The way events are conducted has witnessed a sea change in the last few years giving rise to various virtual event service companies. Data analytics has become a crucial feature to measure the success of any event. With the rise of virtual events, it has become easier to collect, store and analyze data to derive meaningful conclusions. This article will act as a virtual event planning guide for you and help you understand data analytics in detail, what metrics you should track.
What is data analytics?
Data analytics can be affective in analyzing data to derive conclusions, identify patterns and make effective decisions. The data that would otherwise get lost in the vast sea of information can be stored, and analyzed with the help of data analytics. Data analytics can help you improve your performance by identifying the virtual event best practices and improving the attendee experience.
What metrics should you track?
Given below are the virtual event metrics that you should track to host a successful virtual event.
Virtual content metrics
- New attendees: The number of unique visitors to your event and how many people attended the session can help you determine the effectiveness of your marketing and promotion strategy. You can also track the most popular topics among the attendees.
- Dwell time: It helps you measure the amount of time your attendees spent on a particular session and identify the most and least engaging sessions.
- Content ratings: It helps you gather attendee feedback during and help you identify the content that is resonating with your audience. This will help you eliminate the content having low ratings.
Attendee engagement metrics
- Average attendance: It measures the average number of unique visitors who attended the event sessions.
- Social activity: It helps you measure the activity on social media surrounding your event. It helps you to measure the number of posts made using your event hashtag.
- Gamification: You can measure the number of points each attendee earned during the event and determine the engagement level.
- Chat messages: the number of chat messages per attendee can help measure audience engagement.
Networking activity metrics
- Session-wise engagement: This metric helps you measure the attendance in each session and help you determine the most popular sessions.
- Dwell time: This helps you measure the amount of time your attendees spent in each networking session.
- Connections: Data on how many people connected based on common interests can help you measure the success of your event.
Sponsor metrics
- Sponsor page engagement: The number of people who visited your sponsor’s page during each session.
- The number of impressions: It measures the number of times the sponsor’s content was shown to the attendees.
- Clickthrough rate: CTR measures the ratio of the number of clicks on the sponsor’s content divided by the number of times it was displayed.
- Cost per click: It is the sponsor’s total investment divided by the number of clicks.
- Views: The number of times the attendees viewed the sponsor’s video can help determine if the sponsor’s content was engaging.
Why is data analytics a virtual event best practice?
Looking for a virtual event platform that provides data analytics features for making your virtual event successful. Given below are some reasons why data analytics is an essential feature for your event.
Helps gain better pre-event insights
Data analytics and tracking can help you analyze your pre-event marketing strategies and improve them to drive more engagement. You can conduct pre-event polls and use data analytics to find audience preferences and tweak your promotion strategy accordingly.
Help choose the best content and speaker
Analyzing the data of previous events can help you understand the type of content that your target audience resonates. It can also help you identify the speakers with your target audience and direct your speaker selection strategy in that direction.
Help choose the ideal sponsors
Analyzing data about your audience’s product, or brand preferences can help you choose the ideal sponsors for your event. This will help boost the engagement levels for your virtual party. From your past event experiences, you must already know what ways can help your sponsors attract more attendees. You can use this to improve the event experience.
Help improve the audience experience
Finding out what your attendees like and providing them with that will surely help improve their event experience. It can help you find out which features does your audience like and include them in your event. Metrics like dwell time, session-wise experience, average attendance, social activity, and content ratings can help you improve your audience experience.
Analyze audience behavior
It helps you measure the time an attendee spends in your event and which sessions had the highest levels of engagement. It also helps you analyze how your audience behaves and what types of products and services they prefer.
Gather and analyze feedback
You can gather feedback from your audience both before the event and after the event. Based on this feedback, you can make improvements to your event and its marketing strategies.
Help measure event success
Data analytics help you measure the success of your event in terms of the level of engagement. The number of attendees, brand impact, impressions and dwell time, connections based on common interests, content ratings, attendee feedback, etc.
Final Words
There is no doubt that data analytics is the future and plays a crucial role in measuring the success of an event. Hope this article helps you get deeper insights into data analytics and its benefits.
