The Definitive Guide to Optimizing Your Event with Event Analytics

Event planning is a tough job that requires a lot of multitasking. A lot goes into planning a successful event.

From registrations, ticketing, event promotion, attendee management to feedback, all your multitasking and management skills are put to test while organizing an event.

With such a mammoth task at hand, how do you ensure that your hard work does not go in vain and your event actually amounts to something?

How do you optimize these tasks and guarantee that your efforts are in the right direction i.e. towards event success?

The answer: Event Analytics. It is your loyal helper that guides you throughout the event planning process as well as post event.

What do these event analytics consist of?

Event analytics is basically the analysis of your event data. This ‘event data’ in the current scenario is highly detailed. It includes every activity on your event website, your registrations, ticketing, promotions, engagement and feedback.

Event analytics can be divided into four main categories:

1. Event Website Analytics

2. Event Registration Analytics

3. Event Promotion Analytics

4. Event Engagement Analytics

There are a lot of Event Analytics Platforms in the market that provide this detailed event data, roughly built around these categories and help in event tracking. Event organizers can choose the ideal platform for their event as per their requirements and budget.

You’ve selected the perfect event analytics platform tailored to your event and set it all up. What now? What happens to all that detailed event data?

Here’s how you can leverage your event analytics for event tracking to maximize ROI:

1. Set goals and objectives:

Setting feasible goals and objectives is the first step to measuring your event success and making the most out of your event analytics. Every event has a different agenda. Event organizers must identify their primary and secondary goals that they aim to achieve.

Based on these, they can set their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). What exactly is ‘KPI’?

“A Key Performance Indicator or KPI refers to a set of measurements reflecting the performance or success of an organization in terms of progress of its goals.”

It is necessary to set website KPIs along with your overall goals as well. These could be your page views, bounce rate, registrations acquired, leads captured, etc. With the help of event analytics, you can get a daily update on your progress across all these areas and measure it against your set KPIs.

Event organizers can know the scope of improvement required along with the overall performance of their event. It will help you set a pace for event promotion and aid you in the overall planning of your event.

2. Know your users :

Apart from basic demographics, including gender, age and location, event organizers can get much detailed user information through event analytics.

You can track the source leading these potential attendees to your event website, the device that your attendees are using, their likes dislikes, preferences, etc.

One way to do that is to create a well-tailored registration form including all the important questions based on the information that you want to collect.

It could be based on their profession or the kind of event that you’re hosting or their preferences in terms of the event venue, catering or facilities.

Analytics can also be segregated in terms of designation. You can track attendee information based on their status i.e. whether they are investors, delegates, sponsors or speakers.

Study these analytics; understand your attendees and plan keeping in mind these opinions and preferences.

This will help you in creating an amazing attendee experience that will be memorable for your attendees as well. Personalisation is the key to attendee satisfaction.

3. Track user activity:

Event analytics can help you track every single click on your event website. You can track the sources bringing visitors to your website as well as the aspects of your event that is gaining the most interest.

You can track which pages your users visited, which posts or discussions received the most responses, which speakers or sessions the attendees were most interested in, etc.

This analytics can help you plan for event promotion and increase engagement. For e.g. there is a particular session that your potential attendees are extremely interested in.

You can leverage this session in your event promotion in various ways. Interview the speakers for the session and post it on Social media or create teaser posts for the same.

It is all about gaining their interests and nurturing the same for lead conversion. You can also study the demographics of your users and take a more targeted, personalized approach.

For e.g. if the maximum number of the visitors coming to your site are from a particular state or country, you can target that region for event promotion in terms of your social media ads, your posts and other promotional activities.

Thus, track your user activity daily and strategize accordingly to maximize registrations.

4. Maximize audience engagement:

Audience engagement in terms of event analytics can be measured across various platforms. This includes your social media engagement as well as your event’s own networking platform.

You can get detailed reports on the overall audience engagement as well as the breakdown of every platform individually.

It is important for the event organizer to ensure that their event is engaging and fruitful for the attendees. Engagement analytics can help you out with this.

You can track the activities of your event networking platform, the meetings that are being set up as well as the attendees that are most active in the event community.

You can keep a check on your social media engagements including the number of impressions, page-views, reactions, etc. Use these analytics to your benefit and create engaging content tailored to you attendees overall interests.

This way you can maximize attendee engagement prior to the main event itself.

