Ah, content attribution. The delightful practice of tying our work to business results. Some get away with doing hardly any of it, a select few overindulge, but most of us just try to get it over with.
Maybe you’re here because you’re looking for a silver attribution bullet — a tool, a model, anything that brings ease and accuracy. We feel you, because we’ve been on that search.
The disappointing truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-you-me-and-everyone-else solution for perfect attribution. What we have found are practices you can use to improve attribution, regardless of your budget, tool, or org size.
1. Factor in Stakes and Stupidity When Investing in Attribution
The sophistication of your attribution setup should depend on what’s at stake, minus any stupidity involved:
Required attribution sophistication = stakes – stupidity
Make sure to consider this formula before putting effort into improving your attribution.
When the Stakes Are High…
The more budget and revenue at stake, the more time and money can go into attribution; the insights inform improvements and justify spend.
For example, Eryn Lueders, Head of Marketing at Basis Theory, discovered display ads — a paid channel they had almost abandoned — influenced ~9% of their inbound Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Yet that insight required an analytics stack of first-party cookies, GA4, HubSpot, and Hotjar. “Using GA4 alone, we would have missed that entirely,” Eryn says.
But for many content teams, the stakes are lower. They’re not spending on paid, or the business is smaller.
Well-known content marketers admit not caring much about attribution, including Jimmy Daly and Ryan Law on the Superpath podcast, and Eric Doty when we asked him about his work at Dock: “We can easily feel what new thing is working and what isn’t. Maybe less so one blog vs. another, but we can feel when a post or webinar brings leads in.”
This sentiment isn’t limited to marketers. Founders Christophe Pasquier (Slite) and Arjun Mahadevan (doola) shared similar stories. Even without results tied to specific efforts, they see an increase in incoming leads from their content, and that’s enough when the stakes are lower.
When Stupidity Is High…
Stupidity offsets the need for sophisticated attribution and comes in two flavors:
- Ignorance: Executives or other departments lack an understanding of content marketing and how it serves business goals.
- Politics: Attribution is a tool for power games, like defending (or grabbing) budget, making others look good (or bad), and so on — anything but understanding and improving marketing.
Say your organization scores high on ignorance, then most time and money spent on better attribution is wasted.
One marketer at a large organization said: “Our senior leadership […] don’t have the experience to take the pure stats and extrapolate what that means. Their knowledge of SEO is very out of date, if they have any at all, or what a bounce rate is, or why trying to generate more and more traffic all the time is not necessarily the best use of budget.”
An environment high on stupidity can be a blessing in disguise if you manage to satisfy the whims of stakeholders with minimal effort: you’ll have the freedom and time to create original content that doesn’t have to pass rigorous attribution.
Rosanna Campbell, content marketer for brands like Supermetrics, Lattice, and Dock, illustrates how low stakes and low stupidity can also lead to success: “Many of my clients have startup budgets, but they’re succeeding with content because they have leaders who understand it, value it, and let their content teams build and execute a strategy with enough time and consistency to see results.”
2. Give Content a Role and a Goal
Too often, we — or those we work for — have wrong expectations of our content, or worse, none at all.
This problem typically shows up as viewing everything through a transactional lens, where low conversions equal failure. But our work can drive more than transactions — Rosanna gives a helpful breakdown of content’s roles:
“Transactional —as in, ‘If you give me your email address, I will give you this e-book.’
Relational —as in, ‘Because you like my excellent blog posts, you’ll think of me when you’re compiling your list of B2B software products to consider during your purchase process.’
Supporting —as in, providing the sales team with a great ROI calculator so they can nail that pitch.”
Transactional metrics are easier to connect to business goals like sales, which is why many content teams end up in the same situation as Mitangi Parekh, Senior Content Marketing Manager at eSentire: “Because our blogs can’t technically generate leads, we always prioritize creating gated assets (webinar, long report, guide, etc.).”
Again, there’s no silver bullet, but part of the solution is upfront clarity about content’s role and using different measurements for each approach. (A great place to do this is in your article briefs.)
Michael Lowe, a content and marketing leader with experience at high-growth startups, says thought leadership should have different success criteria than SEO. “For the leadership piece, I’m interested in time on page and engagement rates. Are people reading the story? Are they taking an action?” An SEO piece, on the other hand, requires looking at keyword rankings, organic impressions, and traffic. “They’re both blogs, but they’re created for two different reasons.”
