Data-Driven Insights: How to Measure ROI For Virtual Events

Ever finish up a virtual event and wonder if it was a success? Without data, it's hard to tell. Virtual events offer a gold mine of data to gather and analyze, but how do you interpret and leverage that data to gauge your event's true impact? We're entering the realm of virtual event ROI (Return on Investment). Let's dive into the event metrics you need to unlock those insights that elevate your future events and transform data into action.

Understanding Virtual Event ROI: Beyond Attendance Figures

Comprehensive virtual event analytics are more than registration and attendee numbers; they provide valuable insights for your entire organization. While a solid turnout is positive, taking a more holistic approach to measuring virtual event ROI is crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of audience engagement, lead generation, and overall effectiveness. 

Unlocking ROI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's get you started! Understanding how to calculate virtual event ROI empowers you to: 

• Demonstrate the Value of Virtual Events - Provide your stakeholders with quantifiable data that showcases the impact of your events.
• Optimize Future Events - Refine your strategy and maximize your future ROI by leveraging the data for those valuable insights.
• Make Informed Budget Decisions - Concentrate your resources effectively based on the ROI generated by different virtual event formats and content types.

Now that you know the why, let's take a deep dive into calculating your virtual event ROI. First up - let's take a big-picture peek at where to begin and what will help you gather the right data:

• Define Your Event Goals - Set specific and measurable goals for your virtual event, such as lead generation, brand awareness, or customer engagement.
• Track Relevant Metrics - Identify the key metrics that align with your defined goals and utilize virtual event analytics to capture this data.
• Calculate Costs - Add up all the expenses associated with your virtual event, including platform fees, speaker fees, and marketing costs.
• Analyze and Evaluate - Post-event, analyze the collected data and correlate it with your initial goals.
• Calculate ROI - Utilize a virtual event ROI calculator - there are many available online - to translate your data into a concrete ROI percentage.

For more in-depth content on this subject, check out our
Virtual Event Planning and Strategy Learning Hub

Best Practices For Measuring Event ROI

So, what are the key metrics for virtual event success? These five areas will give you the most bang for your data buck when it comes to measuring ROI:

• Registration - Registration data can help you gauge overall interest in your event, as well as offer insights into whether your event title, description, and marketing campaign is drawing your target audience and driving registrations.
• Attendance - Attendance data is an excellent measure of your content and presenter's clout. To get a full picture, measure both live attendance and on-demand activity.
• Engagement Metrics - Monitor engagement activities such as Q&A, chat activity, poll responses, and/or completing a survey to assess audience interaction throughout your event.
• Lead Generation - Identify how many leads were generated through the event, such as form submissions and post-event downloads.
• Customer Satisfaction - Surveys and polls not only measure engagement, they also offer opportunities for gathering valuable feedback from attendees regarding their overall experience. 

Pro tip: Examine polling responses and Q&A to determine if your audience was truly engaged or if they needed better clarity on the topic.

Go Deeper: Customized Event Metrics

Measuring event success isn't limited to calculating your event's ROI. Take advantage of other virtual event analytics tools by filtering your data for deeper insights. Some options to consider:

• By Segment - Event data segmentation is useful for industry-specific initiatives or when focusing on a specific product/service, offering opportunities to explore averages as well as which subsets perform best. 

• By Company - Useful for account-based marketing (ABM), separating data by company helps identify reach and connection activity against the target account and when reviewing account performance. (Where are we succeeding? Where are there gaps?) 

• By Persona - For targeting a particular buyer or purchaser, categorize the data by your key personas to ensure your analytics match up with your structure. 

• By Engagement - With open virtual events, you may have a large number of registrants who don't actually attend. Parsing out data so you’re reviewing only the most engaged attendees may yield different insights. 

• By Demographic - Collecting information such as age, income, education attained, etc., helps paint a more comprehensive picture of event performance by common factors, yielding insights for your marketing team to optimize their campaigns and communications.

• By Region/Geography - Determining where your priority attendees are located helps ensure you're scheduling live virtual events in a time zone that maximizes potential for real-time attendance. 

