12 Tips on How to Measure Success of Your Event

As an event manager, you are apparently able to recognise whether your event was successful or not. But besides feelings, it's essential to know how to measure and prove the success of the event in order to properly evaluate all your efforts. Depending on your goals, which could be either brand awareness, returning attendees or maximising revenue, you need to define a proper KPIs and after that, evaluate whether you have achieved all your objectives or not.

And how to define KPIs? Firstly, you have to determine your objectives - what exactly you want to achieve. Secondly, you need to define critical success factors - concrete numbers which you consider as success. And here we go - after that, you can specify key performance indicators.

The KPIs could relate to different areas according to your objectives. That's why we are bringing you these 12 practical tips on how to measure success from the perspective of marketing & sales, finance, and customers.

📢 Marketing & Sales perspective

Social media activity

When the attendees are excited about your event, they are usually showing it on social media pages. You can observe positive reactions to your posts - likes, shares, comments or retweets. You can measure how many positive reactions you had after the event or how many people are sharing your content. In order to measure that, make sure you are still creating social media content even after the event. 😊

Social media mentions

Besides reactions, you can measure positive mentions from your attendees on social media pages. Make sure you come up with a list of unique and simple hashtags related to your event which your attendees can use. One of the nice ways to track these mentions is through Eventee, which has a great feature for that - an integration of Twitter and Instagram. This means that all the posts with your hashtags are displayed in mobile app Eventee. Additionally, you can track mentions of your social media accounts and measure the amount of the positive ones.

Sold tickets and Registration

This metric simply indicates the number of attendees who have bought the tickets and the number of them who actually came and checked-in at your event. If the promotion of your event and communication with the attendees works well, the two numbers should be very similar. However, if the two numbers are far from each other, you should look carefully at all of your activities and find out where are the struggles and why you are losing these people.

Number of New Leads

If the objective of your event is promoting products, your business or brand, you can measure for example the number of acquired customers or the increase in sales. You have to define what “Lead” means for your company: It could be someone from a specific industry, company or just someone who shows an interest in your products. After that, you can measure how many attendees become leads.

❤️ Customer Perspective

Evaluation of speakers

Speakers play a crucial role in any kind of events and conferences. You can have great content but if the speakers don't perform well, the content would be killed. Therefore, you should choose the speakers wisely and evaluate the attendee satisfaction with each of them individually. The best solution for speakers evaluation offers a mobile event app Eventee, which enables the attendees to evaluate the speakers in a real time. Due to that, the attendees can reflect their current feelings right after the lecture and give the speakers proper feedback, from that they can learn and improve their performance for the next time. Your KPIs could be the average rating of all of the speakers you want to achieve or the overall number of ratings.

Post-event surveys

The best way to find out what are the attendee feelings about the event is through surveys. You can ask specific questions like: How did you like the venue? Did you like the networking party? Did you like the food and coffee? And let them vote on the scale from 1-5. Your KPIs could be the the satisfaction rate which you would like to achieve in each of the event aspects. You can also leave a space for comments in the case the attendee didn't like something in order to improve that for the next time.

Attendee Interaction

It's not just about being present at the event, but more about being active. You can measure how many questions the attendees asked, how many reviews your speakers received or how many people were networking. How? Event mobile app is the answer! Eventee enables the attendees to ask questions, to review the speakers, like your feeds or network with one another. You can observe these statistics in analytics right after that.

NPS

Net Promoter Score is a little bit similar to the survey measuring attendee feelings but it's measured differently. This score asks the attendee a simple question: “How likely on the scale of 0-10 you would recommend our event to your friends?” As “promoters”, well-satisfied people, are considered people who put 9-10, as “passives” are considered people who put 7-8 and as “detractors”, the people who could spread a negative word about your event, are considered people who put 0-6. The final NPS is calculated as follows: NPS = % promoters - % detractors

Before the event, you can set the score which you would love to achieve. The higher NPS, the better. Additionally, remember to compare this score with previous years to find out whether you are moving to higher satisfaction or not. 🤗

Returning attendees

The interesting indicator to observe could be the number of attendees which return to your events. This number shows you how relevant is the content to your attendees and how much they value the event that they are coming back. You can ask for the information in registration forms and measure the percentage of the attendees which are the returnees.

💰 Financial perspective

ROI

The overall event Returns on Investment can show you how profitable the event was or in other words, how successful the particular investments were. You can calculate the basic ROI by dividing your total expenditures by total revenue generated. The ratio of less than one gives you a positive ROI which is probably what you would like to achieve. You can observe also particular ROI - for example, whether the sold tickets covered the marketing costs you spent on hunting the attendees. Remember to set clear goals in advance for particular investments.  

Cost per Attendee

An alternative to ROI could be simple Cost per Attendee ratio. You can calculate it as the total costs divided by the number of attendees. Additionally, you can also measure for example how much cost you the attendee acquisition by simply dividing the total marketing costs by the number of attendees. Think about the optimal ratio in advance and compare it with the reality afterwords.

Sponsors Satisfaction

The success of an event doesn't rely just on attendee satisfaction. Sponsor satisfaction is crucial as well because sponsors are the ones who are funding the event, investing their money with some expectations. Therefore, you should measure that and set a metric to find out whether your event fulfilled their expectations or not. There are many ways to measure this value such as through interviews, surveys, evaluation meetings, etc. Remember, that you should seek for establishing a long-term relationship so that you can count with the sponsors for the next events. Be open to honest feedback and work on your improvement.

Why Is Sponsorship Important for Your Event + How to Find an Ideal Sponsor

Event sponsorship is a powerful marketing tool that plays an important role in every event strategy. Learn how it can benefit your event when done right. And get some tips on how to find and win the perfect sponsor for your event. Start boosting your sponsorship sales today!

Hai Yen Luong

February 2, 2021

To sum up, remember to set clear objectives even before the event preparation and right after that, define and specify the KPIs important for your event. The proper evaluation and success measurement help you not just with reporting, but also to make improvements so that your future events would be much better. The whole Eventee team wishes you good luck with that! ❤️