You’re ready to roll out a ground-breaking online event. You have the platform, content, presenters, and promotions in place, but what about performance metrics? Do you know which metrics you will track? If not, you need to figure it out before your event. But why?
If you measure your event’s performance, you will have concrete results to show from your investment. By analyzing the results, you can identify weak areas and improve upon them. Moreover, you’ll have a better idea of how well your event resonated with your audience. Using your metrics as a yardstick, you can compare all of your events. After that, it’s just a matter of replicating the winning events and repeating your success story. But which metrics should you track? Let’s take a closer look…
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
You can measure how many people clicked through to your event from your website, emails, social media pages, and online advertisements. By comparing the CTR of different sources side by side, you can identify the most resultful channels. The CTR also indicates the effectiveness of your call-to-action (CTA).
A high CTR proves that your targeting was precise and accurate. At the same time, if your CTR is low, you may need to experiment with different target platforms or CTAs.
Number of Registrations
The number of registrations is the total number of people who filled out your landing page form and it is a reflection of the impact of your landing page design and content. To improve this number, you can A/B test different page layouts, personalize the content, and shorten the form. It’s best to keep this page uncluttered so that visitors can focus on filling out the form.
You can also experiment with different placements of your event information. Research indicates that when important information is placed above the fold, conversion rates are relatively higher. It is also a good idea to keep a tab on the times when maximum registrations are clocked. This way, you can figure out the most active times of your target audience and leverage those insights in future events.
Registrant-to-Attendee Conversion Rate
There can be several reasons why people register for an event, but don’t attend it. With timely email reminders, you can keep registrants in the loop and encourage them to tune in for the event. The registrant-to-attendee conversion rate metric highlights the performance of your drip emails. While calculating this metric, don’t forget to factor in the on-demand turnout.
Average Viewing Time
As the name suggests, average viewing time shows how long the attendees were tuned in to your event. It speaks volumes about your speaker quality, event content, and broadcasting platform’s performance. Longer viewing time could also mean that the participants found the event engaging.
If a particular event module triggers drop-offs, you can conclude that the presenter was ineffective or that the content wasn’t engaging enough. If a remote presenter’s connectivity is patchy, that can also be a deterrent to the participants staying engaged for long periods of time. Keep a close eye on the peaks and troughs and use your findings to shape your next events.
Engagement Rate
It’s good to include interactivities in your digital events — in fact, you certainly should. But all of your efforts will be in vain if your audience doesn’t actively participate in your activities. If they are passive or distracted, there will be fewer responses to your surveys, questionnaires, and group chats. As with live events, if there are many questions from the audience, you know they are engaged and interested.
You can also analyze the quality of responses to identify highly engaged audiences. Likewise, if you track learner participation in your online training classes, you can identify learners who are eligible for the next level or merit certificates.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI is probably the most important metric of all as it is a true indicator of how well your event performed. To find the total cost of your virtual event, include the production and hosting expenses.
As for the revenue, estimate the returns in the form of leads, sales, brand authority, awareness — whatever you achieved from the event. Also, bear in mind that you can keep broadcasting your event well past its live schedule. This way, you keep generating revenue and drawing indirect benefits like customer testimonials, event snippets, and so on.
Need More Information on Metrics?
For online events, these are the key metrics that matter. To learn more about them, check out this infographic by webinar-hosting platform, FLOW.
