Publishers have adopted many new marketing strategies to cope with the onslaught of digital marketing. There are many tried and tested strategies that can bear results for you but webinar stands out noticeably from the rest. Webinars are relayed live or they are recorded online and are used to convey about a particular topic or product. Webinar helps organizations to get real-time feedback for their content and interact with potential customers.

Even though webinars have become quite a popular tool for promoting content and services, publishers find it tricky to quantify success based on a handful of metrics. Webinar needs a lot many metrics to gain insights about the performance and how it can be improved. Let’s take a holistic list of these metrics which will help get the true picture.

1. Webinar registrations

The total number of registrations is a clear cut measure of your content’s success. It is also the most crucial of all the metrics that we will be talking from here on. A high number of registrations indicates that your marketing activities to promote the webinar have been quite successful. You may assign a goal for the total number of registrations and accordingly plan the promotion strategy. If you fail to meet this expected figure, there could be multiple reasons behind it. For example, – your efforts fell short in promoting the webinar event, the topic of the webinar was not attractive enough, or you targeted the wrong audience.

There is no ideal webinar viewer number because you are always trying to raise the bar of your quality with each passing webinar. Still, the size of the audience also depends on the webinar topic, budget, niche market, etc.

2. Registration conversion rate

You should keep a tab on the number of people eventually filling up the registration form after coming to the landing page. There should be a healthy number of people turning up on the landing page and finally registering themselves for the event. If not enough registrations are happening despite a high number of page views, it shows that your landing page is flawed and needs fixing. The landing page should facilitate an easy and quick registration process.

3. Origin of registrants

Most marketers are often using different marketing channels to promote content and services, right from social media to email marketing to paid ads. In case most of your audience is coming directly from social media instead of other marketing channels, this means you must pay extra attention to your social media channel to attract more target groups. This study allows you to focus more on channels that are not helping you get more traffic despite all the efforts.

4. Webinar expense

Depending on the quality and content of the webinar, it may cost you between $100 to $3000. This cost also involves your promotional efforts and technological investment. If you have hired a guest speaker to speak in your webinar or have dedicated staff on payroll who are putting day in and out to make your webinar successful also contribute towards the overall cost of each webinar. Once you have an idea of the average expense you incur for every event, you will be able to forecast ROI from your webinar series.

5. Attendance conversion rate

The other most crucial metrics in this list is the webinar attendance. You may have received a good number of registrations for your webinar, but if the turnout number for the webinar is lower than average, it is a cause for worry. On average, only 35% to 45% of registrants attend webinars they have registered for.

If you are facing low attendance, you should look into your post-registration, webinar promotion, event reminder tactics. You should check for any loopholes or communication gaps. 

6. Webinar view duration

Your webinar has achieved real success if your audience stays throughout the length of your webinar. Having said this, it is quite natural a lot of participants will leave at some point during the webinar. You must keep track of the average time your listeners are spending during each webinar. If you observe that the majority of the dropouts happen in the initial introductory phase of your webinar, it shows either the target audience was not clear about the content at the time of registration or your introduction parts needs some work from your end.

7. Live and recording views

Publishers often fret over low attendance during their live webinar event. But it is not a sign of failure because most of the registrants intend to watch saved webinars for a later time and date. “This is why you should not only pay attention to your live audience attendance but also pay attention to your recorded viewerships.” Who knows, you may want to promote it even more than the live webinar itself.

8. Audience feedback

Post webinar, you must insist on getting audience feedback. You may either send a quick survey to the attendees asking questions about the webinar. Your questions should address specific areas of the webinar e.g. The topic covered, a particular sub-section during the webinar, etc. Once gathered, you must ensure these inputs are assimilated in your webinar strategy.

9. Lead generation

Webinars are effective when it comes to generating leads for your business. Not only this, 20% to 40% of people attending the webinar turn out to be qualified leads.

But if your leads are not qualified enough, then it shows your topic is not suited for your target audience and failed to attract them to the webinar.

10. Revenue generated

This is the ultimate matrix and the goal of any marketing or sales strategy. You must get income from your webinars, but tracking your audience in the sales funnel is not very easy. Especially when each one of them is at a different stage of the buying cycle. We recommend that you consider all the customers who had interacted with your webinar at any stage of their buying cycle as the direct deal closed.

Conclusion

The metrics we talked so far will definitely give you valuable insights about your webinar’s success story and give you an idea about what’s working and what’s not. Once you start receiving regular data from webinar analytics, you will further improve upon your content delivery.
It is imperative for business to look at the possible integrations of various technology platforms – like websites to eCommerce experience to webinar hosting platforms and finally to CRM & mail dissemination products. This integration empowers sales & marketing team to observe varied level of interests during the customer journey and modulate the intensity to target your prospects – aggressively or in subtle manner. Ace has helped publishers in integrating various marketing-related solutions with their webinar offerings and helped them streamline their business goals.