Your analytics are your key to building and monetizing your brand. Measure and interpret them well and you’ll be unstoppable! 💪
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? The truth is that oftentimes event organizers, especially those new to events, don’t get as much as they could out of their analytics.
But why?
Maybe it doesn’t feel like it contributes much to the task at hand – planning and executing a successful virtual event. As an Event Organizer, you’ve probably got hundreds of tasks on your plate. From reaching out to speakers, to creating ticket tiers and viral incentives, it’s no easy feat! Or, maybe it just feels daunting 😰.
Setting up your analytics right will help you harness the data at your fingertips and activate your audience.
The best news? It’s super easy with HeySummit. So stick with us - we’re here to make you and your analytics the best of friends 💖
Wait...what are Analytics?
New to this? Let’s start at the beginning. Analytics is the process of tracking, collecting and evaluating data in order to discover, interpret, and quantify performance.
Basically, your analytics tell you what’s working, and how well.
But what does that mean exactly? Here’s just a few examples of data you can track on your HeySummit event dashboard:
- Attendees: The number of people that started the registration process on your event site.
- Social shares: The number of people that clicked on a social share button on your event site after registering.
- Viral clicks: The number of people that clicked on your viral incentive after registering for your event.
- Talks per attendee: The average number of talks that attendees have added to their personal schedules.
These help you determine the health of your event and identify weak areas for improvement or strong areas for amplification, allowing you to play up your strengths and remove or modify anything keeping you from smashing your event goals. The more data you have on hand, the easier it is to discern trends and make generalizations, so you can be confident that you’re making changes that best serve your attendees’ interests and experience with your event.
Now, how exactly do I use Analytics?
The first thing is to consider what kind of data you want and where you can get it. Besides installing custom code on your site to track quantitative data, you can also pose pre-registration questions to your attendees to get qualitative data on things like:
- their industry
- their age
- their location
- their topics of interest
Once you have this information, you can start to refine your attendee persona - super important for knowing exactly who your key demographic is, and who you should be targeting in your marketing efforts towards going forward.
Once your event goes live, you can also ask simple, daily polls and surveys to your attendees to know what your attendees think of your event as it progresses.
Finally, after your event finishes, you can send out post-event feedback questions to get a sense of how your event went. After all, what better resource do you have for improving on future events than the people who have already attended one?
Here are some of the best ways to get your analytics really working for you:
1. Use Analytics to determining the success of your virtual event
Every marketing campaign has its key metrics to measure success – a virtual event is no different. But how do you determine if your event was successful or not?
Come up with a few tangible goals during the planning stage of your event. Things like:
- I want to capture 1000 new leads for my brand website
- I want to sell 500 premium tickets
- I want to test if hosting a giveaway will help generate more social media buzz
- I want to capture more attendees from California
Now that you’ve got your goals set up, you’ll need a way to measure them – and that’s where analytics come in! Much like you’d be likely to track the number of impressions made when you take out a paid ad, you can track progress made against your metrics via:
- your HeySummit dashboard, and/ or
- one of the additional tools you’ve decided to add, such as Pixel and Google Analytics
Here’s a quick example of how it looks in HeySummit:
2. Gain insights that will shape your next virtual event
If you want your next virtual event to perform well, you’ll want to track your analytics as your current event runs. This will help you gain insights into which parts of your event performed well and which require some tweaks.
Maybe a certain style of talk received a higher number of attendees than another? Maybe one talk had a higher number of drop-offs than the rest? Collecting details like these (and reacting!) can propel your future events into new heights 🚀
Identifying your event highs + lows will help you see what to keep, and what to change. Either way, you’ll be making meaningful changes that will lead to better events, happier attendees and increased revenue + leads for you.
3. Understand who your attendees are, and how they engage
Tools such as Google Analytics can help deepen your understanding of your attendee persona (who your customer is) as well as the typical customer journey through your event. You can identify things like:
- how they found your event
- how they engage with your landing page, and for how long
- how many people your promos and landing page were able to convert
This can be especially useful if you have a high number of visits to your landing page, but few attendees – perhaps your registration process is too complicated, or ticket prices are too high. You’ll be able to tell, because your analytics will tell you when and where your visitors left your event site.
You can also track the methods of event promotion that worked best, then capitalize on that to boost leads – for example, if most of your attendees came from a particular affiliate, maybe you could consider doing more collaborations with them in the future.
Ultimately, analytics help make your attendees’ event journey smoother, and give you a clearer idea of the kind of content your audience prefers to consume, and how they consume it.
The bottom line? Analytics take away the guesswork when you’re building future events or choosing other marketing strategies.
Ready to start collecting information to engage and activate your audience? Start a free 14-day trial and gain access to analytics straight away.
