How to measure webinar success?

It often happens that webinar success is measured with the help of money value, i.e., whether it has brought money or not.

Key Metrics for Webinar Success

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 measure and improve them.

Sign-ups

The number of registrations shows us how much demand there is for the topic 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 measure

• 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 about who the event is for, as well as what is waiting for the webinar attendees.
• The registration form also influences the final result, which is why it should ideally be laconic.
• 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 promotion channels. Earlier, we wrote about 34 webinar promotion tools and ideas.

Reposting announcements on social media

The number of reposts tells us about audience loyalty, because some visitors are genuinely 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 measure

• 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 measure

• 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 measure

• Read the "Engagement" chart on the "Statistics" tab, which plots how many people were in the room minute by minute, and the "Chat" tab, which keeps every message with its sender and time. Call-to-action clicks on the "CTA" tab are the third signal. Poll and test answers are not in that report at all, because they live in "Storage" under their own tabs, so gather those separately rather than expecting a dashboard figure.

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 measure

• 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 measure

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

How to improve

• Direct advertising can talk visitors out of placing an order. At your webinar, share advice on improving some area 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 a service that keeps an individual nutrition diary for them.

Sales as a webinar success metric

As a rule, webinar attendees are ready to buy after visiting not one webinar, but several of them. That is why sales is the financial index that reflects, in full, how effective your chosen webinar strategy really is.

How to measure

• 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 measure

• 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.
• 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 measure

• 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 improve.

Conversion rate

A webinar has several conversion rates, and this one is attendance over registrations, the share of people who signed up that actually turned up. Say which one you mean whenever you quote a figure, because the same event can be described honestly with three different conversion numbers.

How to measure

• 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.

Which number goes on top of which

Every metric above is a fraction, and most disagreements about webinar performance are really disagreements about the denominator. Naming it turns a vague number into one you can compare between two events.

There is no funnel screen in the control panel, so you assemble this yourself from the report and from your own systems. That is less convenient and considerably more honest, because it forces you to say where each figure came from.

Two of those rows come from outside the platform, and pretending otherwise is the most common way these numbers go wrong. The webinar room is the last step of the journey, not the whole of it.

The traps that make two honest people disagree

Registered is not one population. The attendee list marks every row as either a self-registration through your link or an import from your own contacts, and that is the distinction that decides what the number means. Forty of sixty people who found you and signed up is a strong result. Forty of sixty you imported from an existing customer list is a different event, and one average across both tells you nothing about either.

Clicks are not people. The "CTA" tab carries two separate figures for each element, the attendees who saw it and the clicks it earned, and one person can click twice. Put clicks over attendees and you will eventually publish a rate above a hundred per cent. Both figures open the list of people behind them, so use the list whenever you need people rather than events.

An attendance percentage is not a headcount. The "Attendance" tab gives one row per person, and the percentage on that row is the share of the session that person was present for. Averaging those percentages answers how long the room stayed, not how many people came.

Email figures stop at delivery. That block counts messages sent, delivered and failed, and there is no measure anywhere of who attended because of an email. If you want that link you have to build it yourself with a tagged link and read it in your own analytics.

A worked example

One 60-minute session, with the numbers rounded and the identifying details changed.

The landing page took 900 visits and produced 180 registrations, which is 20 per cent, and it is the only stage measured entirely outside the platform. Of those 180, sixty signed up through the link and 120 were imported, so the two halves are worth keeping apart from here on.

"Involvement" shows that 72 people turned up, which is 40 per cent of 180. Split it and the picture changes, because 36 of the 60 self-registered is 60 per cent while 36 of the 120 imported is 30 per cent. The single figure of 40 per cent concealed both.

The "Attendance" tab shows 29 people above 75 per cent, so roughly 40 per cent of everyone who arrived stayed to the end.

The "CTA" tab reports 31 clicks from 24 people. Against the 72 who turned up, that is 33 per cent of the room rather than the 43 per cent the raw click count would suggest.

Five of those 24 went on to buy, which is 21 per cent of the people who clicked, and that last figure lives in your own system because the platform never sees a sale.

The useful part is not any single percentage. It is that the weak stage is now obvious, since the imported half turned up at half the rate of the people who found you, and that is what the next event should change.

ROI

The overall ROI is the figure that turns every percentage above into money. It is also the one the platform cannot hand you, because it needs your costs and your revenue, and it never sees either.

How to measure

• Add up what the event cost you, which is the platform for that period, any advertising, and the hours your team spent multiplied by what an hour is worth.
• Add up the revenue you can trace back to the event, counting the orders you can actually attribute to it rather than everything that arrived that week.
• ROI is revenue minus cost, divided by cost, multiplied by 100. Taking the worked example above, five sales at €200 against a cost of €600 gives €1000 minus €600 over €600, which is about 67 per cent.
• Keep the attribution rule identical between events. A rule you keep changing is worse than one that is slightly wrong, because it makes two events impossible to compare.

How to improve

• You obviously want to optimize your webinar ROI as much as possible. Some tips that help:
• 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.

Key takeaways on webinar metrics

When you carefully track your effectiveness indexes and learn from them, you will gain valuable insights into what topics attract the most attention, what promotional methods work best, and how to present information in a more engaging way for your audience. Using this knowledge will help you build a strong, efficient strategy for hosting online events.

FAQ

What does the number of registrations tell you about a webinar?

The number of registrations shows how much your target audience is interested in the topic and also gives insight into the landing page’s quality when you compare it with page visits.

How can you measure attendee engagement during the webinar?

The report gives you three signals, the "Engagement" chart that plots how many people were in the room each minute, the "Chat" transcript, and the click counts on the "CTA" tab. Poll and test answers sit in "Storage" instead of the report, so collect those from there.

Why is tracking the time spent in the webinar important?

Tracking time spent is important because it shows whether people stayed engaged with your webinar content and when they might have dropped off, which helps you identify content or timing issues.

What role does attendee feedback play after a webinar?

Attendee feedback plays a role in helping you understand how successful your webinar was and highlights areas you can improve by asking expectations before the event and using surveys after.

How do you define conversion rate for a webinar?

Divide the number who attended by the number who registered and multiply by 100. That is attendance over registrations specifically, which is worth saying out loud, because clicks over attendees and sales over clickers are also conversion rates and they answer different questions.