Although your event may take place offline, you should still mea­sure the suc­cess of your events just as you would any online mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. You may pro­mote your event through your web­site, social media, dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ty cal­en­dars, and more. Many of these meth­ods will pro­vide you with met­rics to ana­lyze your suc­cess (or lack of suc­cess) in reach­ing your audi­ence.

As an own­er or mar­ket­ing direc­tor of a busi­ness, you like­ly spend a lot of time work­ing toward get­ting more poten­tial clients to engage with your com­pa­ny. One of the most effec­tive ways to do so? Events.

In-per­son net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties are a valu­able way to get prospec­tive cus­tomers to vis­it your busi­ness, learn what you do, and estab­lish long-term rela­tion­ships. In fact, the Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute report­ed that 69 per­cent of B2B mar­keters found in-per­son events an effec­tive form of con­tent mar­ket­ing.

As you begin plan­ning your event, keep these tips in mind to mea­sure the suc­cess of the event and its pro­mo­tion.

Create A Registration Page & Establish Goal Tracking

Once all of the details regard­ing the event are final­ized, you’ll want to cre­ate a spe­cif­ic land­ing page on your web­site for inter­est­ed atten­dees to learn more. This page should list the event’s date and time, pro­vide an overview of what will hap­pen at the event, and a reg­is­tra­tion form.

The reg­is­tra­tion form will help you keep track of who’s com­ing to the event and what chan­nel drove them to your site. By ded­i­cat­ing a page to the event, you can uti­lize Google Ana­lyt­ics Goals to track con­ver­sions (i.e., those who vis­it­ed the page and reg­is­tered for the event).

Promote The Event Online

You should begin pro­mot­ing your event at least two weeks ahead of time. This will allow peo­ple enough time to learn about the event, sched­ule them­selves to attend, and arrange any oth­er logis­tics ahead of the event.

To max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of your pro­mo­tion in reach­ing your tar­get audi­ence, you should mar­ket across a vari­ety of chan­nels, includ­ing:

• Organ­ic search
• Paid search
• Dis­play adver­tis­ing
• Social adver­tis­ing
• Email mar­ket­ing
• Event list­ings
• Pub­lic rela­tions

As you decide which chan­nels will be most strate­gic for your event, you’ll want to make sure that Google Ana­lyt­ics is prop­er­ly set up to track the effec­tive­ness of those chan­nels.

For exam­ple, if you’re uti­liz­ing AdWords to run your paid adver­tis­ing, con­firm that your AdWords and Ana­lyt­ics accounts are linked. To best track email mar­ket­ing or oth­er paid adver­tis­ing sources, be sure to prop­er­ly tag URLs link­ing to the event page to ensure that event signups are attrib­uted cor­rect­ly. Google’s URL builder helps to stream­line this process. For more infor­ma­tion on tag­ging URLs, see this arti­cle.

Track Signup Sources

As you start to receive RSVPs to the event, you’ll want to know how they learned about it. Did they see a Face­book ad or did they do a search on Google?

To deter­mine what sources are dri­ving reg­is­tra­tions, you can use the Goals page in Google Ana­lyt­ics. Sim­ply select the Goal being tracked via the event page on your web­site.

For exam­ple, here’s data from an event signup for a col­lege open house. We can see that 46 indi­vid­u­als signed up, while the Source/Medium sec­tion in the low­er right shows us where they came from. Most came from Direct (like­ly a result of direct mail pieces sent out to pro­mote the event), while Google organ­ic search drove the sec­ond most signups. In addi­tion, “google/cpc” indi­cates signups from paid search, demon­strat­ing that both paid and unpaid chan­nels drove event signups.

Track Attendees

You may know from your own expe­ri­ence that not every­one who RSVPs to an event actu­al­ly attends. This is espe­cial­ly true with busi­ness net­work­ing events because meet­ings come up, client work calls, or oth­er inter­rup­tions sim­ply alter their plans.

The sim­plest way to track atten­dance is to print a reg­is­tra­tion list and have some­one at the door check-in guests. Tools such as Eventbrite also pro­vide mobile apps to assist with check-in.

Google’s pol­i­cy pro­hibits us from using Google Ana­lyt­ics to track per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion. There­fore, the reg­is­tra­tion form is the best place to gath­er infor­ma­tion about how spe­cif­ic indi­vid­u­als heard about your event.

You can set up the reg­is­tra­tion form to pass refer­rer infor­ma­tion for each indi­vid­ual who sub­mits via the page, which will pro­vide you with the orig­i­nal source that led that per­son to the site.

For exam­ple, you can see whether an indi­vid­ual who sub­mit­ted the signup form came from organ­ic search or a Face­book ad. Auto­mat­ed plat­forms, such as Mar­ke­to or Par­dot, will set up this fea­ture for you, or you may need to ask a devel­op­er to imple­ment it.

Conclusion

Host­ing, pro­mot­ing and exe­cut­ing events requires a lot of work, and you’ll want met­rics to prove their effec­tive­ness, as well as jus­ti­fy their cost. Not only can events posi­tion your com­pa­ny as a leader in your indus­try and pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties for intro­duc­tions to poten­tial clients and part­ners, but events can also deliv­er addi­tion­al sales leads.

By prop­er­ly set­ting up Google Ana­lyt­ics to track pro­mo­tions and reg­is­tra­tions, you’ll know what sources helped to dri­ve peo­ple to attend and how to best allo­cate your mar­ket­ing resources the next time you plan to host an event.

Are you ana­lyz­ing the suc­cess of your offline events using Google Ana­lyt­ics, or some oth­er way?