How Sprout’s social team measures Owned Media Value (and other ROI metrics that matter)

You understand the value of social media. You see the engagement, the community building, the real-time conversations. But when it comes to demonstrating its true value beyond your marketing team—especially to senior leaders laser-focused on the bottom line—the story can often feel incomplete.

The good news is, you’re not alone. Even the most seasoned social media marketers grapple with translating the impact of social into an ROI language that resonates across an organization.

At Sprout, we’re making it our mission to help you bridge that gap. Building on the foundational insights shared in our organic social media ROI toolkit, we’re diving into tactical strategies for measuring the value of your social media efforts.

We’re rolling back the curtain on our own reporting strategy, to show you how to use Sprout’s proprietary owned and earned media frameworks to quantify the often under-recognized power of your organic social media strategy—starting with the power of Owned Media Value.

Types of owned media channels

Owned media encompasses any digital property or channel that your brand has direct control over. These channels serve as platforms to publish content, engage with your audience and build your brand presence.

While this article focuses primarily on the value derived from your social media and influencer content, it’s helpful to understand the broader landscape. Here are some key types of owned media:

Website and blog

Your website is the central hub of your online presence. It’s where customers can learn about your products or services, access resources and potentially make purchases. A blog, often integrated within your website, allows you to publish long-form content, establish thought leadership and attract organic traffic through search engines.

While you can directly measure website traffic and conversions, understanding the value of social media in driving traffic to your website is a component of social Owned Media Value.

Social media and influencer content

Your brand’s profiles on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok and others are crucial owned media channels.

These platforms allow for direct engagement with your audience through shared updates, community building and content distribution. The reach, engagement and traffic generated organically on these channels are what we quantify as social Owned Media Value.

Email marketing

Email lists are valuable owned assets for direct communication with your audience. Newsletters, promotional emails and customer updates can nurture leads, drive conversions and build loyalty.

Despite their distinct nature, email and social media are more powerful when integrated. Timely social trends can inspire more relevant and engaging email content, while strategic social promotions can effectively drive valuable email list growth. This cross-channel approach maximizes the impact of your owned media efforts.

Mobile apps

For some businesses, a mobile app serves as a key owned media channel for direct engagement with their customers, providing exclusive content or services. Social media is often used to drive app downloads and engagement, highlighting the interconnectedness of owned media efforts.

How Sprout’s social team measures and uses Owned Media Value

We know it’s critical for social media teams to demonstrate their impact. That’s why we’ve been working hard to develop a framework that helps social teams tell a stronger ROI story.

Owned media value plays a major role in our approach. Our methodology centers on a metric you’re probably familiar with: paid social Cost Per Mille (CPM), AKA the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand impressions. We work in close collaboration with our paid team, who provides us with up-to-date averages on our paid social CPM. This allows us to calculate Owned Media Value using the following equation:

Owned Media Value = (Organic Impressions within a given period / 1000) * Average Paid Social CPM

Want to understand and quantify your team’s Owned Media Value? Our free ROI calculator will help you instantly see the potential value your organic social efforts are generating. 

Calculate my social ROI

At Sprout, we elevate our Owned Media Value during quarterly business reports using our social media scorecard template. Framing organic performance in media value terms helps us speak the same language as our finance partners, who are already familiar with CPM-based models. By assigning a tangible dollar amount to the impact of organic social, we’re able to reinforce our strategic contribution and make our ROI narrative clearer and more compelling to executive stakeholders.

“[Owned Media Value] helps us tell a larger story about the power of our in house content creation, and the value of the awareness driven by our influencer program. Including OMV in quarterly business reports gives our leadership team a more concrete understanding of how organic social contributes to brand awareness without needing additional budget.”

– Rachael Goulet, Director, Social Media, Sprout Social

Complementary metrics that will strengthen your ROI story

While Owned Media Value provides a solid perspective on the awareness generated by organic social efforts, it’s not the only way to quantify the impact of your social content.

To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the value generated by our organic social content, Sprout Social tracks several key metrics. Here are the three we highlight for C-suite leadership on a quarterly basis.

Earned Media Value

Earned Media Value typically describes the value of third-party mentions and shares across social media. However, when we discuss it during quarterly business reports, we’re specifically referring to the impact and reach generated by our employee advocacy program, which we manage using Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social.

The value of employee-generated content is a game changer when it comes to extending our brand reach and driving engagement. With Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social, we can put a dollar amount to that awareness. In fact, our employee advocacy efforts drove $450,000 in earned media for us in 2024—a significant figure that directly strengthens our overall ROI story.

Influencer Cost Per Lead and Influencer Cost Per Action

While both Influencer Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Influencer Cost Per Action (CPA) are crucial for showing the ROI of your influencer collaborations, the core difference boils down to what you’re trying to achieve.

At Sprout Social, our social team leans heavily on Influencer CPL to assign a tangible dollar value to those crucial early-funnel actions driven by our influencer marketing program. By clearly demonstrating the cost to acquire a qualified lead through these partnerships, we can effectively communicate the value they bring to our greater marketing strategy.

Now, while lead generation is our primary focus with influencers, we know that for many of you, Influencer CPA might be an even more compelling metric to highlight.

CPA measures the cost associated with those key actions further down the funnel, like a direct purchase, a free trial sign-up or even a specific product demo request. If your business model allows for robust tracking of these later-stage conversions, elevating CPA can be a powerful way to showcase the ROI of influencer content to your executive team.

Measuring ROI from social media conversion metrics

To tell a complete ROI story, it’s crucial to track both media valuation metrics and key conversion metrics, which vary depending on your business type and goals.

Here’s a breakdown of conversion metrics that typically hold significant weight for B2B and B2C businesses in demonstrating direct impact on business objectives:

Tell a better social media ROI story

Social media ROI isn’t just a number. It’s the language we use to earn trust, influence strategy, and prove our team’s worth across the business. That’s why measurement is a pillar of our approach—and we want to help you make it one of yours, too.

To help you take the first step in telling a compelling ROI story to senior leadership, we’ve created a social media ROI toolkit, complete with a social media scorecard template. This resource gives you a framework for tracking and presenting the key metrics discussed in this article, so you can move beyond surface-level reporting and highlight the real business impact of your social strategy.

Download the ROI toolkit