Content ROI Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-383 judges published content on what it has returned over its whole life. It costs each piece in days of work, tracks visits, leads and customers since publication, shows which pieces are still growing and which have stopped, and names the ones worth updating.

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

Content is a time cost

Almost all of it is time, and almost none of it appears in a marketing budget. Count everybody's: writing, editing, design, review and the sign-off that took three weeks and four people.

A five-day guide at a realistic loaded day rate costs more than most paid campaigns a small business runs, and it is routinely described as free because no invoice was raised.

The cost is paid once and the return accumulates

This is what makes content different from every other marketing activity, and what makes measuring it badly so easy.

A paid campaign stops returning the day you stop paying. A good piece of content keeps returning for years, so its cost per visit falls every month by construction — the numerator is fixed and the denominator keeps growing.

The consequence: never compare a new piece with an old one. The age chart groups pieces into bands so the comparison is at least between pieces of similar age, and the difference between the bands is usually a factor of five or more.

Too young to judge

Below the maturity threshold, a piece is reported with all its figures and left out of every ranking and recommendation. Six months is a reasonable default; for content that ranks in search, a year is better.

Judging content at six weeks is the single most common way good pieces get abandoned, and whole content programmes get cancelled on the strength of it.

Growing or decaying

Above 130% and the piece is doing better than it ever has — which is exactly what evergreen content should do as it accumulates links and rankings. Below the decay threshold and it has stopped working.

Read the trend against the life you assigned. A topical piece decaying is not a problem: it was written to be useful for weeks and the cost was known up front. An evergreen piece decaying is a piece that has slipped in the rankings, and it is the most actionable finding in this tool.

Updating beats writing

A piece that already ranks, already has links and already gets read is far easier to improve than a new piece is to launch. Updating typically costs a fraction of the original and frequently returns the traffic to above where it started.

Record update days separately so the true cost of a piece includes everything it has consumed, and so the pieces that have been maintained can be distinguished from the ones that have not.

Almost every content plan is entirely new pieces, because updates do not feel like progress. The decaying evergreen list is usually the highest-return work available.

Traffic that does not convert

A piece with heavy traffic and almost no leads is flagged. It is not necessarily a bad piece — the sample has one that attracts students and researchers, and it is genuinely useful — but it should stop being counted as a marketing success.

Two honest responses: add a relevant next step, or accept it as top-of-funnel and stop expecting leads from it. What is not honest is quoting its traffic in a report about marketing performance.

The opposite pattern is worth looking for too. The sample's checklist has a twentieth of the traffic of the top guide and more than half the customers, because somebody who downloads a checklist has a problem.

Why leads are worth nothing by default

The lead value is set to zero deliberately. A lead is not money — it is a chance at money — and valuing leads is how content reporting inflates.

If you do set a lead value, the tool only applies it to leads that did not become customers, because the ones that converted are already counted at their full customer value. Counting both would double-count every successful lead.

The customers you cannot credit

The assisted-customers field is recorded and never valued. It exists so a piece that obviously helped can be defended without inventing a number for it.

This is the honest position on content attribution. A customer who read four articles is credited here to whichever one you assign, and the first piece somebody read is often the one that mattered while the last one gets the credit. The assisted count lets you show that a piece is doing work the credited figures cannot see.

Comparing formats fairly

A guide taking five days and a post taking one cannot be compared on total return. Per day of work, they can — and the answer is often surprising, with short pieces on commercial topics beating long ones on broad topics.

What this cannot do

• Attribution. It records the judgement you made about which piece produced which customer.
• It cannot see influence — the piece that made somebody trust you and is credited to nothing.
• It does not know why traffic fell. A decaying piece may have been outranked, or the search term may have stopped being searched.
• It cannot value brand, recruitment or the sales team having something useful to send.
• It says nothing about quality except through what the content returned, which is a slow and noisy signal.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. The actions table is the one for a content planning session — it names what each piece is doing and what to do about it, rather than presenting a league table of page views.

Saving your work

Pieces are held in this browser, on this computer, and stay there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; update the visit figures quarterly and the same file becomes a record of how content compounds.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every figure here is one you entered, including which customers came from which piece. The tool costs, accumulates and compares; it cannot establish that a piece caused anything.