If you’ve done your event marketing right, you’ll end up with a ton of numbers. They all have names worthy of a college degree, and get cranked out of marketing software in big bold texts. The numbers may seem intimidating, but these event marketing metrics are an important part of growing your event. When you grasp context to the numbers and apply them to strategy, they start to tell an incredible story. They tell the tale of your attendees and their experience with your brand. They show you what you did right and what you did wrong. Event marketing metrics are a powerful tool to use, so long as you know what to do with them.

Understanding and applying event marketing metrics to strategy isn’t always an easy task. So, here are three kinds of event marketing metrics and how you can apply them to a strategy that works for you.

1. Conversion Rates

Not everyone who hears about your event will visit your website. Not everyone who visits your website will put a ticket in their cart. Not all of them will finish checking out that cart. You put a lot of work into turning those leads into customers though. It isn’t easy to come up with ads that get clicked on, after all. With all that work, you need to know just how much those efforts accomplished. That is what conversion rates show you: how many people did a piece of marketing material convert from leads to customers.

This metric is a valuable tool to see what works and what doesn’t, and can be used to determine where kink’s might be in their journey as a buyer. Every consumer goes through four stages before they make a purchasing decision. Attention, Interest, Desire and Action, AIDA for short.

Attention

For every single person who goes to your event, there will be a moment where they first hear about it. It may not have been a significant moment, maybe just the first time they see an ad. The point is, a potential consumer is aware that your event is happening. If you are struggling at this stage, then you are not advertising or marketing enough.

Interest

This is the moment that a potential customer says, “Huh, that’s pretty cool!” They have now followed you link, and are reading about your event. If you are losing potential attendees at this stage, you are likely not advertising to your target market.

Desire

You’ve convinced them. They want to go, and they go ahead and add tickets to their cart. We’re almost there. Consumers who stop their journey at this stage were not convinced by your marketing material. If your conversions aren’t making it past here, consider switching up some of your content.

Action

This is it. They put in their credit card information and buy a ticket. You have officially accomplished a conversion. A surprising amount of customers are lost at this stage of the buyers journey

When your analyzing your campaign, it’s worthwhile to know what part of this cycle you started to lose potential attendees at. Low conversion rates mean that people who you had gained the attention and interest of did not end up with enough desire to take action. High conversion rates mean that your strategy is working and can be expanded to bring in even more conversions!

2. Social Media Engagement

Social media is a core part of any event marketing campaign. Even though we all have plenty of practice keeping up with our personal profiles, marketing an event through Facebook or Instagram is a whole different ordeal. When it comes to putting out quality content on social media, metrics such as engagements and reach give critical insight to how you are performing. An engagement with a post is any time that a user interacts with that post, be it by liking it, commenting on it or sharing it. Reach shows you how many eyes your content could potentially be in front of, while the impressions will tell you how many of those eyes stopped scrolling to look at it.

To gain a good understanding of how your social media pages are performing, look at the intersection of those metrics. You want your posts to reach as far as possible, so you do what you can to get as many followers as you can. If you are making impressions on those followers then they are paying attention to your material. You’ll know you’re putting out the right material when your engagements start to match your impressions! Odds are though, comparing these numbers will show you what work you still must do. That’s okay, just work on where you see the hold up. If you have a ton of impressions but no engagements, that’s your followers telling you need to switch up your content!

If you want to go even more in depth with social media metrics, check out FANalytics. FANalytics is an incredible part of Xorbia’s platform and has been helping our clients find new ways to engage with their top attendees.

3. Event ROI & Cost Per Attendee

The purpose of event marketing is simple, to get paying attendees into the seats of the event and to encourage more to come next year. Of course, you also want to do that as efficiently as possible. To build marketing and event strategies that will accomplish these goals, you need to keep comparing your event marketing metrics year after year.

That is where cost per attendee comes into play. The calculation is simple, merely divide the marketing budget by the number of tickets sold. The number you receive is a price tag for each of the butts that filled those seats. If you are sustainably growing your events and brand, this number should get lower as the years pass. Eventually, you should be able to allow word of mouth to start doing some of the heavy lifting in your marketing strategy. If you’re having trouble with your cost per attendee’s, you may need to consider a major shift in your marketing strategies.

You also need to look at your event on a whole. Organizing events may be your passion, and we’re sure you are in it for the thrill of seeing so many faces having a good time. We’re also confident that you want your event to make money. To do that, make sure you are keeping track of your return on investment (ROI for short). The ROI is a percentage that shows how much money the event made in relation to the initial investment. The higher this number, the richer you will be when the dust settles. Growth in this category will help you market to some of the most important people in an event organizers world: sponsors.

Updated on August 8th, 2017