Webinars are an effective tool for lead generation and business growth. If you’re a savvy marketer, you’re definitely making them a key part of your marketing strategy toolkit.
In fact, a recent survey found that 73% of marketing and sales teams believe webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality, qualified leads.
The reasons for this are vast and far reaching, but we do know that webinars are one of the best ways to engage an audience (and an engaged audience is more likely to be receptive to buying what you’re selling).
However, what some marketers find a little more difficult is justifying ROI. Although webinars are considered a budget-friendly way to engage your audience, you still need to justify the time and resources you’re putting into them, and that can be difficult if you don’t have some defined goals.
What do you want to get out of your webinar? Brand awareness? Business growth? In order to reach your webinar goals, you have to decide what metrics are going to get you there.
Webinar success will mean different things to different people. Some of these will be measurable, and some will not. And so, we’ve compiled a list of some of the key webinar metrics that can help you determine whether your online event is helping you reach your webinar KPIs:
1. Lead Generation
It’s pretty simple - you want to know how many people registered and attended your webinars. While attendance is obviously the main goal, registrations can be just as useful to track.
Why? Well, because in registering for a webinar, people are giving you their contact information. So even if they don’t attend the webinar, if you’re savvy and adhere to GDPR guidelines, you can still market to these contacts. They’re still leads. So ensure you’re tracking and engaging with people who have registered for your webinars, even if they don’t attend.
If click-through is high, but registration is low, it would suggest a couple of things. Firstly, the registration page may not be “attractive” enough. Is your copy concise? Is it fully branded, making it look like an extension of your website?Secondly, it may mean your messaging is off. Does the message on your email or other promotional material match the message on your registration page? Tracking your registrant numbers can bring a lot of insight to your marketing practices.
And the attendees? Well, these are your warmest leads of course. These are the contacts who took time out of their day to listen to what you were saying. So while registrants are important, attendees are the golden ticket.
When it comes to webinar lead generation, one of the most important metrics will be registrant->attendee. In examining your conversion rate, you’ll be able to determine things like how effective your marketing is, how engaging people found your webinar environment (landing page, event page, etc.), and how engaging is your topic. If the conversion rate is low, you may need to tweak the process used after registration.
What’s useful is that these figures can extend to your on-demand event, too. If you had a lot of registrations, low attendance, but high on-demand viewing figures, it may say something about the time and day you originally ran your webinar.
At the end of the day, a lot of the webinars our customers run are to generate leads, so keeping a close watch of who register, attend, and why, will help you ensure you’re attracting a lot of quality leads.
2. Customer Engagement
Knowing how many people attended your webinar is important, however, how engaged your attendees are is imperative. Showing up is great, but are they asking questions, answering polls and surveys and downloading the assets you prepared for your presentation?
An engaged audience is an audience warm to your message, so by using the reporting and data from your webinar platform you can look into much more detail than simply how many attended.
Exploring attendee engagement can give you tremendous insight into what’s working and what’s not. It can also help you segment your audience and provide more detail for your marketing personas. Is there a certain industry or segment that was over represented in attendance? What about engagement - did a certain segment ask more questions than the others?
Customer engagement, then, is an important webinar success metric because it tells you who in your data set is actually engaged, but also how engaging your content was overall. You can use both to adjust your marketing - and sales - strategy accordingly.
3. Audience Retention
Audience engagement isn’t just about asking questions and participating in surveys. One of the biggest metrics you can use to measure the success of your webinar is how long people actually watched for.
Did you start off with 250 people and end with 70? With all the reporting tools at your disposal, you can narrow it down to the moment a drop off occurred.
Also, make sure you’re monitoring the average time attendees actually spend on the webinar, so you can see any trends. For example, did everyone drop off after your intro? That could mean your promotional strategy didn’t quite hit the mark.
Was there a decrease when you hit the 40-minute mark? Maybe your presentation isn’t as concise as it should be and you should consider trimming it down. Tracking audience retention and these drop-off moments will allow you to make changes to keep attendees engaged.
4. Increased Brand Awareness
As a marketer, I know it can sometimes be difficult to bring people aboard the brand awareness train. Brand awareness doesn’t necessarily have a direct correlation to ROI, but believe me, it’s an important metric when thinking about your webinar programme (and marketing strategy in general).
How do you measure brand awareness when it comes to webinars? That can be difficult, but one aspect you can measure is social media. You should already be using social as part of your webinar promotion, but are you measuring social interactions after the webinar?
- Driving increased traffic to your social media sites, not just during your webinar when you might be live tweeting but after, is an indicator that your brand has made an impression (no pun intended) on these people.
- Increased web searches and direct traffic. I know when a WorkCast webinar has just broadcast by the substantial increase in direct traffic to the website.
So, when thinking about brand awareness, just think of it as increasing your exposure. By measuring that and letting it inform how you market, you can increase the effectiveness of any campaign.
5. Attendee feedback
It may sound simple, but attendee feedback is a handy metric by which to judge the success of your webinar.
You may want to consider asking for formal feedback in your follow-up email to attendees, but you can also look for other methods of communication. Social media is an ideal place for this e.g. If you used a hashtag, keep an eye on it after the webinar to see what sort of feedback you receive.
A lot of attendees will also use the chat or Q&A function to give feedback, so make sure you’re monitoring that for more than just questions.
And if you don’t get any feedback? Well, that means you’re doing well and the webinar went smoothly, but you may not be ‘wowing’ your audience. Every webinar I’ve run has had some sort of feedback, whether it’s an email reply saying someone had enjoyed it or a note in the chat saying they wish the slide had been blue instead of red (yes, that has happened).
It’s not important to get detailed feedback on every aspect of the webinar, but when you do, make sure you integrate common responses into your data.
A successful webinar is defined in many different ways. The important thing to remember is to use these metrics to inform and improve your online event strategy. Learn from the data, and you’ll be able to devise a strategy that can work to reach your business goals.
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