Before exploring event ROI, what is event ROI? Event ROI is a term that shows you the value obtained from an event, vs the effort. According to a study by Eventbrite, 79% of event organisers measure event success by attendance, but fewer than 30% measure financial ROI. This highlights a gap in understanding the actual value of events. It’s important to note that value could mean, the number of leads secured, the number of event sign-ups, the revenue generated from registrations, or the sponsorships and partnerships involved. Effort could mean the cost, time, or resources that went into producing the event.
Measuring the overall performance of your event, whether it’s attendee registrations, leads generated, profit made, or engagement, is important as it gives you an indication as to whether you achieved your goals. It helps for you to improve your future events as you will know what to work on and improve on. In addition, it’s important that you also lay out your goals and objectives before the event, so that you have a KPI to measure against after the event.
Top event ROI measurement tools
Marketing tools and platforms can help you to track the success of an event. We’ve pulled together a list of popular tools you can use that will help you to measure ROI.
HubSpot is a customer platform with software, integrations and resources to help you connect your data, teams, and customers all on one platform. It allows you to seamlessly share information across your teams, such as marketing, sales and customer services teams/admin teams using an AI-powered solution. Teams also have the ability to track interactions across different platforms, and the AI-generated smart recommendations can help you to make the next action in the process. You also have the ability to connect your tools to HubSpot, such as Eventbrite, Cvent and more. Users have access to ROI reports so that you can track leads and conversion rates.
Eventbrite offers the ability to sell event tickets online. It’s a global event ticketing and marketing platform that allows you to create an online ticketing system, tap into social marketing tools, as well as use their marketing tools to connect with attendees to engage with them. The tool also offers reports and insights so that you can see where the ticket sales are coming from and get detailed information about the ticket buyers.
Marketo is an automation platform that allows you to streamline and optimise your marketing campaigns. You can use Marketo for event marketing, pre-event promotion and post-event follow-up. You can also personalise your event communications using data segmentation and automate email campaigns to nurture and engage your attendees before, during, and after the event. It’s possible to integrate your event platform tools such as mobile apps and social media channels to understand attendee behaviour. This information is collated where you can measure the impact of your event using its ROI calculator. Marketo also offers insights and recommendations to help you to improve on your events.
Why is real-time analytics important in an event?
Real-time tracking is becoming an important part of success when it comes to events. It can help to improve decision making during the event, as well as after.
Decision-making and enhancing attendee experience
By receiving real-time updates, event organisers can make decisions quickly. Decision might involve solving problems as they arise or ensuring there is the right resource available for tasks. These might include having more staff to manage catering, registration, or logistics, or issues with getting to the event such as traffic or public transport delays. You might receive information from different sources such as social media, feedback forums and apps.
By addressing the issues as they arrive, whether that’s allocating additional resources or offering alternate routes for attendees to get to the event (as an example), this will help to improve the overall experience for the attendees as issues are being fixed before or as they happen, rather than after. Additionally, by looking at data such as session attendance, engagement, and preferences, event managers can tailor content to meet the interests of attendees, which will offer a much more personalised experience.
Future planning
Not only is this data important for during the event, but it’s also beneficial for post-event analysis as it allows the event manager to measure the ROI based on the initial goals and objectives. If you have organised a few events, the information will also allow you to identify patterns and trends so that you can identify and make any necessary changes to events coming up. It can also offer a means of communication to your attendees, for example, reaching out to those who had a negative experience and offering them a discount on a future event.
Tracking attendee engagement
Measuring the impact of attendee behaviour and interactions can be difficult. So, we’ve pulled together a list of what you can focus on to help you understand the overall event ROI.
- Are your attendees visiting for the first time, or is it a repeat visit? Knowing this information can help you to understand how you should tailor the event content and marketing for these individuals
- Are your attendees interacting with exhibitors? You can see how many interactions were on the attendees’ agendas and whether or not they found these useful using the different marketing platforms highlighted earlier in this article. You can also measure how many guests attended specific sessions to get a feel for the quality of the content produced.
- Get an idea of engagement rates using live polls and Q&A sessions.
- Are attendees engaging on social media? You can check to see the number of times your event’s hashtag was used or how many photos were taken
- Gamification data. If you have weaved any gamification elements to your event, this will also give you a good indication as to how many people participated and whether or not the gaming elements were a success.
- Have you generated any leads or closed any deals? Naturally, if you generated leads or closed deals during or after the event, the likelihood is that your attendees found value in your event and this is a clear indicator that your event was successful. However, the number of leads and deals closed depends on the event KPIs that you set out with.
Conclusion
It is recommended to begin the preparation for an event with clear goals and event KPIs. This may be generating leads, enhancing brand recognition, launching a new product, or building relationships with potential clients. Having a clear goal will enable you to evaluate the success of the event as you will have a benchmark to work with.
