When you’re comparing DAM products, return on investment is an important part of the decision-making process. Vendors are often chosen or renewed based on potential ROI, but many organizations fail to connect the dots between platform features and measurable financial outcomes.
While you know your marketing team works quicker when brand files are easier to find, it’s hard to quantify that benefit for your financial or leadership decision-makers. But understanding the core levers that affect the ROI of your DAM platform can help you measure, demonstrate, and boost those returns.
What is DAM ROI? (definition + formula)
DAM ROI is the percentage financial return your organization gets from investing in a digital asset management (DAM) system. It shows how much value you get by comparing the benefits it provides (such as time saved, fewer asset re-creations, faster campaigns) against the costs of the software, implementation, and upkeep. Brand and marketing leaders use it to justify spend, prioritize features, and demonstrate impact to the C-suite.
The standard formula looks like this: ROI = (Annual Benefits − Annual Costs) ÷ Annual Costs × 100. This calculation gives you a percentage return that makes it easy to compare against other tools in your stack.
Many executives also look at the payback period when comparing DAM solutions. This calculates how quickly the DAM system pays for itself, covering its costs and starting to deliver net value. Payback period is an important consideration in the ROI equation as it looks at speed of return, not just magnitude.
When looking at DAM tools, vendors may define their benefits and returns differently, making it difficult to make direct comparisons. We work with a governance + adoption model that measures benefits from improved controls, higher asset reuse, and stronger user adoption to make ROI practical and actionable for brand teams.
DAM ROI framework
A structured framework helps teams pinpoint, measure, and report on the value their DAM creates. It links everyday operational improvements, like faster asset retrieval, fewer reworks, and smoother collaboration, to clear financial outcomes. With this approach, brand leaders can show not just efficiency gains, but the bottom-line impact of their DAM investment.
Core ROI levers
A DAM platform creates measurable value through specific levers that directly tie to business outcomes:
- Faster asset discovery: When teams quickly find the right file, they save hours that would otherwise be wasted searching. For example, cutting search time from 30 minutes to 5 across a global team translates into thousands of hours reclaimed and real labor cost savings.
- Higher asset reuse: Reusing existing creative reduces production costs and shortens campaign timelines. Teams avoid duplicated photoshoots, unnecessary redesigns, and lengthy approval cycles—helping campaigns launch faster and cheaper.
- Improved version control: A single source of truth ensures everyone works from the latest approved file. This reduces rework, prevents errors, and safeguards brand consistency across multi-stakeholder projects.
Streamlined workflows: Automated approvals and integrated processes eliminate creative and collaborative bottlenecks. Campaigns and product launches reach the market sooner, capturing revenue earlier and strengthening competitive positioning. - Stronger permissions and governance: Built-in access controls and user permissions ensure only the right people access or release assets. This prevents compliance violations and protects the brand reputation.
Key KPIs
Tracking the right KPIs ensures your DAM’s value is visible, measurable, and tied to business results.
- Adoption rate (monthly active users): Measure as MAUs divided by the total target user base (or licensed seats) and express it as a percentage. Adoption rate shows how many users regularly engage with the DAM. It is the #1 predictor of realized ROI because companies only see the benefits when people actually use the platform. Track trends month-over-month and segment by team to find adoption gaps.
Measures how many users regularly engage with the DAM. It’s the #1 predictor of realized ROI because without adoption, even the best DAM features deliver little value. - Average search-to-find time: Calculate the mean time from search initiation to the correct asset being opened or downloaded, using analytics or timed user tests. Lowering this metric translates immediately into productivity gains across marketing, legal, and creative teams. Compare baseline and post-implementation measurements to quantify time savings.
- Asset reuse percentage: Calculate the share of new projects that leverage existing assets. Higher reuse rates mean you avoid the costs associated with new asset production, such as fewer photoshoots, smaller agency bills, fewer design commissions — plus it frees up time your design team would spend on duplicated work.
- First-time-right approval rate: Shows the percentage of assets approved without revisions. A high rate shows effective brand governance and fewer revision cycles, which cuts rework costs and shortens campaign timelines. Improving this KPI speeds up delivery and reduces cumulative stakeholder hours.
DAM ROI in action: A simple example
We’ve just shared a lot of metrics and KPIs which can feel quite abstract in isolation. To help make calculating your DAM ROI more concrete, here’s a short example. This example uses fictional numbers in a realistic scenario, so you can adapt a similar approach with your own data.
