9 Metrics to Include in Your Webinar Scorecard
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with webinar reporting, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Many of the webinar technology platforms capture more data than is needed–with exports that exhaust the entire alphabet in columns used.
They’ll report on things like “interest rating” and “attentiveness”, which basically tells you if your audience has the webinar up as their dominant screen or if they’re multitasking. Spoiler alert: most people are multitasking.
While metrics like these may be interesting, they’re not all that useful. As someone who’s produced over 100 webinars, these are the 9 key metrics I like to focus on because they are the best indicators of success and help me identify useful insights to apply to future webinars.
Qualified Registrants
In addition to tracking the absolute number of people that register, I would make sure you are filtering for the audience that matters most to you. You could have one column to track total registrants and another to track target accounts or qualified prospects. This will help you filter out the noise and hone in on the audience that matters most as you look for topics that resonate best. I would also recommend excluding anyone from your company that signs up and anyone outside of your TAM.
Qualified Attendees
Similar to the above, raw number of attendees may help you understand how far reaching your webinar was, but it could also be misleading if a third of your attendees were coworkers or if 80% were existing clients and you were targeting prospects. Here again, you’ll want to add an additional filter for your target audience and use that number to compare to other webinars. Sometimes one social post or e-newsletter can skew the total registrant number and mix by over indexing on a particular segment.
Attendance Rate
The all-important and ever-declining attendance rate metric is still an important one to track. I wouldn’t get too caught up in how your percentage stacks up to industry standards (which can be anywhere from 30-40%). Instead, I would work to determine your own benchmark and seek to improve that. I’ve worked for some companies where the average was well over 40% and others where we struggled to hit 30%. There are many variables that impact this, including the fact that some industries/audiences are just “flakier” than others.
Attendee Satisfaction Rating
An important, but often overlooked metric, is your attendees’ approval or satisfaction rating. You should also send a post-webinar survey (even better to send during the webinar or when you close out to maximize responses). In my view, the most important question is a simple one: “Did you get value from today’s session?” The answer tells me whether our webinar delivered on what we promised or whether we missed the mark. It’s interesting to see how responses to this question vary between webinars. Look at the webinars with higher-than-average attendee satisfaction ratings and see if you can determine what it is about these webinars that’s working so well and try to replicate. Do they all address a similar topic? Do they feature the same speaker? Are they panel discussions or slide-based presentations?
Qualified Leads
A good webinar always has a path to inbound. Whether or not this is the primary goal of the webinar, you’ll want to track inbound leads as this is another useful indicator as to whether the content was well received. A speaker or webinar that was effective at communicating the value of your offering will tend to generate more leads for your business. There are many ways to capture leads from a webinar. Here are just a few.
Create a tracked link that points to a lead form on your site and share it in the webinar chat as you are beginning to wrap up (don’t wait until the last second. You want to give attendees time to take action).
If your webinar hosting platform has the ability, launch a survey when the webinar concludes that includes the question, “Would you like to speak with someone on our sales team about [insert product/service]?
Include a call to action in your follow-email to your attendees to either respond to the email or fill out the lead form to get in touch with sales
Opportunities Created
The reporting doesn’t stop at lead creation. While leads are typically captured immediately after the webinar (or up to a week later), the real results can take weeks to crystalize. You should have a report in your CRM that aggregates all sales opportunities from your webinars. I like to pull this number (opps per webinar) into my consolidated scorecard to see not only which webinars are generating the most leads, but which are resulting in qualified opportunities for sales. Some webinars may have a high number of leads, but low opportunity rate which warrants further investigation. Were the leads truly qualified? Were attendees dissatisfied with the webinar and therefore not willing to move forward?
Closed-Won Deals
I also like to have a view into how many deals actually closed. Depending on your sales cycle, this could come months later (which is why it’s important to continuously update your scorecard). You don’t want to fall into the trap of calling your webinar a failure prematurely if there are still active pipeline opportunities.
Revenue
The absolute number of deals closed is helpful, but doesn’t tell you the whole story. Adding revenue (however you measure this – AVC, ARR, etc) helps give more context to the deals that closed. For example, you may have a webinar that closed 10 deals and another that only closed one but the resulting revenue was the same. Ultimately, it’s the revenue that we’re after and we want to use webinars to close more valuable deals. If you don’t have any variability in your pricing, then this discrepancy won’t be as big an issue.
On-Demand Views
As consumer demand shifts to on-demand viewing, post-live event metrics are becoming increasingly important. You should always post the recording to your website either as a new webinar asset or by updating the live event landing page with the video recording. Whether or not to gate depends on your goals. If lead gen is your primary goal, then you’ll want to have a form (but keep it super short/simple). Then you can track weekly form submissions or video views to understand the full impact of your webinar, even months after it takes place. I would also update your performance metrics, namely leads, opportunities, closed-won deals and revenue, as on-demand viewing will most certainly contribute to these.
Tracking the right metrics is critical to understanding the success of your webinars and ensuring continuous improvement. By focusing on key indicators like qualified registrants, attendee satisfaction, leads generated, and revenue, you can gain valuable insights into how well your webinars resonate with your target audience and contribute to your business goals. Avoid getting bogged down by unnecessary data points and instead, zero in on the metrics that truly matter. With a simple and consistent webinar scorecard, you can continuously refine your strategy, optimize your content, and drive better results for your business.
