Play the Numbers Game to Win: 5 KPIs to Keep Track of Your Hybrid Event Success

ByHublio

ELI PARTNER CONTENT

Your hybrid event just wrapped up, and you’re now breathing a sigh of relief for being able to pull it off. The time has come for you to see how you did! It’s time to look at the numbers and stats — your key performance indicators (KPIs) — that will offer you insight into the successful, failed, and the can-be-done-better aspects of your event.

But where do you start? Which KPIs would be the most important? Okay, you’ve got the numbers, but how do you use them?

Start right here. We’ll help you along the way. 

1. Registration vs. Participation rate

The number of registrants and guests are key figures for calculating your registration rate. At a hybrid event, this will be a sum total of the rate achieved at the virtual event and its in-person counterpart.

Registration vs. Participation Rate: Number of registrations/ Number of participants

How does it help?

Estimating the actual number of attendees who joined versus how many showed interest indicates how successful your event marketing efforts were. This KPI is also directly linked to how your sponsors perceive your brand. Lesser participants would mean lesser visibility for your sponsors, who may have been expecting a certain number of attendees based on your registration numbers.

If your registration vs. participation rate is high, reflect on some questions like:

  • Did you send effective email reminders to both virtual and in-person attendees?
  • Did you clearly communicate the agenda of the event and the value it would offer?
  • How did your social media promotions do? Were people excited about the event?
  • Did people face any technical issues due while logging in?

Pondering on these will give you an idea about where you can improve going forward.

2. Engagement Rate

This is a core KPI that involves tracking user interactions to see how often participants were engaged across touchpoints at your event.  Since there are different ways for attendees to be engaged, there are various KPIs for each.  You can do this manually or with a hybrid event platform equipped with the feature of generating post-event analytics reports.

Track the following results to gauge the engagement rate:

  • Live Chat Feed Engagement Rate: Number of people who wrote a message on chat / Number of online participants
  • Social Amplification Rate: Number of people who used the event hashtag or mentioned the event / Number of participants
  • Booth Conversion Rate: Number of leads generated by booths / Number of people who visited booths
  • Survey Completion Rate: Number of survey responses / Number of people who were sent the survey

How does it help?

Tracking the number of sessions viewed, the number of messages people sent on the chat, or the number of times people answered a poll helps you understand what captured their attention and what didn’t. You can narrow down what your attendees liked or disliked during the event by tracking different forms of engagements.

3. Attendee Satisfaction Rate

This measures how satisfied attendees were with the event. Would they return to it next time? Will they recommend it to someone? This KPI answers these questions for you. This is also an opportunity for you to gather feedback and implement suggestions in the future.

Track the following results to gauge the attendee satisfaction rate:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): On a scale from 1-10, how willing are attendees to recommend the event to a friend
  • Positive Online Reviews: Number of positive reviews online / Total number of reviews online

How does it help?

Attendee experience is the heart and soul of your event. Take this KPI as a serious indicator of whether your hybrid event was successful in making a connection with the audience. Plus, positive testimonials from attendees can be used as marketing materials to gain goodwill for your brand. 

4. Event Conversions

Your event is planned to fulfill specific goals — get registrations, sponsors, attendees, or to simply gain brand visibility. This KPI measures how well you’ve been able to meet these goals.

Track the following results to gauge your event conversions:

  • Online Registrations: The number of registrations that came from each marketing effort — social media, ads, emails, and other channels
  • Number of Registrations per Ticket Tier: Number of tickets per tier x Tier cost
  • Number of Registrations per Sponsorship Tier: Number of tickets per tier x Tier costs
  • Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs):  Number of leads that met the company criteria for lead scoring (in terms of requirement, industry, revenue, geography, and any other criteria that matters to your sales reps) and were shared with the sales team to initiate next steps.

How does it help?

This metric is a dominant KPI in assessing an event’s impact or success. The outcomes and differences between primary revenue goals and gross revenue will tell you how your overall event fared. Sometimes the revenue isn’t generated the very day of the event, in which case you’ll have to take into account the number of leads qualified by your sales team. You may also consider the total number of business opportunities generated and their value.

To calculate the official ROI, you can divide the total amount of revenue generated by the total cost of your event.

5. Attrition Rate

The Attrition Rate gives the value of the fraction of your audience who didn’t attend your event after registering.

Attrition Rate: Number of absentees / Total registrants

You will want to calculate this factor for your virtual and in-person counterparts separately to know which event strategy needs more attention.

How does it help?

Once you have the rate of attrition, you can dig deeper to understand the reason why people backed out. This can be done via emails asking for a reason for missing or leaving the event. You can then collate the responses and understand if there was a fault in your marketing efforts, if the registration process was cumbersome, or if other factors were involved.

Wrap up

The success of your events depends on how rigorously you’re able to track these KPIs and chalk out a plan to do better next time. The good news is that it’s even easier to measure this data with state-of-the-art hybrid event platforms today. Check out Hubilo’s analytics page if you want to know more.