Benchmarking 

Benchmarking involves taking current event data and comparing against past data or another standard. Benchmarking is particularly useful for giving context to numbers and identifying trends. Typical event data used for benchmarking include:

• Average Attendance Rate
  • Live
  • On-Demand
• Average Engagement Rate (Live attendees that have taken at least one action: asked a question, answered a poll.)
• Post-Event Survey Completion Rate

Pro Tip: Look at both live and on-demand event data. An uptick in on-demand views within a specific time zone can indicate an opportunity to schedule simulated-live events during their optimal attendance time.

Wrapping Up: Post-Event Surveys

Post-event surveys give you direct audience feedback on your event and provide you an opportunity to ask follow-up questions.

Five Best Practices For Your Surveys:

1. Keep it short - Fewer than 10 questions.
2. Don’t ask for info you already have - For example, attendee information collected at the time of registration such as email, company name, etc.
3. Ask quantifiable questions for easy data gathering - Open-ended and single-answer questions are more difficult to quantify. Rating scales, e.g., "I found this content helpful," (1=not at all, 5=extremely valuable) are better for gathering more precise feedback for analysis. 
4. Build questions around the event type - For example, include direct sales questions for lead generation events: "Would you like us to follow up with you?" 
5. Leave space for open comments - Include an alphanumeric text field for respondents to add additional comments and feedback.

Visualizing Your Data

Presenting your data is an important piece of this endeavor - you need to make the case for your event's positive ROI to your stakeholders, and offering reports and data visualizations are great tools to have in your arsenal. Options can vary based on the level of reporting you need and how that plays into your overall analytics: 

• Basic - Using spreadsheet reports to view information and capture numbers.
• Automatic - Automation tools, such as scheduled reports, reduce the time spent on gathering metrics, freeing you to focus on interpreting and understanding your data.
• Customized - Tools available for creating dashboards and visual data representation include:
  • Power BI - Microsoft’s analytics tool, its basic functionality looks at event-level data including the number of events, number of registrants and number of attendees.
  • Advanced Power BI - For deeper, more complex data analysis, Advanced Power BI can layer in registrant data such as demographics, registration question responses, poll responses, and survey information.
  • API - If your in-house resources allow, leveraging the power of an API interface can offer you deep customization and address specific data points you need to make smart decisions.

Demonstrating Value to Stakeholders

Delving into your event's analytics and examining key metrics will help you calculate ROI for your virtual events and shape your strategy. As an organizer, proving to company stakeholders that your event programming is on solid, quantifiable ground is invaluable for the future of your events! Examples your data-driven insights can provide for your organization include:

• Lead Generating Events - Attendee engagement reports provide vital data on each attendee. From the time spent in the event to poll and survey responses, sales teams love seeing engagement data so they can personalize their event follow up based on the attendee's responses.
• Content Strategy - Insights into the content that performs best can be examined at the individual event level or across all events. At the individual event level, examining poll and survey data and reviewing questions asked in the chat can provide content marketers with ideas. Topic cluster reports that examine the most popular event topics are key to developing content strategies moving forward.
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM) - Reporting grouped by company and persona to show impacts across a company’s ABM campaigns help determine attribution for prospect engagement and strategic follow-up by the sales team.
  

How Often Should You Look at Event Metrics?

Your event data gives you fantastic insights, but your timing is important, too. How often should be running reports and analyzing them to maximize their usefulness? 

• Event-level data - Review event performance and survey feedback shortly after the end of each event.
• Monthly - Review overall trends in registration and attendance, including the most popular event topics and speakers.
• Quarterly - Review segmented data by geography, demographics, or your chosen segments so you can explore trends to assist with decision making; review event ROI from the previous quarter to compare against goals.
• Yearly - Review survey responses, content trends, audience trends, sales funnel trends, cost of the events, and correlated activities to determine ROI.

Tools of the Trade

At EventBuilder, we have the pros who know how to guide you, and the tools to help you make the most of your virtual and hybrid event programming. Let our experts show you what we can do for YOUR events - get started with us today!