Top Metrics to Track Webinar Success

Webinars are an effective channel for businesses seeking to connect with prospects, collect leads, and close deals. But hosting an effective webinar is more than just providing high-quality content or getting those attendee slots filled. In order to accurately assess the influence of the activity and to learn from it for the next time, it is important to measure the right numbers.

This blog gets into the high-level webinar metrics you should be looking at, and why they’re important. By the end, you’ll walk away with a roadmap to analyzing your webinars to make sure they’re delivering results!

Registration Metrics

Number of Registrants

The first part of a successful webinar is getting people to register. Your registrant count is your first signal on your event’s reach and how appealing it is to the audience you’re trying to connect with.

How to track:

Monitor sign ups closely during your promo. Modern tools such as webinar systems and email marketing technology monitor registrations on the fly, in real-time.

Why it matters:

By attracting a large number of registrants, it means that your subject matter, promotion and timing has hit the right note with your audience.

Registration Conversion Rate

How well does your landing page convert? This number is the percent of people that end up on your registration page and actually register.

Formula:

Rate of Conversion to Registration = (No. of registrations / No. of page visitors) × 100

Why it matters:

A poor conversion rate may mean there are problems with the design, message or user experience and this shows where to make improvements.

Cost Per Registration

Each registrant costs money, especially if you’re running ads or using paid promotion channels. You want to know how much you’re spending for each registrant so you can make sure your efforts are cost-effective.

Formula:

Cost Per Registration = Total Promotion Spend / Total Registrations

Why it matters:

If you need to lower the cost per registration, review your channels and identify where you get the best ROI.

Engagement Metrics

Attendee Rate

Out of everyone who registered, who did show up? Your attendee rate shows whether or not your reminders are working as well as how much people care about the topic of your webinar.

Formula:

Attendee Rate = (Attendees / Registrants) x 100

Why it matters:

This high attendance is an indication that your registrants were highly interested in, and motivated to attend.

Average Viewing Time

This measure indicates the amount of time that the participants remained effectively active during the webinar. Did the crowd thin out or remain rapt until the very end?

Why it matters:

Low mean viewing duration might point to content relevance, the quality of presentation and time as an obstacle.

Questions Asked and Answered

How engage-ey are the participants? By seeing how many questions are being asked and answered you can also gauge audience engagement, and how interested people are in your stuff.

Why it matters:

When people are engaged, they are much more likely to believe that you know what you’re doing, sign up as a lead, or buy from you.

Poll Participation

If you have live polls in your webinar, you can monitor attendance rates to see how engaged your attendees are with your presentation.

Why it matters:

Polls also offer instant feedback on audience preference, in order to steer your presentation.

Conversion Metrics

Lead Generation

Nearly all webinars strive to capture top-quality leads. How many show visitors converted to leads at or following the show?

How to track:

Leverage call to action (CTA) buttons, contact forms, or exit pop-ups to collect detailed lead information.

Sales Conversions

What was your conversion rate from attendees & registrants to actual sales after the webinar? By measuring this number, you can see exactly how webinars are contributing to your bottom line.

Formula:

Sales Conversion Rate = (New Customers ÷ Attendees) × 100

Why it matters:

This is a conversion KPI, designed to tell you whether your Webinar was valuable enough to drive conversions.

Customer Acquisition Cost

How much does it cost you to get a customer from webinars?

Formula:

(Cost of Customer Acquisition) (Webinar Recording/Cost) (Total Spend on Webinar= {total spend after apportionment) / New Customers From Web.Link)

Why it matters:

By learning your customer acquisition cost, you can then measure the profitability and decide if webinars are worth doing or not as part of your overall marketing strategy.

Post-Webinar Metrics

Survey Responses and Feedback

The post-event surveys are gold for honest feedback. You can learn what attendees liked and what missed the mark, as well as what people want to see in future webinars.

Why it matters:

This immediate response can be used in tweaking the content you present or how you present or deliver it in future events.

Social Shares and Mentions

Are people expressing themselves on social media after you have conducted a webinar?

How to track:

Track the buzz around your event with social listening tools like Hootsuite and Brand24.

Why it matters:

The more shares and mentions you have the more exposure and visibility you gain for your business, and the more likely you’ll find new and potential audiences on certain channels.

Content Downloads

If you had provided slides or additional resources in your webinar, then track the number of downloads. This is how much your extra content is worth to the audience.

Why it matters:

It’s also another engagement touchpoint, inviting participants back to key takeaways after the event.

Kaizen Philosophy And Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement Strategy

These webinar metrics are only part of the equation. Use the data as a means to spot trends, analyze what’s working, and to iterate your approach for better webinars down the line. Whether that means optimizing your event promotion, playing with your content to drive up engagement, or refining your post-webinar follow-ups, little improvements will compound into major success eventually.

Start measuring these numbers today, and start to notice how your webinars transition from one-off events to lead generation and customer acquisition machines. Once you’ve measured your webinar’s performance, crafting effective follow-up emails can help maximize attendee engagement.