Example scenario
The brand team in a 200-person marketing org is evaluating the ROI of their DAM product. So far, they’ve incurred the following costs:
- Annual license: $60k
- One-time implementation: $25k, amortized over three years to about $8k
Total annual costs: $68k
Benefit calculations
The team previously relied on shared drives and basic cloud storage without formal governance, causing search friction, duplicated work, and approval delays. Thanks to the DAM, they estimate the following time and resource savings:
- Search time savings: $150k/year (100 users x 20 minutes/day x $30/hour, across 150 working days)
- Increased asset reuse: $240k/year ($500 average asset creation cost x 40 assets/ month x 12 months)
- Reduced project rework: $50k/year (Avoiding 10 projects/year x $5000 each)
Total annual benefits: $440k
ROI & payback
By comparing the costs against the benefits, you can calculate the ROI and payback period of your digital asset management solution. Based on this example, the calculation is as follows:
- Annual costs = $60,000 + $8,000 ≈ $68,000
- Annual benefits = $150,000 + $240,000 + $50,000 ≈ $440,000
- ROI = (($440,000 - $68,000) ÷ $68,000) x 100 = ≈ 547%.
- Payback period = $68,000 ÷ ($440,000 ÷ 12) ≈ 1.85 months.
Thanks to high levels of adoption and effective brand governance, this example demonstrates the large returns that are possible with a DAM — in this case, recouping its investment in under two months.
How to measure DAM ROI in your organization (step-by-step)
Measuring DAM ROI doesn’t need to be complex. Follow these five steps to turn qualitative wins into clear, credible numbers your leadership team can trust.
Step 1 – Scope
Consider the teams who will be most affected by your DAM (marketing, product, sales, agency partners, legal) and list their top pain points, such as search time, duplicate creative work, off-brand incidents, slow approvals, localization bottlenecks.
Interview stakeholders and collect 3–5 concrete examples that show where time and money leak today. This makes downstream assumptions easier to defend, and gives you the boundaries for your ROI model.
Step 2 – Baseline
Collect current-state metrics over a 2–4 week period. Use time tracking, data from finance systems, and short team surveys to quantify where teams’ time and resources go today. This gives you your baseline measurements, against which you can track the benefits of your DAM system.
Step 3 – Calculate benefits
Use the calculator above to work out the benefits delivered by your digital asset management tool. Calculate KPIs and metrics such as:
- Search time
- Asset reuse percentage
- Rework reduction
- Compliance savings.
Step 4 – Tally costs
Add up all costs of your DAM: annual license, implementation (amortized), integration, training, and change management. Don’t forget ongoing admin time or vendor support fees. Present costs as Year 1 (one-time + annual) and Year 2+ (recurring only) so leaders see the full picture.
Step 5 – Validate
Model both conservative and aggressive scenarios to show a range of possible returns. Then review your assumptions with Finance or leadership to secure credibility and alignment.
Best practices to improve Digital Asset Management ROI
You can boost the return on investment from your DAM platform by increasing adoption across the business, building workflows to support usage, and strengthening asset governance. These best practices tie directly to the ROI levers identified earlier in this article, and adopting them can help increase your DAM ROI.
Optimize taxonomy and metadata
How you set up and organize your DAM will affect how easily everyone in the business can find and work with the correct brand assets. The more complex your setup and workflows, the less likely people will use your DAM, which means it’s delivering less value to your organization.
First, consider the high-level setup of your DAM, and think about what you need to organize your assets:
- Areas for specific departments
- Libraries for each global region
- Folders or libraries for different campaigns
- Sections for external users
Then, look at your assets individually. When you add a new file to your DAM, you should always add metadata — such as the date, type, and campaign it’s associated with. Setting up proper metadata and tags is essential to help users find the asset they need within your DAM system:
- Metadata helps categorize your assets. It has a clear format — like “date” — and is often used to structure an asset library and improve asset discovery.
- Tags are user-defined and open-ended. You might use tags to describe the asset, or to group assets for different campaigns. But people might tag assets differently, so you should use tags together with metadata, rather than instead of.
Clear taxonomy and detailed metadata and asset tagging will accelerate asset discovery — a core ROI lever for your digital asset management system. For example, the Kansas City Chiefs’ brand team saves up to 10 hours per week with the Frontify DAM, as all stakeholders can access the assets they need and can take full ownership over doing so.
Standardize and enforce templates
Templates for common brand assets, like social media posts, sales decks, product sheets, and conference presentations speed up asset creation and enable wider reuse and repurposing of brand materials.
Standardized templates help companies ensure brand consistency, streamlining the review and approvals process when creating new assets. Designers create the template, then control which design elements can be edited, while other elements remain locked.
Using creative templates has transformed the creative process for Spring Health. The Spring Health team creates between 10 and 50 templates a day, and each template saves them around 16 hours per design. By streamlining their creative workflows the Spring Health team realizes huge time savings and drives higher levels of asset reuse across the organization.
