It often happens that webinar success is measured with the help of money value, i.e., whether it has brought money or not. Yet, in addition to this, there are some more webinar metrics, which are of no less importance. Read this article to learn how to measure webinar success, what metrics you should use, and how to meter and improve them.

Key Metrics for Your Webinar

Sign-ups

The number of registrations shows us how demanded the topic is among the target audience. This webinar metric also shows the quality of the landing page, especially when total visits of the page are taken into account.

As a result, it will help you to understand the percentage of page visitors that have finally left you their contact details and the ones who have left nothing.

How to meter

• Connect the landing page to Google Analytics, adjust target to registration.

How to improve

• To get more registrations for webinars, follow two directions when working, i.e., increase the page attendance and improve its content.
• Place the main information about the webinar on this page, like its name, date and time it will be held, some info about the presenter and those it would be interesting too, as well as what is waiting for the webinar attendees.
• The registration form also influences the final result; this is why it should ideally be laconic. You can find more tips for the webinar landing page here.
• Attract interested visitors to the page. To do this, you might consider it useful to place information in specialized communities and forums. Also, connect additional promotions channels. Earlier, we wrote about 35 tools for webinar promotion.

Reposting announcements on social media

The number of reposts tells us about audience loyalty: some visitors are, in fact, ready to advertise your webinars to their friends. Moreover, this is an indication that the webinar and its topic have “caught” your audience.

How to meter

• Follow the indexes of the Share block at the registration page and in social media where webinar announcements have been placed.

How to improve

• Add a Share button to the registration page;
• Ask your visitors to share and offer additional goodies for reposting like mini books, checklists, brochures;
• Invent a catchy name. For example, the webinar announcement «10 mistakes made when preparing pedagogical portfolio» would gather more reposts than «Preparation of professional pedagogic portfolio».

Webinar participants

Without enough attendees, there is no need to speak about any kind of effectiveness. This is why this index should be given special attention.

The number of visitors at a webinar is an indicator of the audience’s interest in the topic and the proper reminders about the event.

How to meter

• Learn visitor statistics offered by the webinar service.

How to improve

• Send 2-3 reminding emails to the registered participants. For instance, one day before the event, 2 hours and half an hour before it. Generally, you are free to choose any time for reminders.
• Warm up the registered visitors’ interest in the webinar: send video, articles and other materials related to the topic via email.

Visitor activity

This webinar metric is one of the key indexes of event effectiveness. In other words, the more active communication between visitors and the presenter is, the more likely they are to make the target actions, e.g. leaving an order, subscribing to mailing lists, and watching webinar recording.

High visitor activity demonstrates the correctness of the topic and target audience chosen.

How to meter

• Use statistics of the webinar service. Take into account the number of visitors answering the presenter’s questions, commenting on something or participating in polls and other webinar metrics.

How to improve

• Involve visitors into a dialogue: ask questions, organize polls. Humor, life-based experience, provoking questions and statements will help you hold the audience’s interest.

Watching webinar recording

This index will help you to get an idea of how interesting and topical the webinar was for its visitors. If a webinar helps solve problems, its visitors are sure to watch its recording multiple times later.

How to meter

• Upload the webinar recording to YouTube. You will find the number of views under your video and in the channel statistics.

How to improve

• Send the link to the webinar recording to the webinar’s registered visitors;
• Upload the recording to the website and share it on social networks.

Orders

If your webinar contained some references to your products/services, the number of orders would show you how interesting your offer was for your attendees.

How to meter

• Orders can arrive via email, phone or website. Just count their total number.

How to improve

• Direct advertisement can reason visitors out of placing an order. At your webinar, offer your advice to improve a certain sphere of life or business with your audience. At the end of the meeting, just indicate that your offer might help to achieve even better results.
• For example, if you are a nutrition specialist, tell about typical mistakes in nutrition at your webinar. Closer to the end, offer services for individual nutrition diary provisioning.

Sales

As a rule, webinar attendees are ready to buy after visiting not one webinar, but several of them. That is why sales is a financial index reflecting the effectiveness of the strategy of webinars holding you have chosen in full.

How to meter

• Use the information of payment systems you get for accepting payments.

How to improve

• Offer your participants a discount for goods or services. Limit it in time.

Time spent in the webinar

It’s not just about how many people attend your webinar. They need to remain engaged for you to get the most benefit from your efforts. For this reason, it’s important to know how much time attendees spend in your webinar.

How to meter

• Use your webinar reporting tools to check on the number of people watching throughout the webinar. If numbers fall at any point, you should be able to gauge exactly when this happens. This will help you work out any problems with your marketing or the content or length of your webinar.

How to improve

• Several things can be done to increase the amount of time that people spend in your webinars. For instance, you should.
• Make sure that your marketing accurately reflects the experience.
• Concentrate on providing informative and useful content.
• Make sure that your webinar is as concise as possible.

Attendee feedback

The feedback of attendees at your webinars is vital in helping you to understand how successful they are. It can also help you to identify specific areas where improvements can be made. This feedback can be acquired before, during and after the webinar.

How to meter

• The only way to get feedback from attendees is to ask them. You can do this by:
  • Sending an email before the webinar to check expectations and pain points.
  • Using an embedded poll during the webinar.
  • Issuing a survey within two hours of the end of the webinar.

How to improve

• One of the best ways to improve the feedback that you receive is to act on previous feedback. Asking open questions helps with this as it allows you to see exactly where and how attendees think you can approve.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate of your webinar is the number of people who signed up compared to the number of people who actually attended. Obviously, you want this to be as high as possible.

How to meter

• You can easily work out the conversion rate for your webinar by simply dividing the number of attendees by the number of registrants and multiplying the figure by 100. For instance, if you had 40 attendees and 60 registrants, your conversion rate would be 66.66%.

How to improve

• There are some simple ways in which you can improve your webinar conversion rate.
• Send engaging email reminders before the event.
• Make sure that the branding around your webinar is professional and appealing.
• Check the timing of your webinar. If more people watched on-demand than live, you may want to rethink your broadcast times.

ROI

The overall ROI of your webinar involves many of the metrics that we have already mentioned. It’s the overall return that you get, including considerations such as attendance, engagements, leads and sales.

How to meter

• In order to understand your webinar ROI, you need to track vital KPIs.
  • Increasing participation at your webinars.
  • Enhancing engagement with customers.
  • Accelerating people through the customer journey.
  • Furthering awareness of your brand.
  • Increasing leads
  • Improving sales and revenue.

How to improve

• You obviously want to optimize your webinar ROI as much as possible. Some helpful tips to make this happen to include:
  • Create an abstract of what your webinar will cover and what audience it’s designed to attract.
  • Design promotional content for use across a range of channels, from blog posts to short videos.
  • Use the webinar landing page to gather preliminary data.
  • Make use of polls, before during and after the webinar.

Conclusion

To sum up, when you are systematically tracing effectiveness indexes and webinar metrics, you will learn more about the topics in demand, means of promotion to be used and how information could be better delivered to the audience. Taking into account this information, you will be able to elaborate on an effective strategy for webinar holding.