11 Ways to Measure Your Virtual Event Success Metrics

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are effective virtual events. Developing them takes a lot of time, effort, coordination, and resources — so organizers want to do everything they can to make sure they’re a hit.

While virtual event success means different things to different people, it doesn’t have to be hard to measure. Simply figure out which key performance indicators (KPIs) best align with your online event objectives and track them accordingly. To help you do that, let’s dive into some of the top virtual event success metrics you should take into consideration.

How to define your virtual event KPIs

Get crystal clear on your biggest virtual event objective before you decide how you’re going to measure success. Depending on your highest-priority goals, the KPIs you track will vary, for example:

• If your goal is putting on an engaging virtual event, then you should monitor metrics like social media engagement, poll responses, in-event messaging, and Q&A numbers.
• If your goal is turning attendees into qualified leads, then keep an eye on metrics like the number of registrations, email campaign metrics, and overall conversion rate.

How do you measure engagement with virtual events?

While participant engagement can be hard to measure, these key performance indicators (KPIs) can tell you a lot about how people interacted with your virtual event:

• In-event engagement: Participation time, poll responses, chats & messages, Q&A numbers.
• Pre and post-event engagement: Email campaign metrics, social media engagement, on-demand event replay.

You can also use Livestorm’s free video engagement calculator.

What are the most important metrics to measure virtual event success?

Establishing your top objectives perfectly positions you to decide which metrics will uncover whether your virtual event was a hit or not. Some of the best options are email campaign metrics, registration numbers, social media engagement, attendance figures, participation time, polls, chat messages, Q&As, NPS, conversion rate, and on-demand event replay.

The list below will break down those metrics in more detail so you can determine which aligns best with your circumstances, so let’s dive in.

1. Email campaign metrics

Most organizers use email marketing for virtual event promotion — in fact, as many as 76% of marketers say that email is the most effective way to drive online event registration.

But did you know that email campaign metrics like open rate and click-through rate (CTR) also provide great insights for virtual event success?

For instance, if you send out an email about an online event and it has higher or lower open rates than usual, that’s a good indication of how interested your audience is in what you’re organizing.

Livestorm also has several email marketing-specific integrations like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign, so you can sync your attendees with your subscriber lists, track engagement, and boost lead attribution within our platform.

2. The number of registrations

Tracking how many people register for your virtual event is a useful success metric for a few reasons:

• Monitor lead generation: People who sign up for your online event on your registration page become leads for your business. Even if they don’t end up attending, you’ll be able to send them follow-up email content and nurture them down your webinar funnel.
• Gauge interest: If you’ve run other virtual events, you likely have a number of how many people usually register on average. If your number of registered participants is higher or lower than that average, you can get a good idea of how interesting your event is to your audience.
• Compare registrations vs. attendance: Your registration numbers will almost always be greater than your attendance numbers, but comparing those two sets of data will help you understand how invested your audience is in your event.

3. Social media engagement

Social media event marketing is an effective tactic for getting the word out about your online event, but have you considered monitoring your channels before and after it takes place to gauge success? Social media activity is a great indication of how excited participants are about your event or how useful and share-worthy they found it.

Here’s what you should keep an eye on in your social media channels:

• Likes, comments, and shares on the posts you made about your event
• Reactions, responses, and reposts of the stories you made about your event
• Tags related to your event
• Follower count
• Posts or stories made about your event with a specific hashtag (ex: #MeasuringVirtualEventSuccess2022)

Some organizers use specific social media tools like SproutSocial and Hootsuite to analyze social media engagement surrounding their event. If you’re a Twitter fan, Livestorm also has a Twitter integration you can use to promote events directly to your audience.

4. Attendance figures

Tracking event registration numbers is important, but you also need to calculate how many participants actually end up attending your event. Raw attendance numbers not only let you analyze gaps between registration and participation — they’re one of the best ways of determining your most successful virtual events over time.

Monitoring returning webinar attendees vs. new attendees is also useful to understand who your content is resonating with the most. People who consistently tune into your virtual events are likely loyal to and excited about your brand and what you’ve got to say. It’s worthwhile to reach out to returning attendees for feedback to make sure you’re effectively serving them and their networks, so they’ll be well-positioned to spread the word about your events in the future.

5. Participation time

Having lots of attendees doesn’t mean a thing if a large portion of them drop off after the first few minutes of your event. Tracking how much time people spend participating in your event can tell you:

• If your webinar didn’t meet expectations: If a lot of participants leave your event during the first few minutes, it’s possible that your marketing wasn’t consistent with your event reality or that people had high expectations that weren’t met.
• If your webinar was boring: While it’s vital to fill your online events with quality content, it’s just as essential to make them dynamic, engaging, and interesting with elements like live polls to keep people captivated. If a lot of attendees leave around halfway through your event, it might not have been engaging enough.
• If you said something that didn’t align with your audience: If a lot of people leave your webinar at the same time, it can be a signal that you made a mistake, expressed a controversial viewpoint, or simply took an approach that several participants didn’t agree with.

6. Polls

Webinar polls are short surveys that organizers can send out to participants while their event is taking place. With platforms like Livestorm, they can either be put together live or pre-made and scheduled in advance.

While polls serve a practical purpose by checking for understanding or collecting feedback, they’re also fun virtual event ideas that can ask relevant, light-hearted questions or act as ice breakers.

