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Without using webinar metrics and KPI it’s hard to keep track of what’s actually working.
Just hosting a webinar without paying attention to what it’s doing for your business could result in a lot of time, money, and effort being wasted.
While there is a long list of data you can track, we share top 13 webinar KPI metrics to focus on. We’ll also give you tips on how you can boost these metrics.
Let’s get into it!
What are webinar metrics and KPIs?
Webinar KPI metrics are indicators that help you measure the effectiveness and success of your webinars. KPIs, or key performance indicators give insights into how your webinar is performing, from the promotion to the execution and follow-up phase. You get insight into different aspects of the webinar, like marketing effectiveness, audience engagement, and return on investment (ROI).
There are plenty of important webinar metrics like registration rate, attendance rate, engagement rate, and more, which we’ll detail further below.
Why do webinar KPIs matter?
Keeping track of various webinar KPIs gives you insights on how well your webinar performed and throws a spotlight on which areas need improvement.
Let’s look into more detail why webinar KPIs matter:
It helps improve future webinar content
By analyzing metrics like audience retention, engagement, and drop-off time, you can find out which webinar sections were boring and which were interesting. This will help you change your webinar to create better content in the future.
Helps in understanding the audience
KPIs are like a window into the preferences, behaviors, and interests of your audience. For instance, demographic data from registrations can give you a clue on what types of people most interested in your topic.
Measuring success and return on investment (ROI)
By evaluating metrics like attendance rates, engagement levels, and conversion rates, organizers can determine if the webinar achieved its intended goals. This, in turn, helps calculate the important metric of return on investment (ROI).
Boosting your brand and authority
By paying attention to the metrics for each of your webinars and improving upon them, you make your webinars better and better. This makes your webinar successful more consistently, which increases the credibility of your brand and establishes authority in your niche.
Keeps track of goals and helps make better decisions
Use metrics to track if the webinars were meeting your predefined goals or not. Depending on whether the webinar accomplished its job or not, you can make better, more informed decisions on how to conduct the webinar the next time.
13 Most Important Webinar KPI metrics to track your success
Below are 13 of the most important webinar KPI metrics spread across 4 broad categories:
Registration and attendee webinar analytics
Registration Rate
This is the total number of registrants who signed up for the webinar.
Why it’s important: This KPI measures the effectiveness of your marketing and copy. A high registration rate indicated strong interest in the topic or speakers.
Registration to attendee ratio
This metric compares the number of attendees to the number of registrants.
Why it’s important: Attendance rate helps you understand the level of commitment and interest among those who registered. If they weren’t that interested, there could be three reasons:
- The marketing or copy wasn’t compelling enough
- The topic of the webinar wasn’t that interesting
- The timing of the webinar was not optimal
- There weren’t enough follow-ups or reminders sent
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate is the number of people that clicked on a specific link. This link could be in emails, social media posts, online ads; basically any links leading to your webinar registration page.
This metric measures the effectiveness of your promotional content.
Why is it important: A good CTR means that your marketing message resonates with your audience and compels them to learn more about your webinar. It also helps you figure out if you’re reaching the right audience.
Audience Engagement and Interaction
Average viewing time
Measures the average amount of time attendees spend watching the webinar. The longer your audience watches, generally the higher their engagement.
Why it’s important: If whole or sections of the content weren’t interesting or if it didn’t give people what they wanted, they’ll drop off the webinar. This will reduce the overall viewing time. If people watched the whole webinar, then you’ve done a good job on the content front.
Audience participation and engagement rate
Tracks the percentage of attendees who engage with the webinar through questions, polls, chats, or other interactive elements.
Why it’s important: Having people interact with your webinar through text chat, polls, and questions means your webinar is virtually a hit. They’re super interested in the topic enough to engage actively instead of just watch passively. High participation rates often correlate with higher satisfaction and retention rates.
Satisfaction rate and feedback score
This metric tracks how satisfied the attendees were with the webinar. Feedback surveys or polls after the webinar help calculate this rate.
Why it’s important: Satisfaction rate can help you understand how helpful and entertaining the webinar was for the audience. In case you got bad feedback on your first webinar, don’t sweat it – just use the feedback gained to improve on future webinars.
