How companies can measure the success of their events
Measuring the success of an event can be a complicated process for many event planners. It is easy to look at the number of people that attended the event, the number of people that purchased tickets, or ROI calculations and base success on these two key indicators.
While those may be vital metrics to determine whether your event was successful or not, it is not the be-all and end-all of measuring success.
Sometimes success can’t be quantified, and in these cases, it is best to measure the impact of your event on your attendees.
5 ways to measure the success of your event
With hybrid and virtual event options, event planners can seamlessly measure the impact of their events.
Many event platforms can generate metrics that will assist event planners as they look back at how their event impacted attendees.
1. Ticket Sales and Registration
Ticket sales are vital indicators of success. This is usually the first number event planners look at when measuring success.
If you are hosting a free event, event registrations might help you better understand how many people are interested in your event.
In addition, it is also good to compare the number of people that registered for your event or bought tickets to your event versus the number of people that attended the event.
2. Calculating Event ROI (return-on-investment)
Event ROI is an important indicator of whether your event was successful or not.
Event ROI can be a helpful metric in your negotiation strategy for event partners. Potential sponsors will appreciate the insight into the type of returns they can expect from your event.
Here’s a simple formula to help you calculate ROI:
3. Event app analytics
In the case of virtual and hybrid events, platforms usually integrate event apps. These apps are convenient for the attendee, and they provide valuable data in real-time.
Event apps can provide information like page or sponsor booth impressions so that event planners can report back to sponsors or partners with accurate data.
Event planners can use the data directly from the app to decipher which content was most engaged with by attendees and which sessions or activities were most attended.
4. Number of returning attendees
Event planners can look at the number of repeat attendees based on their email address or contact number with recurring events or even an event series.
This metric shows that your events are providing value to the attendee, and you have sparked enough interest in your brand, product, or service, turning them into loyal attendees. This is the ideal situation for event planners.
5. Post-event sales
If the objective of your event is to generate sales, you can map out your attendee journey and see whether you were able to meet your goals after your event.
Mapping out their journeys can give you insight into which point your attendees fall off the sales journey. This might help inform your efforts at your next event.
How do you measure the impact of your event?
As previously mentioned, success is not necessarily reflected in the numbers. Success can also be measured by the impact you or your brand had on event attendees.
Attendee feedback
Feedback from your attendees can help you to contextualize the numbers.
For instance, if a large number of your attendees entered your website to make a purchase but didn’t follow through, perhaps your attendees are having trouble, and they might let you know through the feedback.
Social media interaction
If people are impressed with your event, they will rave about it on social media, even more so if they had a terrible experience, they would want people to know.
How people interact with your brand will let you know how you’ve impacted them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, sometimes measuring success can be done with analytics and numbers. In other cases measuring impact through people’s feedback and experiences can be a means to measure success. The metrics you use to determine success depend on your event objectives.
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[hubspot portal=”5958648″ id=”de0c0cbb-e144-4596-8bde-5ca391770991″ type=”form”]About the Author / Akeem Okunola
