One of the goals of events is to draw attention to your brand. In this article on communication and brand awareness events, we'll walk you through the relevant KPIs to help you measure their success.
Whether it's a product launch, the presentation of a new offering, a special company celebration, or a client event, your event serves marketing purposes.
There are two types of events:
- Those that celebrate a unique occasion: the aim is to create an emotional bond between attendees and the brand (or project). As a secondary goal, you may also want media coverage of the company.
For example, a company anniversary celebration, a groundbreaking ceremony, a grand opening. - Those with a commercial objective: here, the goal is to engage attendees, convince them, and win them over to the company's cause.
For example: client events, product launches, sales roadshows, press presentations, etc.
To define your KPIs, you need to rigorously align them with your event's objectives. This question needs to be addressed at the design phase, not after the event.
Consult with the various stakeholders: sales management, marketing manager, media and press manager, and communications manager, to align on objectives ahead of the event.
This article gives you some ideas for indicators to help you measure the success or failure of your event:
💸 Sales KPIs and indicators
If your event serves more of a commercial purpose (particularly for B2B events), you'll need to measure its impact in terms of opportunities created, new contacts, or partnerships initiated.
For this to work, you may need to sync certain key information from your CRM (Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc.) with your event management software (Digitevent, of course). You'll then be able to measure your event's impact on your business and get a rough idea of its ROI.
You can rely on indicators such as:
Revenue from the event = (Number of open deals x average deal value x deal conversion rate)
Cost per lead collected = Estimated revenue from the event / Total cost of the event.
These indicators will let you determine an Event Return on Investment (ROI). This purely factual analysis is the most direct one, and it will let you quickly calculate your event's profitability to help guide future, more optimized marketing efforts.
Of course, this calculation is an underestimate, since it doesn't account for the awareness and reassurance impact: media, social, and commercial effects over the medium term.
👋 Attendance KPIs and indicators
Attendance (turnout) is an important metric for any event. As proof of how effective your communication campaigns around it were, the attendance rate (for both online and in-person events) can be calculated as follows:
Attendance rate = (Number of attendees present at the event / Number of invitees) x100
You can compare this attendance rate with your targets, or simply with your past events, to gauge your progress.
This calculation relates to the well-known "no-shows": invitees who confirm their attendance but don't show up on the day, and so aren't counted as visitors or attendees at the event.
No-show rate = (Number of attendees not checked in among confirmed attendees / number of confirmed attendees) x100
To collect this data, use our check-in app for tablets and smartphones during your events, giving you real-time visibility (arrival time, reports, etc.) into your guests' arrivals. Reviewing these dashboards afterward is also extremely valuable and shouldn't be underestimated.
The attendance rate gives you a measure of how relevant your theme is and how well the event's promise matches its target audience. This indicator alone doesn't tell you whether the event was a success, but it does show its potential!
😀 Attendee satisfaction KPIs
- Net Promoter Score:
The Net Promoter Score (or NPS) is an indicator of your event's overall satisfaction rate. This tool is widely used in events, and it's a well-known analysis metric, one of the main ones when it comes to satisfaction (whether of customers or employees).
Typically:
Net Promoter Score = (Promoter rate - Detractor rate) x100
Note that neutral (passive) responses are excluded from the NPS and considered not relevant.
To calculate your NPS, run a post-event survey. You can send an email campaign with a satisfaction survey directly from the Digitevent tool.
If you'd rather collect this information directly at your event, have your guests fill out these questionnaires using tablets (with built-in quizzes) and work with an event hosting and hostess agency.
After the event, it's standard practice (but crucial) to give your attendees a satisfaction questionnaire. It's very useful, particularly for calculating several key indicators: did your event create an emotional connection? Did it improve your brand image? Did it help your prospects better understand your product?
2. Qualitative survey:
This kind of survey doesn't need to be filled out by everyone. Sometimes it's better to take the time for an in-depth conversation with 10 promoters and 10 detractors than to use a tedious questionnaire that's hard to interpret.
📣 Brand awareness KPIs and indicators
- Press coverage:
The press (print, TV, or web) is one of the main levers for getting people talking about you (and your event).
If you invite journalists, make sure to follow up with them on the results of their visit. To do this, you'll definitely need to prepare a press kit for them.
For the online press or influencers (blogs, etc.), track your backlinks to find press articles that mention your company or event (via Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SEMrush, etc.). You can also ask them to write content mentioning your company, or create it yourself for an even better effect.
You can trace the source of every article and every mention of your site by asking influencers or press officers to add UTM parameters to their links to your site.
This press coverage increases your visibility in the media, as well as your e-reputation and your SEO score.
To measure the impact, it may be wise to use conversion links specific to the event (e.g., a dedicated promo code, or a specific destination URL).
- Number of social media followers:
Your social media channels are probably already one of the ways you communicate with your various audiences.
Your follower count is one of the obvious indicators to track to see how your event performed in terms of your company's brand awareness.
Follower growth = ((Number of followers 1 week after the event - Number of followers 1 month before the event) / Number of followers 1 month before the event) x100
You can also track tags, shares, and views on your social posts. To maximize these results, create ways for your audience to engage during the event, such as hashtags specific to it. This will let you go further than simply calculating the change in follower count.
- Traffic to your website:
Once someone knows a company's name, a potential customer's first instinct is to search for it on Google.
Of course, if you're a B2C brand organizing an event with limited reach, this indicator may not be relevant (since the event might be a small part of your overall volume).
If you see your Google Analytics traffic spike during your event, you've probably boosted your brand awareness!
Web traffic growth = (Traffic change After Event / Before Event) x100
Conclusion
The benefit of measuring all these KPIs is also having reports, improving future editions, and having arguments to support your event strategy. Digitevent provides a real-time dashboard for your event, giving you a data-driven approach to your event strategy.
Be creative, and keep in mind that this article isn't an exhaustive list of metrics. The main thing is to adapt your dashboards to your line of work. Don't be a perfectionist: perfect is the enemy of good. The worst thing would be to forget to measure performance; finding the perfect indicator can take time :)
