Virtual Events: Best practices for determining the success of your virtual event?

Courtney, I run a very successful series of industry best practices events on our virtual engagement platform. Here are the metrics I use to determine the results of my program:

1. Number of Registrants - This measures the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns. I track each individual with a promo code to determine which campaign he originated from. The number of registrants varies with the type of your event and your audience. As a rule of thumb, if you have a physical event e.g. a user conference and you add a virtual component, you should expect to at least double your registration number.

2. Attendance Rate – The percentage of registrants that actually attend. I like to differentiate between live day attendance (typically 50%) and overall attendance. Since your event is always-on, I care more about overall attendance e.g. 2 or 3 months after the live day. My best event has had a 87% attendance rate.

3. Attendee Engagement – This metric indicates how successful you were at engaging your audience, - a higher overall engagement level will result in more satisfied attendees. It also allows you to rank your attendees, which is important for a lead gen event. In our case, I customize our Engagement metric to reflect the desired type of lead I am trying to attract. E.g. I will place additional weight on senior level decision makers from my desired geography, who attend the sessions that I want them to attend, who actively ask questions and who communicate with our subject experts at the booths. The way I like to set it up, all leads with a ranking of 50 – 100 will be sent to our sale team as leads, while I like to leave those below 50 in the virtual environment to mature.

4. Cost per Attendee – a key performance metric for the success of an event. This number strongly depends on your individual situation and type of event. Virtual events are able to reduce cost per attendee by an order of magnitude. An average cost per lead for industry trade shows is somewhere around $200 - $500. For training events the typical cost can be $2000 or higher. Virtual events can get this down to $ 50 - $20 and less.

5. Pipeline – Most of my events are ultimately measured by the number and size of opportunities generated by our sales team. I assign a pipeline goal to every event. This is a metric that depends on the type of product or service you offer, as well as your average sales price and your sales cycle.

There are lots of other, more tactical metrics, like the time spent in a session or in the overall event, the number of visits per attendee, number of downloads etc. - we consolitate all of these in the engagement index for the overall event, but attach them to the individual attendee/lead profile that goes over to sales, so that the sales team knows what each attendee has experienced.

I look forward to seeing how others measure the success of their events.