The Morning After: 5 Event Metrics You Simply Must Report

Sometimes, the most important work of an event happens after everyone goes home. That’s when the reporting begins, and that’s when you find out what really happened: whether your metrical successes line up with your anecdotal perceptions, and what your true ROI looks like. To determine the true extent of your event’s performance, here are five key metrics you can look at to fill in the big picture.

Track Social Reach

Social reach has quickly become one of the most important metrics to measure for two reasons: 1) It’s virtually demographic-agnostic because social media use has become so widespread (per a 2014 Pew Research study, 74 percent of online adults use social media, and those numbers are even higher for adults between the ages of 18 and 49), and 2) It’s genuinely trackable. The first point is important because everyone from influencers to janitors uses social media. Assuming your event has met the minimum social media requirement of establishing an event hashtag, every attendee is presumably going to be using that hashtag, which leads to the second point. If everyone uses that hashtag, it becomes very easy to track what happened: who commented, who shared, who liked and who replied.

Track Post-Event Engagement!

Any good event takes on a life of its own after it ends, but post-event engagement is crucial for real success. Attendees have time to not only process their thoughts and reactions, but also to assemble them into things like photo journals, blog posts and other pieces of valuable content. To ensure full advantage is taken of these opportunities, it is vital that: a) there is a strategy in place to encourage post-event activity, and b) there is a person or team in place to directly engage with those contributing post-conference content. The best way to encourage post-event activity is to reward post-event activity by responding to it. If you see a tweet about the event, don’t just retweet it and/or favorite it. Respond directly to it as well, with an @mention that tells the tweeter you’re directly engaging them. Oftentimes, your proactive and engaged response can generate more traction than the original content!

Track Attendees, and Flag Leads!

There are two significant things you want from an event: leads and data. To get the right kind of the former, you need to flag the right kind of the latter. Well-leveraged events generate a lot of data, and while only so much of it will translate, the information that does is really valuable. It begins with your attendee list because they’re already converted. They signed up; they attended. To be blunt, they’re low-hanging fruit, and they need to be picked. That’s what post-event lead generation is all about, but it doesn’t stop there. You need to parse that list, and flag key attendees. And attendance itself is a key metric, particularly when balanced against RSVP expectations. For budgetary reasons alone, building a “no-show” rate over time is crucial to successful event planning. And supplemental research into what may have drove the no-shows can then in turn drive outreach strategy for a next event.

Use Surveys to Collect Specific Data

One of the most direct ways to glean event insight is a survey, which gives attendees the opportunity to say exactly what they think. Surveys can be conducted online in static fashion (on an event landing page), online dynamically (via social media) and in person (using a custom event app). Keep surveys short, make the questions specific, and most of all, be prepared to publish the results within a reasonable post-event timeframe.

Event analytics are only one part of the process of staging a successful event, but collecting properly from the last one is how you ensure the success of the next one! To do this strategically, thoroughly, and consistently is challenging, certainly, but not at all impossible. And fortunately, there are now a select few companies (Limelight, for example), that offer comprehensive suites of services to address all the above and more. With the right company, the right platform, and the right tools, you can track everything you need to track, and achieve everything you need to achieve.