“Is your event a success?” Only if you demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) to your organization.
As a result that’s why using your event analytics is one of the key aspects of event technology. Without the ability to accurately measure how much people love a particular session, whether your sponsors are getting value, and whether your event app is getting downloaded, you can’t really determine if you are on the right track with what you are doing at an event. And now it’s easier than ever to measure event success with a deep dive into your event analytics. Your event analytics capture valuable insights that can be used to inform actionable decisions for your future events.
For example, suppose you are planning next year’s annual sponsorship package to cover your events and operating costs. But you’re not sure what sponsorship opportunities will be a hit or what they are worth. Using metrics from your event analytics you would be able to answer these questions and make well-informed decisions. Did you charge enough money for rotating banner ads last year? How many users saw the banner ads? Can you upsell packages by demonstrating the value of timed splash pages in addition to banner ads? Did gamification work and can you charge more for it?
Here are just some examples that deep-dive analytics can give you a measure of:
- Event app download rate. You can analyze your event app use by specific module and time frame and drill down to see metrics on different platforms. If it’s not being downloaded, delve into the why.
- Value of speakers and sessions. Determine the popularity of session handouts and check surveys and polling questions to determine value of each. How did attendees rate your session speakers? How did attendees respond to certain topics? Good analytics let you drill down for the answers and choose sessions and topics for the future that attendees will engage in.
- Value of gamification. Did you attendees actually participate in your gamification? Was it a success? If not, maybe you need to add more incentives or change your approach, because gamification should be used. Attendees love it and it’s a good way to generate sponsor dollars.
- Value of sponsorship. Get a quick overview of how your sponsor banner ads are performing. View the number of clicks and drill down to specific platforms and time periods. Get total impressions and click through rate for each sponsor and sponsor type. Why is that important? Because you can hone in on things that work well to sell to additional sponsors, and also try and upsell packages to existing sponsors.
- Value of your alerts. Check how many users have read your push notifications? Which alerts did well and which didn’t? That will help you determine the type of information that is most relevant to your attendees.
- Engagement. By looking at your attendees’ page views you can see how active they were in the event. See how many attendees adopted the app and calculate their event engagement by analyzing note taking, downloading of handouts and answering of surveys. Those are all good features to see if attendees were engaged and active at the event.
- Use your polling and survey questions wisely. Yes you can get answers on whether your dance party was a success, but you need to also get answers that go beyond the mundane to truly determine whether your overall event was a success. Three key answers you want to find out are: 1) whether the attendee will return to next year’s event; 2) whether the attendee would recommend the event; and 3) whether the attendee learned new things from the event. Analytics will help you summarize these answers in one dashboard. If the answers to all three are “yes”, then your event was on the right track for sure.
Why does it all matter? Because your decision making should be backed up by powerful real-time data so that you can make the right call. Why guess when you don’t have to?! Good analytics take the guesswork out of event decision-making.
If you want to learn more about the power of our analytics, request a demo.