3. Declare Pageviews Dead; Long Live Engagement!
Measuring pageviews is easy. It’s also largely a vanity exercise and we all know it. “Better one lead in your inbox than a hundred pageviews in GA” should be a marketer’s mantra but isn’t — it’s too painful to see your numbers “drop” by changing from Views to Sessions or, God forbid, Engaged Sessions.
Focus on pageviews, and the clickbaiter’s mentality takes hold: do anything to get anyone in the door. And, as Deborah Carver, content strategy consultant and creator of The Content Technologist, points out, “Meaningless traffic also has nearly zero correlation to successful business performance—quality lead gen, subscriber acquisition, etc.—no matter how many marketing bros tell you otherwise.”
If Not Pageviews, Then What?
Obviously, you want to measure conversions. But it’s a long way to the top if you wanna roll with only conversion metrics. You need to know what’s happening along the way, and that’s where engagement comes in.
Make the Switch to Engagement Metrics
After overcoming the horror of seeing your absolute numbers drop, engagement metrics have a lot going for them. They cover the territory between first visit and conversion, and — when used right — tell you more about a visitor’s behavior than most other metrics.
And despite its many, many flaws, GA4 does have a few benefits, one of them being out-of-the-box engagement measurements, like:
- Average engagement time: Probably the most useful one. You can measure this for your entire site and individual pages, so you can track month-over-month which content keeps people around longer.
- Scrolls per page: This number applies every time someone scrolls 90% down the page. It’s another helpful indicator of how engaging and helpful your content is. If your site lacks other conversion metrics, Deborah recommends using this one, as it’s a pretty good indicator someone enjoys what you offer.
💡 Another Deborah power tip: increase engaged session duration in GA4 to 60 seconds. I know, that hurts again, as the absolute numbers in your reports will drop further. But this change does provide a more accurate reflection of real engagement with your content.
Don’t Overlook Retention Metrics
Engagement signals how deeply users interact with your content; retention metrics show whether they find enough value to return.
“As top-of-funnel organic has slowly shrunk, we can’t be reliant on a revolving door approach to bringing in customers. And now, with retention measurement, we have a better case for producing educational material that resonates as much (if not more) after the purchase as it does before the purchase.”
— Kody Wirth, Inbound Marketing Manager, Palo Alto Software
GA4’s retention reports allow you to analyze user retention over time, offering metrics like cohort retention and average engagement time of returning users. These insights help identify patterns in behavior so you can tailor content for repeat visits and build a loyal audience.
Say you manage content for a SaaS workflow tool. You find that people who spend more than 10 minutes exploring one of your advanced workflow automation tutorials are three times more likely to upgrade to a paid plan. This discovery could prompt your team to focus on creating more in-depth, technical content around automation features and potentially accelerate your conversion rate.
Focus on Metrics That Signal Human Action
For any other metrics you consider tracking, focus on data points that signal human actions, such as submitting, sharing, downloading, and completing videos.
Deborah says: “As a rule of thumb for all digital measurement: if you can’t correlate the metric with a human action, it’s probably not worth your time to track.” She gives impressions as an example of a non-human metric. “Impressions are just how many times the content has loaded somewhere. It doesn’t mean anyone even saw it.”
4. Pick an Attribution Method — And Stick With It
There are many attribution models; we’ve listed several common and accessible ones below.
Whichever your pick, take this advice from Ryan Law, Director of Content at Ahrefs and former CMO here at Animalz: “Instead of obsessing over perfect calculations, it’s better to choose a simple methodology, stick to it consistently, and see how it changes over time.”
Pick-Your-Touch Attribution
First touch, last touch, multi-touch — all these models assign value to content used in the customer journey, but each puts the weight somewhere else. For example, first touch gives all credit to the first asset, while last touch attributes everything to the final item before conversion.
Say a customer reads a blog post, then watches a webinar, and finally makes a purchase after clicking on an email. First-touch attribution would credit the blog post, last-touch would credit the email, and multi-touch would spread it across all three.
Of course, this designation is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the variation you pick. But, if you understand each model’s workings and limitations, this modeling offers a high ROI: valuable insights for low attribution effort as they’re pretty easy to set up with most analytics tools.
🔗 Google’s official instructions on configuring many of these models in GA4 and a more in-depth guide on attribution models by CDP.com.
Return on Content Spend (ROCS)
ROCS gives you a high-level view of your content program’s financial impact, perfect for impressing the C-suite or making big-picture budget decisions. It’s your go-to for a quick content ROI check without drowning in data or complex models.
To calculate ROCS, first, add up all your content-related costs (including headcount and tools). Then, do the same for your returns from content, for example, by adding up the total lead value delivered. Finally, subtract your total costs from your returns, and you will have your ROCS.
