BLOGS 4 Surefire Ways to Measure Audience Engagement at Live Events
By Lelde Dalmane
Source: Social Tables
In this post, we’ll show you how to measure audience engagement using four very different tactics that any planner or event marketer can employ.
Event planning isn’t easy. In fact, it takes our all sometimes: energy, time, effort, ideas, management, and even some sweat and tears. So when it’s all said and done, it’s only natural to that planners want to make sure that all of those efforts are validated. The best way to do that? Measuring audience engagement. In fact, when we ask event planners what they value the most during or after an event, it’s one of the answers that come up the most. But at the end of the day, it’s also tricky to measure in a tangible way.
Why Make the Effort to Measure Audience Engagement?
If attendees are enjoying an event, they’re not only engaged, they want to participate. And that engagement and participation doesn’t just mean a successful event — it means more word of mouth, more repeat attendance, and more return on planning and marketing efforts. Engaged attendees want to get involved, share images from the event, recommend it to their friends, and attend all over again.
And while you can always qualify audience engagement at live events with your gut, it’s a whole lot more effective to quantify it using hard data. Plus, when you know where to look, you can find the numbers you need around every corner — your attendee list, web analytics, social media, and many other places. Just combine them with some savvy methods of analysis and you’ll have an accurate, insightful idea of how engaged the audience is at any live event.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness shows how much of a lasting impact an event leaves on the audience, as well as the type of perception that they’ll carry forward in regards to your brand.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
While brand awareness is somewhat intangible and can’t always be measured with 100% accuracy, you can get a pretty good idea if it’s growing (and how fast) by following some numbers.
Start by benchmarking metrics around organic traffic and direct web page visitors. Compare this data to the number of visitors for the period after the event. This gives a pretty good idea of how far the word about an event is spreading. Plus, the numbers indicate how many people have a deep enough interest in a brand as a result of the event to have looked it up, hit the follow button, or visited a brand’s website directly.
By using Google Analytics to monitor traffic to your website, you can track specific metrics that illustrate the growth in awareness with real numbers.
- Unique pageviews – Track unique pageviews for the period after the event to a specific page (usually your homepage) for an idea of lift.
- Serial Content – Create serial content like blog posts about the event or topics from the event, and send them out to your attendee base. Then, track metrics like unique page views, time on page, and bounce rate on those pieces to get an idea of how people are engaging with your content.