Measuring your webinar performance by looking at the engagement funnel

This article will describe how you can measure the impact and performance of your virtual event or webinar when using our platform.

Of the many indicators that can be used to produce analytics for your event, here we will primarily focus on the essential key performance indicators that are relevant regardless of the content and audience of your virtual event/webinar.

The engagement funnel

The engagement funnel can be seen as the various conversion steps of your attendees from the very first touchpoint of their journey (the invitation to the virtual event/webinar) to the very last touchpoint of your attendee’s journey (providing feedback on the event).

There are four indicators or steps that are important to look at, and this article will outline where to find the information for each of these steps:

1 - "Invitation" to "Registration" conversion rate
2 - "Registration" to "Activation" conversion rate
3 - From activated attendee to engaged participant
4 - Feedback response rate

Beyond these four indicators, we'll also provide some information on using the SpotMe/Onomi API to capture data from the engagement funnel.

1 - "Invitation" to "Registration" conversion rate

The first conversion rate to be measured is the "invitation" to "registration" conversion rate.

The invitation to registration conversion rate can be measured as follows depending on whether your event is using public (open) or private (RSVP) registration.

Invitation through public (open) registration

If the invitation to the virtual event/webinar is performed outside of SpotMe/Onomi, try to find out how many people have been invited through your event promotion campaign(s).

For example: What was the target audience of your email marketing campaign? How many people did your social media campaign reach? What was the traffic on your website where the event was promoted?

Once you have an estimate of the number of people who were invited/reached, you can easily calculate the registration conversation rate by going to Backstage and looking at the total number of people registered for your event. This number can be accessed either on your Backstage dashboard by looking at the number of self-registered users, or by downloading a XLS report:

If you know that your target audience was about 1'000 people and you currently have 255 people registered, you know that your "invitation to registration" ratio would be around 25.5% = (255/1000)*100.

To download a report of your current registrations, you can download the report from your Workspace dashboard called: Registrations and activations.

Invitation through private (RSVP) registration

In the case of a closed-invitation event, where the SpotMe/Onomi private RSVP registration feature was used, you can easily see the "invitation" to "registration" conversion rate by looking at the RSVP rate on your workspace dashboard in Backstage (the  "Acceptance rate" visible in the "RSVP accepted" section):

2 - "Registration" to "Activation" conversion rate

The second conversion rate that should be monitored is the "registration" to "activation" rate.

This is the number of attendees that registered who actually engaged with your event platform at least once.

The activation rate can be found on the workspace dashboard. Look at the activation rate number when clicking on Active users on your workspace dashboard:

3 - From activated attendee to engaged participant

Although interesting, the activation rate will only tell you how many people engaged with your event platform at least once.

To take things a step further, what you really need to know is how many people actually attended (and engaged) with your virtual event/webinar.

To identify who actually attended your event, you can define your own attendance criteria on your workspace in Backstage. Attendees will need to meet this criteria in order to gain an "Attended" status for the event. The attendance criteria can be set either as a threshold of the total watch time, or as a minimum watch time.

To set the attendance criteria on your workspace in Backstage, navigate to Settings > General> Attendance criteria.

In the below example, the attendance criteria for virtual attendees is set to a threshold of 20%. This means that if your virtual event/webinar is 2 hours long in total (120 minutes of broadcast time), an attendee would need to watch at least 24 minutes (20 %) of the total live broadcast time in order to be considered to have attended the event:

Once the attendance criteria is set on your event, you can navigate to your workspace dashboard and download the Attendance report for the event.

You can go deeper into the analytics to find out who the most engaged participants were. In the Live session report, in the Attendance sheet, you will find the watch time of each participant. Participants that really engaged with your content and watched at least 80% of your event are considered to be "engaged" participants.

The great thing with virtual events/webinars is that your content can continue to be shared to your registered attendees even after the live event has passed, by making the content available on-demand.

For example, you can make your content available on-demand to your attendees by publishing the live session within minutes after your webinar concluded, or (if needed) after having downloaded > edited and re-uploaded it.

To note, once you have published the recording of your live session, you will find the list of attendees who watched the live session on-demand via the Videos report in the workspace dashboard (instead of the live sessions report in the attendance sheet).

Keep in mind that, if you open your event for on-demand viewing through the registration but would like to remove any on-demand registrants from the registration report, you can do so by setting the start and end date for which you would like to gather the information in your report. Simply click on the "Registration and activations" report section in the workspace dashboard, set the start and end dates (e.g. if you’ve opened your event for on-demand viewing on April 4, set April 3 as the end date for your report) and then click on Download XLS.

4 - Feedback response rate

Last but not least, beyond registering for, activating, and attending the event, the feedback response rate can also help indicate whether a participant has been highly impacted by your virtual event/webinar or not.

This rate is calculated by looking at the number of attendees who watched at least some part of your virtual event/webinar, versus the number of people who provided feedback.

To get the number of attendees that have watched your live broadcast, navigate to the Workspace dashboard and download the Live sessions report.

Then, to find out how many people responded to your feedback form, go to Content > Forms > Results and click on View Result next to your feedback form:

Divide the number of responses to your feedback form by the number of people who watched the live session, then multiply it by 100 and you will get your feedback response rate.

For example, if 30 people responded to the feedback form and 110 people watched at least a portion of the live session (based on the attendance criteria), the feedback response rate is 27,3%.

Capturing the information from the engagement funnel via API

If you are using the SpotMe/Onomi REST API, you can look at the following data points to track the performance of your virtual event/webinar. Find out more about the SpotMe/Onomi REST API

Check the Person data point

The "attendance_status" of the person document will provide you with the information about the attendee’s current position in the engagement funnel. Find out more about the different statuses listed in this string

Check the Form response data point

The "Form response" data point will provide you with a list of all the latest form results:

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