5 metrics to consider for your virtual event

Virtual events are ideal if one of your main goals is to reach a larger audience and generate leads without the expense of an in-person event. If you're in charge of the marketing department for your company, chances are you're looking for ways to measure the success of your virtual event. But like any event, you need to set goals and objectives beforehand so that you can measure your success afterwards. While there are a lot of different metrics you could consider, here are the top five metrics you should consider when planning your virtual event.

Number of Attendees 

This is perhaps the most important metric to consider for any type of event, whether it is on-person, hybrid or online. You need to set a goal for how many people you want to attend your event, and then track registrations to see if you're on track to reach that goal. 

If not, don't panic! There's still time to promote your event and get more people to sign up. It’s important to organize and announce your event in advance in order to have enough time to attract those interested in attending your event and to be able to pivot to other ways of promoting the event in case the registration goal is not reached at the stipulated time. 

Engagement 

To calculate your engagement rates throughout your event, you need to have the number of total attendees at hand. At the beginning of your event, you can measure things like the number of people registered, how many people logged into the event, how long they were logged in for, and what percentage of the virtual event they watched. Answering these questions will give you a good idea of how engaged your audience was during the event, and comparing these engagement statistics to your total number of attendees should give you a good idea of what percentage of your total audience stayed engaged through the event. 

If you see that a large percentage of people logged in and watched the entire event, that's a good sign that they found it valuable. On the other hand, if fewer people logged in or if they only watched a small portion of the event, that's a sign that you need to make some changes for next time. 

Also, just because someone attends your virtual event doesn't mean they're paying attention. That's why it's important to measure engagement by tracking things like how long attendees spend on each page of your event, what content they interact with, and whether they click through to any of your Call-to-Actions (CTAs).

Satisfaction 

After your virtual event is over, it's important to survey attendees and ask them how satisfied they were with the overall experience. This will help you identify areas that went well and areas that need improvement for next time. 

Customer satisfaction surveys should ask questions that can provide insight into how the user felt about the event platform, the registration process, how useful it was for them to attend the event, whether they would attend the event again, whether they would recommend it, etc. 

Try to make this survey easy and short to answer, with clear questions that are quantifiable, avoid asking open questions because it will be more work for you and your sales team and besides, the probability of attendees answering this type of questions is lower. 

Lead Generation 

One of the primary goals of any event is lead generation, and virtual events are no different. Be sure to track how many new leads you generated from your event so that you can determine its ROI (return on investment). 

A successful virtual event should generate qualified leads that you can then follow up with and turn into customers. Look at how many leads your event generated and compare that to your goal. If you met or exceeded your goal, great! If not, don't despair—that’s why event data and statistics are so important. They reveal the strongest and weakest parts of your event so you can improve your engagement rates on the next one. There are always things you can change for next time to increase your lead generation. 

Sales Generated 

If your virtual event resulted in any sales, be sure to track them. This is perhaps the most concrete metric for determining the success of your event, because it is the goal of any marketing effort, and it's especially gratifying to see results like this from an event. Even if you didn't generate any sales from your event, though, all hope is not lost. You can use the leads you generated to continue working towards making a sale down the road. 

We hope this gives you a starting point for thinking about which metrics to track for your virtual event. Virtual events are a great way to reach more people and generate leads, but only if they're done right. By setting goals and measuring the right metrics, you can ensure that your virtual event is successful. Remember, attendees, engagement, customer satisfaction, lead generation, and sales are all important factors to consider when measuring success.