How about your event data?

Everyone talks about the importance of “data,” but knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. What data should you collect? How do you translate it to useful insights that can help you further optimize your event strategy?

When used effectively, data can give you a clear picture of your event’s ROI and guide you in making the right decisions — from marketing, pricing, and programming to onsite experience and post-event follow-up. The real value comes not just from gathering data, but from understanding how to activate it.

Events are exceptional data generators. Unlike a standard webshop purchase, an event involves a unique customer journey with numerous marketing touchpoints. This creates rich opportunities to design an outstanding user experience. When executed well, events achieve low no-show rates, strong attendee engagement, and—depending on your goals—increased sales, high-quality leads, broad publicity, satisfied exhibitors, and more.

Every event generates data that delivers meaningful insights

Holon’s founder and CEO, Marc Bot, has been in the industry for more than 20 years. “Many event managers still approach their events the same way they did a decade ago: if everyone had a pleasant day, the drinks at the end were good, and the keynotes ran smoothly, the event is considered a success.

I understand the challenge event managers face: once an event concludes, they quickly have to shift focus to the next production. Often, they don’t take the time to step back, review all available data, and use it consistently to design the next event, set meaningful goals, and refine their approach and communication strategy."

Julius Solaris is a highly influential expert, consultant, and entrepreneur in the event industry, widely regarded as one of its leading voices and the founder of Boldpush. Solaris argues that if you’re not leveraging event data, you’re simply organizing a party.

But how do you create meaningful and measurable goals and KPIs?

1. Start with defining your target audience. Not everyone who will attend is your main target audience-- try to narrow it down to your preferred type of attendee on job level, sector and region. Up to a level that says: we aim to have at our event CTOs from European Retail Banks with a minimum balance total of 6 bilion.
2. What is it you want to achieve with this target audience? When can the event considered a succes for this group and how can it be measured? You might want to work with a NPS score or an attendance rate, interaction engagement rate, booked meetings, (social) media coverage. There are many ways to measure and it depends on your goals what you want to measure.
3. Make sure you ask the right questions when attendees register. If you use pre-populated data from your CRM is the the way to capture new insights and enrich your profile - if it is an open registration, you need to make sure you aks the basics that allow you to define if the registrant belongs to your target audience.
4. Follow the engagement of the attendees to sense check on the relevance of the event design, topics and speakers: do they open emails with news, do they download the event app, do they join any pre-event polls. Everything can be an indicator that will help you to make adjustments on the program or help you to understand your audience better.
5. Use onsite data to see if all efforts do lead to the right result and pre defined goals. Investigate some standard indicators like the no-show rate- who were not attending and what is their background? Are they part of your defined target audience or not? What is their position? From what region did they need to travel?
6. Discuss the relevance of the collected data, try to learn from it, but also ensure consistency in collecting the data overtime. This helps you compare and benchmark events and see whether your approach results in a better return on investment, higher NPS scores, or which matrix you used to determine your KPIs.

Holon can help you in defining your goals and create KPIs that do matter for your events.