Post-Event Analysis: How to Evaluate the Success of Your Virtual Event and Improve for the Future
The big day is over and your virtual event went off without a hitch. But now what? You need to show the rest of your team that all of the prep they put in wasn’t a waste of time. You also need to start planning for the next big event two months down the line. In this article, we’ll go over the importance of post-event analysis and provide a framework for evaluating the success (and learning points) of your virtual event.
Define your KPIs
First, you need to understand the real outcomes you wanted from hosting an event. Are you building towards a new product launch? Are you looking to drive brand awareness? Was this an education based training for your employees? Once you have identified your goals, you can then define your KPIs. For example, if your goal is to increase engagement, your KPIs might include the number of social media followers, likes, and comments.
Top KPIs to Evaluate Success of your Virtual Event
- Registration numbers
Registration numbers are a key metric to track. However, registration numbers alone do not give a complete picture of your event's success. It's important to compare the registration numbers to other similar events you may have hosted in the past. This can help you identify trends and areas where you may need to improve your marketing efforts. It’s also important to compare the number of registrants to the actual number of attendees. If your drop off rate is too high, consider a more aggressive event ramp up including emails, social media, and calendar reminders.
- Social media engagement
Social media can be a powerful tool to create buzz around your event and engage attendees before, during, and after the event. Tracking the number of social media followers, likes, comments, and shares on your posts about the event can give you an idea of the level of interest. It is helpful to have an official event hashtag and to encourage attendees to use it for their own posts. Checking all the posts after the fact can help you understand what elements really resonated with your attendees. Similarly, if you don’t see many posts, you might need to get more creative to encourage their engagement. For example, with our RLTY x The Fabricant x World of Women Event, our attendees used the hashtag #IamFABricant to show off their event attire.
- Participation time
Measuring how long attendees stay engaged during your event is crucial to understanding how successful your event was in capturing attendees' attention. Did attendees spend more time during a specific activity or point in the event? Did they stay engaged throughout the entire event, or did they drop off after a certain point? This information can help you identify what worked well and what needs improvement for future events. Consider using analytics tools to track attendee behavior during the event, such as the amount of time spent on specific pages or activities.
- In Event Chat
Chat messages sent during your event can help you measure attendee engagement and satisfaction. Tracking the total number of chat messages per attendee can give you an idea of how active and engaged your attendees were. After the event is over, read through them and break them up into positive, negative, and neutral. This simple analysis can provide valuable insights into how attendees felt about the event and what aspects they particularly enjoyed or disliked.
- Call-to-Action
A good CTA is probably the easiest way to evaluate event success. You can also check socials and the in event chat to see what people were saying about the CTA and the process of actually following through. For example, there might have been a POAP everyone wanted, but couldn’t figure out how to actually find in the venue.
Some Extras for Deeper Evaluation of your Virtual Event
- Streams and simulcasts: If you streamed your event on multiple platforms or had simulcasts, track the number of viewers on each platform.
- Website visits: Track the number of website visits before and after the event to identify if your event had an impact on website traffic.
- Feedback: Send out a survey to attendees to gather feedback on what worked well and what could be improved.
- Revenue: If you had sponsorships or sold products during the event, track your revenue to evaluate the financial success of your event.
- Repeat attendees: If your event was multi-day, track how many attendees returned for subsequent days. If this wasn't your first event, track how many attendees returned from previous events.
It’s key to decide what you want to get out of your virtual event before it happens, and that will guide which of these factors you need to focus on for evaluating success. Luckily, a lot of this is very easily measurable, and there are many reasons your next event should be in the metaverse.
RLTY is building the metaverse one event at a time. If you would like yours to be next, contact us here: www.rlty.live