If your objective is an engaging online meeting, polls are a fantastic tool. Integrating them in your webinar prompts interaction and analyzing response quality and numbers can help you understand how invested your audience was in your event.

7. Chat messages

When people are interested in an event they’re participating in, they’ve usually got something to say. That’s why keeping track of video engagement metrics like in-app chat messages is important — you’ll get insight into how they’re interacting with what you’ve got to say and whether they’re enjoying the experience or not.

While in-event chat messages can be hard to quantify, here are some ideas of how you can measure them:

• Count how many chat messages were sent throughout your webinar.
• Identify specific moments in your webinar that prompted a large number of chat messages.
• Classify chat messages into positive, negative, and neutral categories to get insight into audience sentiment.

8. Questions & answers (Q&As)

Q&A periods are a common feature of virtual events, but they can do a lot more than just address participant questions — analyzing them lets you gauge engagement and can help determine how much your webinar resonated with your audience. Here’s why:

• Since Q&A periods almost always happen at the end of a webinar, getting lots of questions means many attendees stuck around to dig deep into the topic at hand, which is a great indicator of success.
• If you notice specific questions getting lots of upvotes, that means your participants are paying attention and interacting with each other. Upvotes also give you insight into your audience’s most burning questions.
• Question trends can help you zero in on what information your participants are most vs. least invested in, which can inform the development of future online events.

Q&A periods are also a great opportunity for virtual event guests speakers to ask questions and get a read on what stood out most to participants and how they benefited from the overall experience.

9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS typically measures customer loyalty and satisfaction, but it’s also a highly effective metric for understanding how well your virtual event resonated with participants.

How to calculate your NPS?

To calculate webinar NPS, subtract your percentage of detractors from your percentage of promoters.

The easiest way to calculate NPS is by sending a post-event survey to participants and asking them:

“On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our company’s virtual events to your network?”

Here’s what NPS responses mean:

• Promoters (9-10): Highly satisfied with your event, would return in the future, and are likely to recommend it to others enthusiastically.
• Passives (7-8): More or less satisfied with your event, but weren’t totally sold on it.
• Detractors (0-6): Generally unsatisfied with your event and are unlikely to return in the future.

10. Conversion rate

If you’re striving to increase brand awareness, generate leads and drive future sales with your virtual event, be sure to track your conversion rate. That is, what percentage of your participants go from attendees to sales qualified leads (SQLs) over the course of your virtual event.

It’s also a good idea to compare conversion rates across multiple virtual events — that way, you can zero in on where your marketing message was most effective and replicate it in the future.

11. Event replay

When you’re measuring how successful your virtual event was, consider how many people watched a replay of your webinar.

Simply tracking attendees often isn’t representative of your online’s event audience because as much as 25% of people watch recordings after the fact due to different time zones, scheduling conflicts, or simple forgetfulness. That’s why it’s vital to choose a video conferencing platform like Livestorm that lets you track how many people caught your virtual event’s replay.

Sending out an email with a link to your webinar’s replay is also a great way to nurture your relationship with people who registered for your online event but didn’t end up attending.

What to look for in a virtual event success dashboard

When searching for the right virtual event success dashboard, look for one that goes beyond tracking simple metrics like registrations and attendance. Livestorm’s dashboard gives organizers an overview of all their webinar’s insights, including everything from attendee details to engagement data.

Webinar dashboards are also supposed to make organizers’ lives easier — so the best video conferencing software will give you direct, easy access to all the information you need in one central place. Then, you can quickly analyze event success and consider key analytics to make strong, data-driven decisions for future events.

A highly engaging virtual event is a successful virtual event

All in all, success means different things for different virtual events. The best way to measure just how fruitful yours was is by figuring out the top goals you want to work towards early on. Then, track metrics that reveal key insights about your personal definition of virtual event success.

It also goes without saying that the best online events have highly engaged audiences before, during, and after they take place. That’s why it’s so important to choose one of the best video engagement platforms like Livestorm that can do it all — help organize a frictionless, high-quality virtual event and keep your audience engaged from beginning to end.

Frequently asked questions about virtual event success metrics

What is a virtual event KPI?

A virtual event key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that tells you how successful your virtual event was. There are many possible virtual event KPIs, including number of registrations, registration page visits, attendance figures, and participation time.

What is virtual event ROI?

Virtual event return-on-investment (ROI) is how much money you make from a virtual event compared to how much you spent on it. While most event organizers calculate monetary virtual event ROIs, another approach is calculating value or benefit gained.

How do you calculate event ROI?

To calculate virtual event return-on-investment (ROI), divide your overall profit by your overall expenses and multiply the result by 100. For example, if you spent $2000 on a virtual event but made a profit of $5000, your ROI would be 250%.

How do you measure the success of a virtual event?

To measure the success of your virtual event, identify your biggest objective. Imagine the most important goal of your virtual event was engaging your audience as much as possible. In this case, you’d investigate key performance indicators like participation time, in-event messaging, Q&A numbers, and poll responses.

What are the most important metrics for virtual event success?

There are many different metrics that can tell you how successful your virtual event was. Here are 11 of our top examples:

• Email campaign metrics
• Number of registrations
• Social media engagement
• Attendance figures
• Participation time
• Polls
• Chats
• Q&A
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Conversion rate
• On-demand event replay