On-demand downloads and replays
On-demand downloads and replays count how many times people watch the recorded version of the webinar.
Why it’s important: This metric is useful for understanding how engaging and valuable your content is to the audience. If the video is replayed multiple times by a large audience, then your webinar was informative and engaging. People are most likely writing down notes or trying to recall information by watching it on the second playthrough.
Webinar lead conversion rates
Lead conversion rates
This is the percentage of attendees who take a desired action after a webinar. Examples include signing up for a trial, making a purchase, or filling out a contact form.
Why it’s important: The conversion rate is a direct indicator of the webinar’s effectiveness in driving business goals and ROI.
Follow-up engagement rate
Follow-up engagement rate measures how much your audience responds to the follow-up emails you send after the webinar.
Why it’s important: The true test of the webinar is how engaged your audience is after the event. If your audience still shows interest in your webinar after the ‘high’ of it wears out, that means they’re more inclined to purchase your product or service.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
This metric tracks the number of leads generated by a webinar event ready for a direct sales follow-up. (A lead is a potential customer who has expressed interest in your product or services after the webinar.)
Why it’s important: Sales-qualified leads allow sales teams to focus on the most promising leads and move them toward a close.
Webinar costs and expenses
Cost of the webinar
This includes all costs associated with making the webinar, including
- Speaker fees
- Money spent on equipment
- Marketing
- Webinar software subscription
Why it’s important: Content creation costs are a key factor in calculating the return on investment (ROI) of content marketing. By controlling these costs and focusing on conversion, you can get a better ROI which increases profitability.
Webinar Return on investment (ROI)
While the previous metric calculated the cost, this one assesses the cost involved with the benefits or returns generated. This process can be somewhat complex, however, as webinars often produce intangible benefits that are not easily quantified in monetary terms, like brand awareness.
Why it’s important: This is an important metric because it’s tangible evidence of how effective a webinar was and the value it generated relative to its cost. Only if you get a good ROI in the long term can you continue to justify running webinars as part of your marketing strategy.
Cost per qualified lead
This is the cost of acquiring a qualified lead per webinar. To find this out, you’d have to use the formula: Total Webinar Costs / Number of Qualified Leads = Cost per Qualified Lead.
Why it’s important: Following up a qualified lead takes time and money. Ideally, the overall profitability of getting the customer should exceed the cost of acquiring them.
How to measure your Webinar KPIs: Tools for tracking webinar metrics
Here are some webinar platforms and tools that can track webinar analytics and the different metrics they analyze:
Demio
Demio is a webinar platform for hosting webinars, virtual events, and live meetings. It’s particularly geared towards marketers and sales professionals, helping them engage with their audience and drive business growth.
Metrics include:
- Registration numbers
- Attendance rate
- Viewing time per person
- Conversion rates
- Engagement (chat box activity, poll participation, questions asked, etc.)
- Feedback and satisfaction scores
- Revenue generation
GoToWebinar
GoToWebinar is an app you can use to host webinars. It is the sister app of GoToMeeting and it can support up to 3000 participants.
Metrics include:
- Attendance rate percentage
- Average attentiveness
- Number of opened invitations
- Engagement metrics (poll response rate, number of questions asked, etc.)
- Individual time in session
- Individual registration date and time
BigMarker
BigMarker goes beyond standard webinars, letting you host even virtual events and hybrid events (a mix of live and virtual events).
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Metrics include:
- Total number of registrants
- Total revenue generated
- Total page views
- Invitation open rate
- Email registration
- Engagement metrics
- Conversion rates
Zoom Webinar
Zoom webinar is a feature offered by Zoom that allows users to host online events for large audiences.
Metrics include:
- Attendee report (when they joined, left, total time in session)
- Performance report (registration, attendance, and feedback)
- Engagement report (Poll, survey, and Q&A report)
Livestorm
Livestorm is a browser-based platform that lets you host webinars and virtual meetings.
