Which KPI should I track for Business Events?

Event organizing can get quite messy really fast if performance is not measured. However, it can get cluttered if too many KPIs are measured.

So which KPI’s should you be measuring?

If you are organizing business events, here’s a handful of KPIs that will help you down the road, with some thoughts on why they are important.

Sales KPIs

If you are organizing free events you can skip this one but you can benefit from a free account on Oveit (great news, right?).

But if your budget includes ticket sales or corporate partnerships, sales are at the core of your event. They are both the fuel that keeps the events going and a meter on how well you are performing.

So here are some you should be keeping your eyes on:

Average profit margin: you probably organize more than one event. The average profit margin is the median margin across your events. You should be keeping track of this figure and measure the events you organize against the APM and the average profit margin against previous years indicators

Quote to close ratio: you have your ticket sales and then you have corporate sponsorship, partnerships, and things such as exhibitor fees. Most of the time quoted prices are modified upwards or downwards (usually through bundling or up-sales) and you should try to keep the ratio between quote to close larger under 100%. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive, right?

Well, let’s think about it. This ratio looks like this:

Quoted price / Close price 

If the close price is higher than the quoted price, it means the sales team is performing well as they have effectively increased the sale. This means if the initial quoted price was, for example, 1000$, and the final close price is 2000$, you get a ratio of 50%, thus implying you have doubled the performance for the sales team.

If on the other hand, the ratio is larger than 100% it means the deal decreased from quote to close.

So by keeping track of the median quote to close ratio, you can get an overview of how sales are performing.

Tracking KPIs against past performance and against industry standards:

One thing to keep in mind is that KPIs are unimportant on their own. The keywords in KPI are performance indicators. That implies relative importance of these values. This relative performance is measured against past performance and against industry standards.

Attendee and partner sentiment analysis

One very important aspect of managing a successful event management business is understanding and measuring the way your target customers react to the event.

In terms of business events, that usually means two types of customers:

• partners (sponsors, advertisers, exhibitors)
• general attendees (visitors interacting with the event and with partners)

To get a sense of how they feel about the event you should split the KPI measurement into three-time frames:

• before the event
• during the event
• after the event

Each of these phases can have specific KPIs measured but the general concept of sentiment analysis should be viewed as a way to quantify how your (potential) customers feel about your brand. So it’s basically turning feeling into numbers. You can do that using:

• social media tools that monitor and report user feedback regarding your event
• customer feedback tools (forms, surveys, automated mailing lists)
• direct interaction (focus groups, live interviews, discussion panels)
• automated optical recognition technology (basically video systems that quantify how happy visitors are)

Loyalty and customer retention

Loyalty is a really important brand value and it should be noted that returning attendees are probably the best measurement of how successful your event is.

The KPI you should be focused on is Customer Retention Rate (be it Partners or General attendees). To do that you should be tracking the number of attendees that keep coming back and its yearly evolution. Ideally, you should strive to get most of last year’s customers returning and increasing this ratio year over year.

Most of these indicators are easy to extract from Oveit and we hope you will find these guidelines easy to use and helpful.

Is there any KPI you would like to add?

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Article written by Mike Dragan.

Mike Dragan is the cofounder and CEO of Oveit and works daily on providing better tools for live experiences. Mike has a background in computer science and loves building digital products.