How to Measure Webinar Success

Marketers are always asked to report on their performance, regardless of their approach. But in the context of scrappy marketing – and, in particular, when you’re running webinars – how do you measure webinar success? What numbers will you use to measure your performance? How do you know you’re successful? And what data points might provide inspiration for driving further results?

To help you, we’ve put together a few questions you either might get asked about how to measure webinar success or might ask yourself. Each guiding question has several points you can use to help find an answer suitable to you – as well as some suggestions on where scrappy approaches could help turn the dial.

How are webinars contributing to marketing’s goal?

Different marketing teams often work on different goals. But ultimately, most marketing is measured by how it impacts sales performance.

As such, here are a few areas to look at when assessing the impact of your marketing campaigns. Connecting your CRM or marketing automation platform to your webinar software is also advisable. ON24 Connect can help you do that seamlessly.

Chances are there are other channels that go into the touches for each prospect. To get a clearer picture, use your marketing automation or CRM to investigate what touches buyers went through in their journey. Even if you don’t have a full attribution model in place, this data will give you a good indication of how you are performing.

• • Marketing-generated opportunities by both volume, total amount and weighted pipeline value. Your company’s CRM will likely be the place to turn to for opportunity information. If you don’t already mark opportunity records as marketing-generated, export the list of opportunities your sales team is working on (including closed, lost, and open) and look to match these against your campaigns and webinars. Email addresses can often be an easy way of matching records.
  • Webinar-influenced sales-accepted leads (SALs). Assess which of the leads accepted by the sales team were influenced by a webinar.
  • Webinar-influenced marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Look at the data within your marketing automation platform to understand how webinars are contributing to your MQL numbers.

Some scrappy ideas for influencing the above include:

• • Run scrappy campaigns against large target accounts. If you can open a large opportunity through webinars, this will help increase marketing’s contribution to pipeline. More information is in the B2B Marketer’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing.
  • Run scrappy webinars to further qualify leads – and get sales to join the session. If you need to influence the number of leads that sales is accepting, find out what information causes them to disqualify prospects (e.g. budget) and run webinars to screen for those attributes. Use both registration fields and poll questions to collect this data – and invite your sales team to answer Q&A in the background so they will be happy to pick up those leads directly.
  • Test calls-to-action in your webinars that boost lead score. While it’s tempting to adjust your lead scoring to boost MQL numbers, that tactic won’t do anyone any favors. Instead, try to increase engagement during your webinars in a way that contributes to building a prospect’s lead score – so more of them become MQLs.

How are webinars engaging our prospects?

There are many ways to measure webinar engagement – from simple figures such as attendee count, through to more granular metrics such as drop-off rate. Here are a few to assess.

• • Attendees and qualified attendees. This is a simple number – how many people watched your webinar? How many of those were qualified and fit your target prospect profile? But a word of warning – be careful that this number doesn’t become used as a vanity metric.
  • Engagement score. ON24 provides a simple to understand engagement score that uses participation, engagement and use of webinar features. This number can give you a benchmark to further drive performance.
  • Resource use. How many assets did your prospects engage within the webinar console?
  • Average viewing time. How long did your prospects stay tuned into your session?
  • Attendee feedback. Don’t forget about qualitative metrics. What do attendees say about your webinars? You can also poll them for this information.
  • Repeat viewers. How many of your prospects have viewed more than one webinar?
  • Account coverage. For your target accounts, how many decision-makers have tuned into your webinars?

Many of these figures can be found within the ON24 Intelligence console – as shown below. Looking at the data, we can see that while average viewing time was strong, the engagement score could be improved – as well as running some marketing to increase on-demand viewing.

The good news with all these tactics, there are scrappy ways to amplify webinar success – many of which only require small tweaks. To drive up your engagement score, look at increasing the number of engagement options within the session or try a different presenter. Put more resources on your webinar console and signpost them during the session. Take polls, but hang on to the answers to increase average viewing time. Ask for feedback in the Q&A. Tell attendees to sign up to the next webinar, or watch an always-on session. Run campaigns for specific accounts.

How successful is our webinar promotion?

As well as the success of the webinars directly, look for webinar metrics connected to influence sign-up and attendance rate. This is an effective way to measure webinar success. Figures to look at include:

• • Registrations and qualified registrations. How many people signed up? Of those, which registrants fit your target profile?
  • Attendee conversion rate. How many of those registering actually showed up?
  • Cost-per-registration / cost-per-lead. If you paid to drive registrations, what was the average cost?
  • Registration page conversion rate. What percentage of people are converting on the registration page?
  • Conversion rate from channels. Which channels are performing better than others?

Taking a scrappy approach to improve these could include:

• • Making use of third-party sites and syndication to boost registration counts. If you need more people signing up, working with a partner that has a large audience can help.
  • Experimenting with landing page copy. What could you do to make signing up irresistible? Feel free to experiment and do something new.
  • Try different channels. If you’re stuck on using just email, change things up. Add social promotion, incentivize your sales team, get your friends to share it! As an example, Twilio used Facebook ads to boost its audience by 30% – a channel overlooked by many B2B marketers.

How will you use this data?

This isn’t a question that demands numbers but highlights a key aspect of success with any marketing. You need to find out what works and how well it’s working to close the loop on your efforts and make next time even more successful.

It’s important that you get this data, and use it to change your approach in measuring your webinar’s success. The sooner you do this, the faster you will see improved results.