Revenue Analysis: Content Attribution Modeling by Content Type with Revenue

This week, we have been working with SaaS data to analyze and develop a content attribution model for them. The goal was to analyze their content marketing efforts and relate that to conversions and revenue. In this article, I will outline the process and then review the results at a high level. We may dig into finer details on the how-to side in future articles, but I will outline them here. Then, I will discuss three top-level graphs to show content value and ROI that are perfect for stakeholders who want more details than just revenue.

This graph has a classic shape because that is the model we chose to align with their marketing efforts–a classic attract, capture, nurture, and turn into a sales opportunity process. This is common with SaaS businesses doing content marketing in the B2B space. But first…

How We Did It

The goal was to measure the content contributing to their “Schedule a Demo” conversion. So, we picked last month’s conversions as the starting point to analyze. 

Content Discovery Process

Note: As we use our tools and advise this client on measuring conversions, we can then backtrack all conversions or use specific conversion segments.

Here is an outline of the process of discovering and grouping the content types:

1. We pick all the month’s “Schedule a Demo” conversions. They had both a form and a Calendly scheduler… we grabbed both.
2. We grab their unique visitor IDs. These could be segmented by campaign, demographics, etc. We chose all for this analysis.
3. We chose six months of back data to see what content these conversions engaged with. This is reasonable for longer B2B sales and marketing cycles.
4. There are hundreds of pieces of content. Not very helpful, yet, for our goals.
5. We are able to group them by type and/or delivery method, such as content categories, nurture content, newsletters, and lead magnet landing pages. These are the parts of the marketing pipeline.
6. Now, we do frequency analysis to see which content groups are most common and their timing.

This process is not perfect because of cookie blocking and multiple devices. But it in no way needs to be perfect. It just needs to be accurately representative. Usually, there is enough data, and/or you are focused enough for the data to be representative if you are at the level where you value this type of analysis.

‍Note: This gives us a lot of information and data. For example, we can do deeper dives into the exact content type, keywords, channels, and campaigns to inform strategic content focuses. And yes, we do this, but that is another article.

The results in the following content types:

1. Blog articles. These are used for SEO, to attract initial and continual engagement, and for newsletter content. Specifically, we found that “how-to” articles were their big “first” engagement draw. I would say this is common for technical B2B tools.
2. Lead magnets are part of their pipeline. They have several, but we group them into one.
3. Newsletter and nurture sequences. While both are email-based, we broke them into “newsletter” and nurture types for our analysis. Why? Because the lead magnets drive the nurture sequences and have CTAs driving the next conversion in the pipeline, “Schedule A Demo.”
4. Lastly, “Schedule A Demo”. Note from the graph above we do not attribute a lot of revenue value–because we are focusing on the content marketing value and not the sales process itself here.

Revenue Attribution

Now that we have the content types, how did we do revenue contribution and then analysis?

As you can see from the above graph, the total value generated was estimated to be $154,000. We do lots of revenue modeling for our real-time dashboards, but I can simply summarize this here. This is estimated by taking the number of “Schedule A Demo” sales leads, multiplying it by historical conversion rates, and then multiplying it by six months of revenue in this case. Why 6-months? Why not a lifetime value (LTV)? Or a single month, or 3 months? We had to pick one that shows value generated, and we did use six months as the marketing sales cycle in our initial period. No matter, it is simple enough to change periods for this.

Content Marketing Attribution with Revenue, W-Shaped Attribution Modeling, and ROI Analysis

Why the W-shaped attribution model? Some people suggest this is not ideal for our modeling period. But in this case, where we have sufficient data and a good pipeline model, it works best to accurately measure the marketing efforts. Because we have the data by content type and time, we could try other models with a little extra effort.

W-shaped attribution modeling is a method of measuring the ROI of content marketing that takes into account the long sales cycle of content marketing. W-shaped attribution modeling assigns credit for a sale to all of the pieces of content that a customer interacted with before making a purchase. This gives you a more accurate picture of the ROI of your content marketing efforts. 

Why did we pick the percentages we did? This is a Content Marketing analysis, not a closing sales analysis. We wanted to focus on the value of marketing and the content we felt dove the lead to the “Schedule A Lead” conversion.

It is a judgment call based on experience and this specific client’s experience. We actually used a modified W, as we did not give the “Schedule A Demo” part as much weight as the typical analysis that included “sales & marketing.” We did give it some because the landing pages are marketing content, but gave the nurturing more as it clearly was engaged with substantially from the data, and thus likely drove “Schedule A Demo” conversion.

Here are some tips for measuring the ROI of content marketing:

• Use W-shaped attribution modeling. W-shaped attribution modeling is the most accurate way to measure the ROI of content marketing.
• Track the right metrics. The metrics that you track should be aligned with your business goals.
• Use a content marketing analytics platform. A content marketing analytics platform can help you track your content marketing metrics and measure your ROI.

By following these tips, you can get a better understanding of the ROI of your content marketing efforts. This information can help you make informed decisions about how to allocate your marketing budget.

ROI and Content Attribution

The graphs below are two examples of mapping ROI with the analysis from above. Not only can we analyze the revenue attribution, we can calculate the marketing cost for production and distribution. And we can calculate the ROI. Read more on this in my article, "ROI Analysis: Using Content Type ROI Analysis to Direct Strategy."