You can also track audience engagement during the event with the help of event app analytics if you opt for one. Some organizers also include an activity stream in the event app to engage the attendees.

The data gained from this activity stream can also help you plan out your activities during the main event to ensure that the audience is involved with your event. This will help you in creating an overall amazing event experience for the attendees.

5. Boost your ticket revenue:

Ticket revenue is an important factor for many events. So, how do you bring in the maximum number of potential attendees and get them to buy the tickets to your event? Through effective event promotion and nurturing. It is also possible to analyse the entire step by step ticket drop off with event analytics.

Track the attendees landing on your registration and ticketing page, the ones moving on to sign up and the ones who finally move on to payment and become a registered attendee for your event. There are multiple benefits of these analytics.

First off, you can track the progress of a potential attendee at every step.

So, for e.g. if, as per the analytics, the event is losing the attendees at payment, there has to be some trouble at the payment stage. It comes into the organizer’s notice and can be rectified accordingly.

Apart from this, it is also possible to capture and filter leads that can be converted to attendees and approach them accordingly.

It is also possible to sort through the different type of tickets that people are buying. This helps in understanding the attendee perspective, whether they would like to buy an all access ticket or are interested in particular sessions.

This analysis could be integrated with your event promotion strategy to help you boost up your ticket sales and in turn your ticket revenue.

6. Optimize your sponsorship proposal:

Sponsorship is essential to any major event. There are various purposes based on which event organizers seek sponsorship. It could be for funds, for barter or for promotion. Organizers should keep in mind their own intent of seeking sponsorship as well as the requirement of the sponsors.

All of this has to be included in the sponsorship proposal. Proposal is one of the key deciding factors in terms of acquiring sponsorship.

Sponsorship proposal is crucial in terms of deciding the nature of sponsorship that you will receive as well. You can optimize your proposal with the help of event analytics.

For e.g. you can include website analytics in terms of page views or lead conversions. You can also include social media promotion and engagement analytics as well in your promotions. It will help you convince your sponsors that yours is a promising event worth investing in.

You would have your analytics to back up the promises that you make. Also, attractive reports and crafts add on to the overall look of your proposal. It will make your proposal stronger and visually appealing. Thus, your sponsorship proposal can be optimized with the help of event analytics.

7. Event analytics to reel in speakers:

As mentioned earlier, as a part of website analytics, organizers can also track the interests of the attendees in terms of speakers and sessions that they would like to attend. You can also get to know the topics that interest majority of your attendees. Just include it in your registration form.

This analytics can be utilized to your advantage when you approach your keynote speakers.

Especially, if it is a high profile speaker, creating an effective proposal with your event analytics can definitely increase your chances of getting that speaker to present at your event.

Event analytics can also help you decide what kind of speakers you can approach based on the kind of sessions that attendees prefer.

As it is with sponsorship, even in case of approaching speakers, it is necessary to research what the speakers are looking for when they choose to present at an event. Research and tailor your analytics in a way that can reel in those much in demand keynote speakers for you easily.

If exposure is what they are looking for, you can provide them with visitor analytics including the number of attendees who have registered so far, your website hits and attendee demographics.

Presenting analytics along with your well- researched proposal also creates a good impression in the mind of the speaker that you’re approaching.

8. Event Feedback :

The purpose of event analytics is to help you track your event progress as well as measure the overall success of your event. Thus, the utility of event analytics does not end at the main event. This can be leveraged post event as well in terms of feedback.

Organizers can get to know the overall feedback of the attendees and evaluate their performance post event. There are various ways to do that. Post event surveys are often preferred by planners when it comes to feedback.

Another way to obtain feedback is through mailers. You can send out these mailers requesting attendee feedback and get analytics for the same. You can also evaluate your activity stream through engagement analytics.

It is beneficial to get an idea of how many attendees engaged on your event website or app and their participation in the overall event experience.

The conclusion of this analysis can help you measure your overall event success as well as provide scope for improvement in future events through event tracking. This analytics can also be leveraged for post event promotion.

Event analytics is a powerful tool with a lot of benefits. But, no tool is effective unless you know how to use it. Integrate your analytics with your planning process, tailor these analytics as per your event agenda and make the most out of your event analytics.

This will surely set you on the right path to creating an exceptional event!

Want to know how Hubilo can help you optimize and transform your next event with efficient event analytics? Request a Demo.

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