10 Metrics Event Planners Should Track for Event Success

How do you know what ticket type resonated best with event attendees? How well does your event website resonate with visitors? Did your event really provide value for sponsors, or did you have to scramble to find “vanity metrics” that justify sponsor investment?

If you’re like most event organizers, these are the types of challenging questions you are presented with before, during and after an event. For planners interested in building better events, data (when collected and analyzed correctly) can present a one of a kind opportunity to learn and make improvements by answering key questions.

This article and the accompanying infographic will discuss 10 data points event organizers should be collecting and analyzing in order to build more successful events.

1. Ticket Sales Performance Over Time

When event planners understand how event registrations or ticket sales performed over time, they can better understand when most attendees are likely to register for an event. If organizers understand this, they can either decide to wait to open registrations during an optimal time period, or they can decide to take steps to incentivize potential attendees to register for an event when they are less likely to by creating early bird tickets, offering special packages or capitalizing on the proven psychological habits of potential attendees.

2. Registrations By Ticket Price

This data point helps organizers understand the price elasticity of ticket prices. For some events, the ticket price may be very elastic – meaning that a small change in price, or consumer income has a big impact on demand.

For other events, tickets may be inelastic, meaning that a change in price or consumer income has a marginal impact on demand.

The best way to understand this is to track the number of registrations sold at various price points.

3. Registrations By Ticket Type

Which ticket are most attendees interested in purchasing? By tracking registrations by ticket type, event organizers offering multiple ticket options can better understand which ticket options truly appeal to attendees.

They can use this information to modify the ticket types being offered to provide more or fewer options depending on the data.

4. Revenue From Promo Codes

How do you know if your speakers, sponsors, or industry supporters were successful in promoting your event and driving registrations? By providing these influencers with track-able promo codes, event planners can better understand what outlets (if any) were successful at increasing registrations.

5. Visit-To-Purchase Conversion Rate

This metric will help event organizers get a sense for how well their event website is optimized to drive visitors to actually register for the event. Rather than investing in paid ads, social media, or other marketing initiatives to drive visits to your event website, it may be more cost-effective to simply “build a better mouse trap” by converting a higher percentage of website visitors to registrants.

This data can help event planners understand if changes to their event website are helping or hurting event registration conversions.

6. Email Open Rates & Click Through Rates

For some, this will be a metric that is already being tracked, but for those who are not tracking email open and click-through rates, it’s time to join us in the 21st Century.

Email Open Rates can tell event organizers if the subject line of the email is “clickable.” Are recipients willing to take the time to open your email – if not, it’s time to create more compelling subject lines, and to make sure emails aren’t ending in the Spam folder.

Email Click Through Rates indicate if people who opened the email find the content to be interesting and relevant to them. If recipients are opening your email, but aren’t clicking on the links inside, consider personalizing, segmenting and writing emails to make them more interesting to recipients.

7. Sponsorship Engagement

How well did your event provide value to event sponsors? If you have hard data on hand, it can make it much easier for event planners to prove to sponsors or exhibitors that the event was worthwhile. Metrics like, sponsor page views, likes, and actions taken, can help event sponsors get a better sense of whether or not your event is worth investing in moving forward.

These metrics can also help you as an organizer to spot trends, see which sponsors get the most engagement, determine what it is about the sponsor page that’s working, and recommend that your other sponsors take similar steps to find success with your attendees.

8. Number Of Active Networking Community Members

Tech oriented event planners recognize the value of having a digital community that provides event goers with a place to network with one another before, during and after an event. But it’s critical that organizers who offer a networking community, also track the number of active registrants in the community.

If attendees aren’t involved online, then planners should take steps to increase adoption. If they are already active, then organizers know that investing in an online networking tool was worth it, and now they can take steps to make the digital community a bigger part of the live event.

9. Event Session Engagement

There are many ways for organizers to understand if an event session was popular after the fact. But what if you knew months in advance that certain sessions were considerably more popular than others? By tracking metrics like agenda session views, likes and the number of sessions that were added to personal calendars, planners can see which sessions are really resonating with attendees.

With this information, planners can work to find larger spaces to accommodate more people, they can edit the event agenda to offer other similar sessions, and they can let speakers know so that they are even more prepared to deliver a stunning presentation.

10. Social Media Impressions By Network

There are many different social media platforms for organizers to consider when marketing an event – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Instagram just to name a few. By tracking the impressions your event is generating on each social network, and by understanding which networks are driving visits will help you to double down on the platforms that are working.

Key Takeaways

There are many different metrics that event planners can track to understand how well an event is performing, but by focusing on metrics related to event registrations, event sponsors and attendee engagement, event planners will be able to take smart proactive steps to create even more successful events.