Webinar Analytics: The Key Metrics for Measuring Success

Here at Wistia, we’ve been hosting monthly webinars for a while, and we’ve found that one of the most important parts of any webinar strategy is measuring success. It’s the key to continuously improving how you host and market your webinars and, in turn, generating more leads and building better connections with your audience.

But how do you measure your webinar’s success? To find out, we chatted with Evanna Payen, Wistia’s Growth Marketing Manager. She provided a lot of insight into our webinar marketing strategy and how we track the performance and effectiveness of our own webinars.

In this post, we’ll walk through what we consider the most important webinar metrics, as well as how you can track them against your goals during the pre-event, live event, post-event, and on-demand stages of your webinar. Dive right in to start leveling up your webinar marketing strategy in no time!

Pre-event metrics

You can start measuring success even before you go live! In the weeks before the event, you can track the metrics of your registration and promotion efforts. Here‘s what you want to look at:

Number of registrants

When you’re promoting your webinar, registrations will start rolling in. After the event, you can put the registrants into two buckets: people who attended the live event and people who registered but did not attend. You can use these numbers to determine the attendance rate, which is the number of attendees out of the total number of people who registered.

At Wistia, we follow up with each group differently after the webinar. For example, we send two sets of follow-up emails. Each set is specifically written in a language that resonates most with the group for which it’s intended, and it comes from either our marketing team or sales and success team.

Registration page conversion rate

Your registration page’s conversion rate is also an important metric to track. It’s the number of folks who registered for your event out of all the visitors who landed on your page.

Optimizing your registration page is the best way to increase its conversion rate. Its overall design can influence the number of people who sign up for your event. So it’s essential to consider the information you include on your registration landing page and how you present it.

What information should your registration page include?

Here are our suggestions for the essential information you should include on your registration page:

• A description of the webinar topic(s) you’ll be covering
• A biography for each host
• An image of each host
• A registration form
• Graphics that’ll add a brand touch, such as custom illustrations
• A promotional video (depending on your webinar software)

What information should you collect from your audience?

When people see your registration form, what you ask for can really impact how many actually sign up. Start with the basics: first name, last name, and email address. If you’re using Wistia Live, you can add more fields like phone number, company name, job title, and country. But remember, folks might bail if the form gets too long or asks for too much information! Keep it friendly and straightforward.

Registration rate by channel

Another metric you want to look at is the conversion rate for the various channels on which you’re promoting your webinar.

The top converter for Wistia’s webinars is usually email outreach with social media coming in second. We promote our webinars on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Stories, and we’ve found that LinkedIn converts the most people based on our audience.

By tracking the conversion rates by channel, you’ll learn over time which areas are worth investing in more to promote your webinar. Those are the places where your ideal audience is more likely to take interest in your message, head to your webinar registration landing page, and sign up to attend!

Live event metrics

Now, let’s discuss the types of engagement and retention metrics you should track during your actual live event:

Attendance rate

As we mentioned, you can track your attendance rate on the day of your live event. Wondering what the average attendance rate is? According to ON24, it depends on the size of your event. For webinars with 100 to 199 registrants, the average attendance rate is 51%. For webinars with 200 to 299 registrants, the average attendance rate falls to 18%.

While it’s good to keep industry benchmarks in mind, you should also make sure you’re comparing your own overall benchmarks. At Wistia, we compare our metrics month over month, and our average attendance rate typically falls between 40% and 50%.

In the past, we noticed a drop in our attendance rate because we hosted a weekly webinar series about our Channels product. Noticing this trend helped us reevaluate the frequency of our webinars.

Key drop-off points

You’ll also want to note when your webinar attendees start dropping off. Identifying when attendees leave your webinar will help you tweak your presentation’s content and format for future events.

In our experience, most drop-offs occur during the question and answer (Q&A) session after the main presentation ends, so we should think about what might entice people to stay longer for the Q&A session.

If you notice a high drop-off rate, think about the different ways you can keep people engaged throughout the entirety of your webinar. Perhaps a section of your webinar could be more interactive to keep your audience engaged. Or maybe you should incorporate more visuals or screencasts to help convey your messages.

Responses (polls, questions, and feedback)

You can also use polls, questions, and feedback as a measurement for success during your live webinar.

If you’d like to know something about your attendees, use a poll to ask them questions. For example, during a webinar about creative video ideas for business, we might ask our audience how they use video at their company.

You can also use polls to field interest from your attendees. At Wistia, we poll the audience to ask if they would like a demo of our product. When folks respond with a “yes,” our sales team knows who to follow up with immediately.

Last, but not least, the chat functionality is great for eliciting anecdotal attendee feedback that you can deliver to your product team.

Post-event metrics

Once your webinar ends, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and measure some important growth and return on investment (ROI) metrics! Let’s take a look at what they are:

Leads generated

If one of the goals of your webinar is to support sales enablement, you’ll want to work closely with your sales team to keep track of the number of leads your webinar helped generate, as well as the quality of those leads. Here’s a quick breakdown of the types of lead qualities to track:

• Marketing qualified leads (MQL)
• Sales qualified leads (SQL)
• Sales qualified opportunities
• Closed won/closed loss

Conversions

Conversions are another important metric to track that can be counted in different ways. This data can help you set goals and targets for future events and webinars. Your goals could be around the number of opportunities or the amount of revenue you hope to drive from your webinar.

Depending on what you’re offering in your webinar and what’s important to your company, here are some examples of the types of things you might count as conversions:

• The number of content downloads (eBooks, guides, etc.)
• The number of people who purchase what you’re offering
• The number of new customers
• Increases in product usage related to your webinar

After one of our webinars in the past, we counted conversions as the increase in product usage through media uploads and embeds. What you measure as conversions can change from one webinar to the next.

Brand awareness

You should also look at your metrics across social channels to learn how your webinar impacted brand awareness. Did your audience grow on LinkedIn and Instagram? What did folks comment on your posts about your webinar? How many engagements did your webinar posts receive?

You get the picture. All of these things can help you see the impact your webinars have on growing your audience.

On-demand webinar metrics

If you want to grow your audience and generate even more leads, you should record your webinars and then turn your recordings into on-demand content. Whether you drive people to watch your on-demand webinar from follow-up emails, repurposed content, or a library of content on your site, here are the metrics you should look at:

Form submissions

If you gate your on-demand webinar recordings with a lead generation tool like Wistia’s Turnstile email collector, you can collect information from folks who want to watch them.

With Wistia, you can also get viewing data and then pass it into your favorite customer relationship management (CRM) tools like HubSpot and Pardot. This is a good way to capture, score, segment, and assign leads in a flash.

We track form submissions, and we only have our sales team follow up with folks who watch 50% or more of our webinar recordings.

Video engagement

When you make your webinar recording available on demand, there are a number of video analytics you can continually track, like the number of plays, play rate, clicks, engagement rate, and more.

Wistia makes it easy to do this. On our platform, you can embed your webinar recording on your website and track different levels of statistics available to you in your Wistia account, from high-level account-wide trends down to individual media and even individual viewers.

You can use your video engagement data to inform your webinar strategy, pinpoint changes to make for future webinars, and make your content even more valuable and engaging for your audience.

Start seeing webinar success!

Assessing these webinar metrics against your goals will help you measure the success of your strategy and improve it for future events.

If you’d like more resources on hosting successful webinars, we’ve got plenty! Whether you want to find the best webinar software, learn how to repurpose webinar recordings, or get ideas on where to promote your webinar, you can find it all in our webinar marketing guide.