Metrics include:
- Registration rate
- Attendance rate
- Conversion rate
- Replay views
- Retention rate
- CTA click rate
- Engagement metrics (polls, chat, and questions)
What webinar benchmarks should you strive for?
Here are the webinar benchmarks to strive for:
Registration rate
A large number of webinar registrants indicates that your promotional materials, marketing, and copy have been effective. It also suggests that the topic of your webinar was intriguing enough for the people to register.
The average registration rate is 30% for cold traffic.
Attendance rate
The average attendance rate of a webinar is 40% of registrants. But don’t worry if your webinar falls below that range; it doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It could be that registrants skipped the live webinar and watched the on-demand replay.
That said, a 35%-40% attendance rating is decent, and a 45-55% is a good showing.
Engagement rate
A large percentage of the audience that actively participates in the webinar bodes well for the event. Engaging with something is a sign of deep interest, and these people can become lifelong customers if you play your post-webinar marketing strategy right.
We suggest you aim for a 60% engagement rate. This means your audience is listening and attentive.
Conversion rate
If your webinar is meant to convince attendees to join a course or make a purchase, the conversion rate from attendee to customer is important.
The average webinar conversion rate is 55%, but this changes from industry to industry.
Average viewing time and drop-off rate
Having a high viewing time and low drop-off rate is a sign that your attendees enjoyed the webinar. The more they stayed till the end, the more you can be confident that you created a webinar that was valuable to the audience.
The average viewing time is 56 minutes, which is why it’s a good idea to wrap up a webinar within an hour.
Feedback scores
Good feedback scores, on top of the above metrics, are even greater evidence that you’re doing the right job, and you should continue more of what you’re doing. However, if the scores are low, just ask attendees what changes you can make to future webinars to make them better.
Best practices to improve and achieve your webinar goals
Here are some ways to push your webinar metrics in a positive direction:
Clearly define your goals
Whether it’s lead generation, brand awareness, or making a sale, define your end goal so you can optimize all aspects of the webinar towards it.
Understand your audience
The success and failure of your webinar rests on how well you’re attuned to the likes and desires of the audience. Give them what they want, and you’ll be rewarded with lifelong loyal customers.
Make your webinar and presentation engaging
Your webinar presentation should be visually appealing and easy to follow. It should have storytelling, use of engaging slides, interesting demonstrations, and an engaged and enthusiastic presentation of concepts.
You can also add sound effects using a media board like Riverside’s to spice things up.
Get your audience involved
Include your audience in the webinar with activities like Q&As, polls or use breakout rooms that’ll keep them engaged.
If you’re on Riverside, you can even invite them to talk to you with our live call ins. This way, you can talk to them authentically and make them feel a part of your show.
Record your webinars for easy repurposing
Use software that gives you full control to record your webinar in top-notch quality. This allows you to post your webinar on-demand or repurpose it for social media and other platforms.
We suggest you make sure you use software like Riverside that can handle this.
Riverside has a presentation recorder that lets you upload slides and present directly from the dashboard. You can record these presentations, along with separate, but synced video tracks in up to 4K resolution. You’ll also get AI transcriptions and webinar summaries so you can turn your webinar into a blog effortlessly.
Analyze and modify
Use every webinar as an opportunity to learn something. Don’t skip this vital step; the only way to get better at conducting webinars is to become better and better by using lessons learned prior.
Ask for good feedback
Prepare a feedback form that asks good questions so you can find out what you did right, wrong, and what could be done better. Here are some questions that you ask:
- How would you rate the relevance and usefulness of the content?
- Was there a specific section you found the most valuable?
- What are your thoughts on the duration and pace of the webinar?
- Are there additional topics or resources you wish had been included in the webinar?
- What improvements would you suggest for future webinars?
FAQs on Webinar KPI Metrics
What is a good show-up rate for a webinar?
An average good show-up rate is 40%. However, it can vary from niche to niche – corporate communication webinars attract a 65% attendance rate, whereas training webinars get around 53%.
How do you calculate the attendance rate for webinars?
The attendance rate refers to the percentage of registrants who attended the webinar live compared to those who registered.
It’s calculated by dividing the number of attendees by the number of registrants and then multiplying that by 100.
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