While the 2020 shift to virtual events may have been challenging, event planners quickly discovered loads of useful data that a digital format can provide. More than physical events, virtual events give an event organizer unprecedented insight into attendee demographics and behavior. All of this information can be used to create bigger and better future events. But, this data is only useful if you know what to collect and how to analyze it. To help you leverage event data to improve your virtual events, we’ve put together this short guide. Here’s everything you need to know about event data, and it can be used to improve your future virtual events.
As mentioned in the introduction, virtual events can provide event organizers with a significant amount of useful information. Because you will be using a virtual event platform to deliver content to your audiences, you will have increased access to their activities once they are through the ‘virtual’ door. Here is just some of the type of data you can collect during virtual events:
A virtual event gives you easy access to the number of people that have attended each event and session. This can give you a high-level overview of what content people were most interested in consuming when they registered for your event. For example, if you are hosting a virtual conference, it can be hard to determine what is driving your registrations. Your entire program may be appealing, or it could be that a single speaker is generating all of the interest. By tracking overall event attendance and specific session attendance, you can determine which pieces of event content were most appealing to your target audience.
When using a virtual event platform, like Accelevents, you will have access to real-time data about your registrants and ticket buyers. Through the platform’s dashboard, you can track all of your sales and where they are coming from. With this data, you can gain insight into who is registering for your event, allowing you to make shifts to your event marketing strategy if necessary. You can also share this information with your virtual event sponsors and exhibitors to maximize their investment and lead generation.
Event and session attendance is important, but those numbers alone do not tell you how people interacted with your content. Fortunately, when hosting a virtual event, you can better track what people are doing once they attend a session. For starters, you can see if people stayed in the session until it was over or left partway through. You can track document downloads, video views (and for how long), chat engagement, quiz/poll/questionnaire engagement, and more.
When hosting a virtual trade show, it will be essential to understand attendee engagement with virtual booths. At physical events, this data can be challenging to collect. If you wanted this information, you would be more or less at the mercy of each exhibitor to share any information they gathered. And that data would be incomplete. In face-to-face interactions, it can be difficult to keep track of every person that comes through. With a virtual show floor, attendee movements can be tracked through your virtual event space. You can see which booths attendees visited, what materials attendees downloaded and how often, and even see lead and sales data.
Sponsors love to be a part of an online event. The availability of data can provide them with more in-depth insight into their target audience. But, you can go a step further than merely providing sponsors with attendee demographics. You can track how the audience interacted with sponsored sessions, sponsored content, and displays, and even offer social media impressions and engagement data for sponsored posts.
All of this data is great, but you will need to apply it properly to improve your virtual events. Here’s how you can leverage virtual event data to increase audience satisfaction and your revenues.
Every event marketer knows that sometimes you need to make unexpected adjustments to your strategy. When monitoring sales through your virtual platform, you will be able to see where your audience is coming from. This can be done in two ways.
Some of the most important bits of information you can collect from your virtual event can be found in your post-event survey. This feedback will give you direct information about what did (and did not!) work for your event attendees. When creating your post-event survey, there are specific questions that you need to ask.
It may also be useful to send post-event surveys, with tailored questions, to your event sponsors, volunteers and staff, and invited presenters and speakers. The more feedback you can collect, the clearer you can evaluate your event and improve on your shortcomings in the future.
Calculating the net promoter score will help you determine whether or not you’ve hosted a successful virtual event. This score gives you insight into what people thought of your event and its value in an easy to understand number. Once you have collected your post-event surveys, you can calculate the NPS. You’ve had your attendees rank the likelihood of recommending the event on a scale of 1 to 10. These answers can be categorized as detractors, passives, and promoters. Detractors score the event between 0-6, passives between 7-8, and promoters between Tally how many fall into each group, you can plug the numbers into the following formula:NPS = [(Number of Promoters – Number of Detractors) / (Total Number of Respondents)] * 100
So, for example, If you have 100 attendees and 10 are detractors, 30 are passives, and 60 are promoters, it will look like this: [60-10)/100]*100=50. In this example, your NPS is 50. A score greater than 0 means that your event was well received, and most people would recommend it. A score above 50 means your event was a resounding success. A negative score means that most people would not recommend your event.
Knowing how to leverage virtual event data to improve your event offerings is an integral part of the process. Collecting information and data around who your attendees are, where they come from, and what they did during your event can help you understand what sort of content and experience people are looking to have. Using Accelevents to market and host your event makes this data collection and analysis simple and easy. With the platform’s built-in, real-time dashboard, you can track website traffic and ticket sales, view audience demographics, capture leads, and monitor session and speaker engagement. Why struggle to understand and apply this data when Accelevents makes it simple and easy? If you are planning a virtual event, reach out to Accelevents to learn how we can support your event goals!
