The Anatomy of Event Analytics

With the changing times, event industry has gone about a technological transformation with a visible shift towards online platforms for a lot of tasks related to event planning and execution.

Now, I would not go at length about the benefits of event technology and how it has simplified the entire planning process, making life simpler. We all know it, we all have experienced it.

In this article, I would like to highlight one aspect, in particular, that has been entirely transformed from tedious and time-consuming to fast, accurate and effective: Event Analytics.

What exactly is Event Analytics?

Analytics can be defined as,

“Information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics.”

When it comes to event analytics, it is a detailed report of the analysis of your event data.

To understand what exactly this ‘event data’ is in the current scenario, let’s take a walk back in time.

Remember those tedious times when event planners had to manage a dozen file cabinets with a hundred files filled with registration forms, survey questionnaires and reports?

According to Event Manager Blog,

“A decade ago, event data would have consisted of basic attendee information collected from registration forms, such as name, age, address or data collected from surveys.”

With the inception and evolution of the event automation software, various tasks such as registrations, ticketing, networking, promotion, etc. are now done online.

Event planners now have access to a lot of detailed data rather than just basic attendee details. These reports are in the form of graphs and charts, making it visually enhancing and easy to comprehend as well. And the best part; it is all auto-generated.

Let’s dig in to know more!

Event analytics can be divided into four main categories:

1. Website Analytics:

Website analytics are extremely important. Your event website is the first touch-point for all your attendees. Your event website can definitely influence an attendees’ decision to register.

Here’s an anecdote to give you some context: You have a tech event coming up. A potential attendee is looking for tech events online and comes across your event website.

The overall visual appeal of your website and the content including speakers, schedule, event agenda, etc. will affect his/her decision to move further on to the registration platform and sign up for your event.

Website analytics help you track a person’s entire activity from landing on your website to exploring its content to signing up and further.

Organizers can track their daily activities on the event website including their page views, new potential attendees who visit the site and the number of people who have visited the site more than once.

There are more than 2 billion active smartphone users in the world. Taking into account the statistics, it is necessary to know through which device is your website being accessed the most.

Why so? It is necessary, in terms of deciding the responsiveness of your website. If your event website is being actively accessed through a smartphone as well, it is necessary to make it as responsive and visually appealing for the phone as well.

As mentioned earlier, website analytics can help you track every activity on your page.

You can also know how many people had a look at the pages listing your speakers, sessions, exhibitors etc. Apart from this, it is also possible to see which speaker, exhibitor or session is most popular among those.

Thus the traffic on every single page every single click can be tracked through this analytics.

2. Promotion analytics:

Event promotion is necessary to get the word out and reel in more prospective attendees. With the rising popularity of social media, event planners opt for various suitable platforms to showcase and promote their event.

They can also design e-mail promotion campaigns along with social media campaigns for the same. Visitors on their website tracked through the website analytics can be added to their mailer list for lead conversion.

But, all these efforts might all be in vain if planners don’t keep a check on it regularly. How do you know what’s working and what’s not? Which post, e-mail or platform is bringing in maximum visitors to your site and getting them to sign-up?

Here’s where your promotion analytics come into the picture. You can get the analytics of both, your social media as well as e-mail event promotion campaigns.

Get a detailed report on the total number of likes, shares and the overall engagement on your event page.

You can also get to know the click-rate and open rate for your mailers and the activity beyond it. Track how many users clicked on the registration tab attached with the e-mail and how many of them moved further on to your website thereon.

3. Registration Analytics:

As mentioned earlier on, the only event data that planners could access was through their registration forms and other surveys. In the current scenario, planners now opt for online platforms for the event registration process. Because of this shift, the event registration forms as well are much more evolved, leading to a very detailed database on the attendees.

It is also possible to know the source of traffic on your registration page and the platform through which attendees have accessed your registration platform.

Along with the total registrations received, you can also check on the number of registrations received on a day-to-day basis.

As mentioned earlier, event registration forms are now much more detailed. So, along with the basic demographic details, it is also possible to gain information about the attendees work, ideas, opinions and much more.

Frame your event registration form in such a way that it includes questions on various aspects of your event to help you build a database based on the responses.

With the event analytics generated through the event automation software, it is also possible to segregate these responses in terms of the respondent i.e. investors, delegates, exhibitors, etc.

One of the perks of using an online registration platform is that you can directly link it to your ticketing platform.

This analytics is helpful in maximizing ticket-revenue as well. Organizers can track the step-by-step ticket drop off with as a part of registration analytics. It means that they can track the website visitors who have moved on from tickets page to registration form to final payment.

Thus with this analytics, it is possible to see the entire break-up in terms of the overall conversion rate of the attendees visiting the website and moving on to purchase the tickets, their designation as well as the entire funnel of ticketing.

4. Engagement Analytics:

Engagement is key to any event. One of the main reasons that attendees register for an event is the prospect of professional networking. Planners have realized the importance of engagement, networking in particular and have made efforts to facilitate the same.

They can integrate an event networking platform with their website in order to enhance attendee engagement. This platform can further be linked with event registration.

This is to ensure that the attendee becomes a part of your event community right after the registration and is involved in your event prior to the main event itself.

You can integrate communities, facilitate meetings and initiate discussions and conversations and track it all with the help of engagement analytics.

Get detailed reports on the overall engagement in the community and the returns that attendees gain from your event. Get a detailed schedule of all the meetings being set up during the event. You can also pin down the most active attendees on your event community.

Creating a platform for networking and engagement is not enough. It is also necessary to generate content that drives this engagement. Create polls and discussions on the group and get to know which post does best based on the analytics.

This will help you in generating similar content in order to further increase engagement on the event community.

Every aspect of event analytics has its own purpose. Device categories can be used to design responses, ticketing analytics can be used to generate revenue, e-mail promotion analytics can help you in designing an effective campaign.

It is up to the event planners to incorporate this analytics in their planning process and in turn maximize their event success. Be sure to make the most of your event analytics.

Want to know how Hubilo can help you optimize your next event with kick-ass event analytics? Request a Demo.

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