Centralize access through brand portals
Make it as easy as possible for users to access your DAM. A single, centralized brand portal provides an easy entry point into your DAM, and connects it to other valuable brand resources like your guidelines and templates. It also provides customizable user permissions, enabling different levels of access for marketing teams, designers, and other stakeholders. This ensures the right people can contribute to and utilize brand materials effectively.
Streamlining access to your DAM strengthens asset governance, giving you control over who has access, and what they can use. It also makes it easier to collaborate with external agencies and partners — Datacom saves between 1-2 hours of admin time per project when working with agencies, and its internal team members save 3 to 5 hours per asset request, thanks to the Frontify DAM.
Integrate DAM with key tools
Connecting your DAM with other tools can increase adoption across the business. Many companies connect their DAMs with key tools, such as:
- CMS platforms so website teams can upload brand materials directly from the DAM to a website page
- Project management tools so creative teams can collaborate and stay up-to-date during new asset creation
- Creative suites so designers can access brand elements like logos and icons directly from their creative tools, and upload finished assets directly to the DAM.
These integrations reduce time spent manually uploading files, or transferring files between different platforms. They also help team members use brand assets more often, as they can access the DAM (and the brand files it contains) straight from the tools they already use every day.
Common pitfalls that affect DAM ROI
ROI calculations can be misleading if you make a few common mistakes. Avoiding these pitfalls ensures credibility and helps executives trust your ROI numbers.
Misinterpreting metrics
Some metrics make it look like you’re getting high levels of DAM use, but don’t paint an accurate picture.
For example, high numbers of asset downloads makes it look like you’re getting significant levels of asset reuse, but those assets may never actually get used. One person might download an image three times but never actually finish the project they used it in. These instances make your DAM ROI look stronger than it really is.
Some DAM vendors highlight vanity metrics like “total downloads” or “storage saved,” which sound impressive but don’t map to real financial outcomes. Frontify’s analytics help you track asset usage alongside other adoption metrics to ensure ROI reflects actual business impact.
Ignoring low adoption rates
If people don’t use your DAM, you won’t see any return on your investment. Low adoption rates mean all those problems you’re trying to solve — like duplicated work and inconsistent asset use — continue.
Track adoption rate every month, so you can spot if adoption and engagement rates slow down. Frontify lets you track adoption at the team and individual level, so you can spot usage gaps early and support teams to boost DAM use as needed.
Weak governance
Ineffective governance erodes your DAM ROI as your company will need to pay unexpected rework and compliance-related costs.
Without strong governance and approval workflows, teams risk publishing off-brand or outdated assets. This can cause driving costly rework, project delays, and could even expose your company to legal risks. Frontify enables effective brand governance. The platform provides customizable user permissions, version control, asset deprecation, and automated approvals to ensure only approved, brand-safe content gets published.
Overreliance on simple payback metrics
Payback period answers “how fast,” but not “how much” value a DAM generates over its lifecycle. While a DAM may pay back its initial investment in a matter of months, its real value compounds over multiple years thanks to the ongoing benefits of asset reuse, increased consistency, and reduced compliance risks — so the payback period doesn’t tell the full story.
Focusing only on payback period can mean you overlook longer-term benefits like scaling globally, and future workflow automations. Your finance leaders may prefer Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to quantify these broader returns. Frontify supports ROI models that extend beyond payback, giving executives the full financial picture.
Frontify helps you drive higher DAM ROI
Companies often think of DAM software as a simple asset storage facility. The Frontify platform provides much more: it actively drives adoption, governance, and creative efficiency, moving the levers that maximize the ROI of your digital asset management system.
Frontify provides a unified brand management hub that combines DAM with digital brand guidelines and creative templates in a centralized platform to help companies:
- Strengthen brand governance: Frontify’s brand guidelines connect with the DAM to help users create and use the correct brand assets. This reduces compliance risks, off-brand designs, and time spent correcting brand mistakes
- Scale on-brand content creation: Frontify’s editable templates with locked elements empower non-designers to create branded materials autonomously. You can reduce agency costs and free up designers to work on higher-impact projects while streamlining creative workflows
- Centralize brand access across teams and markets: Frontify’s brand portal provides centralized access to approved assets, templates, and guidelines for global and local teams, agencies, and external partners. You can control access to users can only view assets relevant to their role or market, improving asset reuse and brand adoption
- Speed up asset searches: Frontify’s AI-assisted metadata, tagging, and search functionality helps users spend less time searching for assets as they find the right files more quickly. Faster asset discovery and retrieval adds up to huge time savings across the organization, boosting productivity and business output.
Find out more about how Frontify’s centralized brand hub can drive brand adoption and engagement, delivering higher DAM ROI: book a demo with our team.
