Organizing a corporate event requires not only a great effort from the organizers but also a significant investment of the company’s resources. It is essential to have positive results and ensure ROI (return on investment). That is, events should guarantee the generation of an economic value that positively affects the company.
The best way to evaluate an event is by measuring the results, as without this analysis, all efforts could be in vain, and we would not have any information for future events.
With this objective, it is essential that all marketing professionals, particularly the event organization specialists, count for their day-to-day tasks with a number of tools to help them analyze the data and the results.
Each action taken within the company can be measured, no matter the type, but, in the case of virtual events, this is multiplied. In fact, online meetings are considered strong tools able to quantify the return on investment achieved, they give us the possibility of obtaining valuable data during and after the events that can be later analyzed to make a real assessment of the results.
This is the objective of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It consists of performance metrics that allow us to gather information and check if our event had the expected success.
These indicators should have a leading role in the organizer’s agenda, as they offer all the key data to determine the return on investment. Furthermore, they would give us the opportunity to improve future events and optimize the projections of this.
Thus, the advantages of the metrics or KPIs can be summarized in:
- Capacity to obtain valuable information for the company
- Possibility of carrying complete result analysis
- Great potential for decision-making based on objective and reliable data
First step in measuring virtual event success: Strategic Planning
When it is time to organize a virtual event, the fear of failure is present for the whole process, especially the fear that the audience will not appear or will disconnect early.
The best advice when planning a virtual meeting is to comprehend what the assistants need, what they expect, and what they will obtain. In this sense, it must be borne in mind one fundamental premise: great ideas generate great experiences.
For that, during the planning phase, it is important to reunite all possible information about future attendees. This includes data about what motivates the audience and get to know how they conceive the event and what they expect from it.
By efficiently collecting this information, organizers can guarantee that the offered contents and activities meet the audience’s desires. Most importantly: they would be able to design an event that appeals to the assistant.
In this scenario, virtual worlds are the most favorable environments for creating immersive experiences, and for that, they have become great allies for event planners.
8 Core Indicators to Evaluate Virtual Events
Once the event has been planned, it is crucial to use a series of metrics to measure it. Regardless of the stated goal, we should always count with objective reliable data obtained through these KPIs:
1. Check-in
Find out how many assistants have come to the event versus how many registered to attend.
2. Number of regular assistants
This metric allows us to analyze the customer trust and the value of our events.
3. New clients
An essential KPI that allows us to know the number of new clients obtained thanks to the organization of the event.
4. Interest in the activities
Within a virtual event, the activities that can be carried out are numerous. Webinars, Team Building activities, videoconferences, virtual classrooms, etc. For that, when trying to measure the success of our proposal, it is important to collect data regarding which was the most popular.
5. Satisfaction Survey
The best way to know if the assistants have enjoyed the event is by asking them. And, if we plan our questions in terms of numerical answers, the measurement will be even more efficient.
This technique is not only reliable to know the level of satisfaction, but to know to what extent they will recommend the event. The KPI Net Promoter Score provides this information: just by including the question, “From 1 to 10, how likely is it for you to recommend this event to another person?”, we can learn which assistants can be considered as promoters.
6. Interactions
Every virtual event stands out for offering different experiences that encourage interaction between participants. This metric exists, for instance, to know the number of assistants who visited a company stand at a virtual fair or within an interactive chat, who was the most active, either by speaking with their microphone or by the number of messages sent.
7. Social media interaction
This method of communication is by far superior to the rest nowadays and its measurement is an excellent tool to assess the repercussion of your event. In order to measure it, it is necessary to think about an effective hashtag and follow it to see how many times it has been mentioned by the assistants.
It’s also important to count the number of ‘likes’, both in publications and in mentions or in the company’s profile during and after the event.
8. Gross and net incomes
One of the KPIs that should never be forgotten. It is essential to know the profits made by an event to measure the return on investment.
These are the most important KPIs, but, depending on the kind of business or event we want to organize, we could use others. In fact, in most cases, it is advisable not to choose between one or another metric, but to learn how to combine them to elaborate exhaustive reports that present us a global image of the event and make the appropriate decisions based on these objective data.
