How to Use Event Data Analytics to Measure and Improve Your Events

There’s a wide range of different metrics you can use in event data analytics, allowing you to tap into the performance of each different aspect, from initial advertising to post-event reviews. Below, we share some of the best metrics to analyse when looking at registration, attendee and engagement data.

Registration data allows you to assess how well your event performs before it actually takes place. This is a great way to measure whether you’re advertising it to the right target audience and analyse how effective your marketing efforts are at converting attendees.
 

Tickets Sold

The number of tickets sold to your event is one of the key metrics that you’ll likely use to measure its success. This not only lets you know how many people are going to be attending, but the pace at which tickets are sold indicates how popular your event is, as does the time it takes for all event tickets to sell out.
 

Landing Page Traffic

If you have a dedicated landing page on your website for your event, you can track the amount of traffic to this page to assess how popular it is. You can use tools like Google Analytics to do this, measuring the number of visitors the page gets every day, tracking when the page got the most traffic and using other data to identify what caused this traffic.
 

Registration Source

Leading on from that last metric, another key piece of registration data is the source of each attendee registration. This involves tracking where every person that buys a ticket comes from before they arrive on your event landing page in order to identify how they’re finding out about the event and what’s persuading them to register.

This is a really useful piece of data because you can measure which of the links to your registration landing page got the most clicks and therefore which of your marketing efforts was most successful in getting potential attendees to visit your site. You can use this to identify where your target audience is spending their time and which kinds of messages are most effective at reaching them, helping to develop more effective event advertising methods in the future.
 

Landing Page Conversions

Alongside tracking the amount of traffic you get to your event landing page, you should also measure the number of visitors that convert to attendees and compare these two pieces of data. This indicates how effective the marketing material on the landing page is and whether the traffic you’re directing to the landing page is high-quality.
 

Ticket Profits

The profits you make from organising an event may be a key success metric if you’re using the event to raise money or increase revenue. It’s also a useful metric for calculating the return on investment of your event and assessing whether you spent your budget efficiently.

Diving into attendee data allows you to get a better idea of whether you’re organising and hosting events that your target audience actually enjoys and finds valuable. Here are some of the best metrics to help with that.

Number of Attendees

The number of attendees at your event is a classic analytical metric. You can also compare this number to the number of tickets you actually have available, the number of attendees you predicted you’d get and the number of attendees that have come to previous or similar events. 

Number of New Attendees

Tracking the number of new attendees you get at an event is a great metric to analyse if you’re trying to grow your audience and increase awareness of your event. To make this data more insightful, you could also ask new attendees how they heard about the event to track where this growth is coming from.

Number of Returning Attendees

The number of returning attendees you have at your events indicates how well you’re doing at retaining your audience and how enjoyable and valuable attendees are finding your events. In a similar vein to the previous metric, it’s very useful to be able to identify what it is that’s bringing returning attendees back to your events and then ensuring that you continue to offer this at future events.

Attendee Enjoyment

Attendee enjoyment can be a tricky metric to measure because it’s subjective. The data that you collect for this will be qualitative, so there won’t be the same clarity in being able to identify whether your event was or wasn’t 100% enjoyable.

The way that attendees decide if they’ve enjoyed an event will likely be based on different factors depending on why they’re attending in the first place. For example, some attendees might enjoy the event because they met new people and had fun, whilst others will enjoy an event where they feel they learn something new or are challenged or enlightened by conversations and talks.

You can gather data to gauge attendee enjoyment by sending out surveys after your event and asking attendees to review their experience. You might ask them to rate their level of enjoyment on a scale or might ask for a written record of what they particularly enjoyed or found valuable.

Gathering data on engagement is one of the hardest areas of event data analytics because engagement is much harder to measure quantitatively. Below are some of the key ways that you can track engagement to get a good idea of how much your attendees and audience are interacting with your events and related content.
 

Pre-Event Communication

One of the best ways to measure engagement data is to look at the interactions that your pre-event communications receive. This involves emails sent to attendees in the build-up to the event and information about the event shared on social media and your website.

With email communication, you can gather data on open rates and interaction with links within this content. With other content, you can look at landing page traffic, likes and comments on social media, and any instances where the content about your event is shared.

If you have an event app, you can also gather data from how attendees use and interact with this before the event to gauge whether you’re providing useful and valuable content.

Social Media Engagement

If social media is part of your event marketing strategy then social media engagement is an essential metric. This lets you know how successful your social media content has been in engaging and providing value to your audience and can help you to refine your approach by identifying the key features of successful posts.

You can measure engagement through things such as likes, comments, shares and views on social media. Many social media platforms have their own data platforms that let you measure these metrics to track engagement, so it’s quite a straightforward and very useful metric to be measuring.

Press Coverage

Another metric that is related to engagement is how much press coverage your event gets. This doesn’t directly link to attendee engagement during your event, but instead the impact and the reach that your event has and how successfully you have advertised it.

Press coverage in the lead-up to your event indicates that you’re hosting something unique that attendees are going to be excited about attending, as well as showing that any PR efforts have been successful. If you receive press coverage after your event has taken place, especially from attendees, this indicates that the event was engaging and enjoyable enough to warrant a positive review afterwards.

The more positive press coverage that an event gets the better, so this is definitely worth tracking if PR has been part of your marketing strategy.

Social Media Mentions

Another metric that is linked to attendee engagement is how many mentions your brand or event gets on social media. This includes mentions before, during and after the event.

The more mentions and content about your event that gets shared on social media, the greater your reach is going to be and the more potential attendees you’ll reach and hopefully inspire to come to your next event. Generating a lot of hype on social media is also great for your brand in general and can help to better establish your event in your industry sector.

App Usage

Event apps are becoming more and more popular, particularly for large events like conferences or multi-day trade shows where lots of different activities and presentations are taking place. Tracking how much your app is used tells you a lot about whether this event app itself is engaging, but it can also give a general indication of event and attendee engagement.

Gather data about how many different features on the app are used and whether there are spikes in user activity during the event. You can then use this data to refine your app experience for future events and get a good idea of which parts of the event were more engaging than others.