social content, ranking key metrics to identify what works best. Andy says that for Liquid Death, investing in highly entertaining content produces a return that outpaces spending the same budget on traditional media.
Group your own content by style and format to help identify overarching trends. You may find that your audience appreciates humorous infographics more than brand-specific memes, or vice versa.
4. Optimize underperforming content
Compare sessions by landing page against your online store conversion rate to spot content that draws traffic but doesn’t convert. That gap points to where optimization efforts can pay off. From there, ensure your content aligns with how users search, read, or buy.
For search engine optimization (SEO), understand why someone is searching for a topic and make sure the content delivers on that intent. For instance, someone searching for “best cold-weather hiking pants” wants information about important product features, not the history of how hiking gear has improved over the years.
That said, be wary of over-optimizing for search engines. Keyword stuffing, for example, can actively hurt search engine optimization rather than help it, since content overloaded with keywords becomes harder to read and can be flagged by search engines as spam. The better approach is to use key terms naturally and prioritize what your audience wants to read.
For social media content and emails, test different calls to action (CTAs), so they match where a customer is in their buyer journey and make the next step clear.
5. Repurpose content across multiple channels
Scaling content efficiently comes down to getting more value from a single asset. For example, you might film one podcast episode and turn it into four reels, four TikToks, a long-form YouTube episode, and a blog post.
Makeup brand Fluff founder Erika Geraerts uses exactly this strategy with the brand’s podcast, Pretty Hard. On Shopify Masters, she describes podcasts as an effective platform and marketing channel for brands looking to reach new audiences, and says the value for her team from repurposing each episode across channels. Erika says they film every episode so it can become Reels or TikTok content, and pull specific conversations out to repurpose into blog content.
Content ROI FAQ
What is ROI and an example?
ROI, or return on investment, measures how much value you get relative to what you spent, expressed as a percentage. For example, spending $2,500 on a marketing campaign and generating $10,000 in sales produces a 300% ROI. This means a profit of $3 for every dollar spent.
What is content ROI?
Content ROI is how much value you get relative to what you spend on your content marketing efforts. It measures the revenue generated by your content, such as blog posts, videos, and social media, against what it costs to create and distribute it. A positive content ROI means your content is generating more value than it costs.
What’s a practical way to measure content ROI?
A practical way to measure content ROI is to define success, whether that’s revenue or another metric, such as social media follower growth. Then calculate your content creation and distribution costs. You can use attribution and analytics tools to connect content performance directly to revenue. From there, use the content ROI formula to measure your efforts.