The Most Revenue-Relevant Metric
Here’s a simple approach from Fio Dossetto, Content Lead at Float: pick a metric close to revenue, like leads generated, and combine it with a content metric, like organic or engaged sessions. Check how these develop and correlate over time, and you have a sense of how your content drives business results.
This crude but quick approach is useful for smaller teams where the stakes aren’t too high and complex attribution calculations aren’t worth the effort.
🔗 More details on calculating ROCS and the most revenue-relevant metric in Relato’s article on content ROI by Rosanna.
Measure Campaigns, Not Just Channels
Megan Morreale, former Head of Content Marketing at Reddit and Taboola, told us she forces leadership to view content through a campaign lens: “Reporting on individual campaigns throughout the whole funnel is more realistic than reporting on all of these channels once a quarter, especially without a multi-channel attribution model in place.”
Designing parts of your content program as campaigns has several advantages and simplifies attribution:
- Clear scope: A campaign has set goals, parameters, and timelines that help to focus your efforts. And with a clear beginning, middle, and end, campaigns are easier for stakeholders to follow than ongoing, open-ended marketing activities.
- Easier reporting: Campaign-based reporting resonates better with leadership, as it ties directly to business objectives like product launches, company milestones, or other KPIs.
- Obvious ROI: With a defined budget and specific goals, it’s easier to calculate and demonstrate a campaign’s return on investment.
Quick wins from well-executed campaigns also earn you credibility and trust. You can use those credits for long-term initiatives like your SEO program or experimental projects — like a printed book or making your agency’s pricing public. 😇
5. Stop Data Dumping and Start Delivering Insights
Analytics solutions come with an overwhelming number of features; most of us use only the most basic and obvious. But invest a little time learning about the tools you use often, and you’ll go from delivering data dumps to giving actionable recommendations.
💡 The list below is not exhaustive. Use it as a starting point for building your own attribution reporting cheat sheet, so you know where and what to look for when making a report.
Create Groups of URLs to See How They Perform Collectively
Most reports analyze a site as a whole or individual URLs. With GA4 and Ahrefs, you can measure content groupings and attribute results to clusters or campaigns.
Ryan at Ahrefs uses this approach to measure content performance by author. Other useful groupings include topic, funnel stage, campaign, or content type.
🔗 Doing this in GA4 isn’t easy, but we’ve created a summary with Perplexity showing the options and setup steps.
Calculate Your Repurposing Multiplier
Jess Cook, Head of Content & Comms at Island, calculates a “repurposing multiplier.” By tracking the source asset of repurposed content, her team can attribute results to the original and measure the value of repurposing.
Reporting this metric isn’t just helpful for attribution. It can motivate you to do more repurposing, which sometimes feels unglamorous but is often a high ROI activity.
Report Your Direct Traffic Growth Over Time
Deborah from The Content Technologist says, “Good digital media and content marketing websites experience a steady growth in direct traffic over time.” Such an upward trend shows people are specifically looking for your work outside of search.
To measure this, compare your direct traffic monthly or quarterly. An increase signals your content efforts are building brand awareness.
Find Out How Sales Uses Your Content
Don’t overlook a direct way to attribute content to business results: tracking how your sales team uses your work. Connecting marketing efforts with revenue makes clear which pieces help close deals.
Tools like HubSpot, Seismic, or Showpad can automate this process by tracking content usage and engagement. But you can gather valuable data without fancy tools — just talk to your coworkers in Sales to gather anecdotal evidence on what’s working.
Ditch the Dashboard and Buy Someone a Coffee ☕️
The solution to improving attribution isn’t always hiding in a dashboard or model. What else could you do with that money you’re spending on tooling? How could you use your time differently to get more valuable insights about your customers?
“You could spend $400 giving eight customers $50 gift certificates for spending one hour with you,” says Ronnie Higgins, founder at Neutral Ground Labs + Marketing Under The Influence. “Answering questions that will help you understand not just their challenges and goals for the year; they’ll tell you their media habits, they’ll tell you their responsibilities, they’ll admit their competencies.”
One trip into the real world can be worth a thousand digital data points.
Buy someone a coffee. Go to an industry event. Shadow a customer for a day.
Attribution is about getting other humans to do something you want them to do. It’s easy to forget that when you’re staring at pixels all day.
So when you’re stuck, or when all else fails, or if you don’t have the resources for sophisticated attribution, think about the people behind those numbers you’re looking at. Consider how else you could learn about them and their behavior because ultimately, that’s what attribution is all about.