Demand gen marketers, we see you. It’s always “How’s our conversion rate doing?” and never “How are you doing?”

Driving brand- and solution-awareness and building predictable pipeline are all in a day’s work. And if you’re looking for a channel that can do it all, look no further than virtual events.

Virtual events can provide a host of benefits—audience insights, opportunities to engage, and a high-ROI demand generation channel you can scale. But to make the most of these benefits, you have to track the right data.

1. Registration
2. General attendance
3. Booth and discussion room attendance
4. Event engagement score
5. Engagement times
6. Resource downloads
7. Event and booth CTA clicks

So what exactly isthe “right data” to track for events?

Here are seven key metrics to help you generate maximum value—and make the biggest impact—with your events.

All demand gen marketers know the value of brand awareness, even if it doesn’t generate an immediate lead or sale. In today’s crowded market, getting your target audience to pay attention is half the battle.

That’s exactly why it’s important to always know your registration numbers.

Your event registration numbers can help you:

• Assess the effectiveness of your event promotion strategies
• Gauge interest levels in your event topics
• Contextualize the rest of your event performance data

With the right event platform, you can track registrant activity in real time. Katie Dunn, senior demand gen manager at ThoughtSpot, uses registration data to determine how each promotion tactic impacts event registration.

“In the analytics, you can see how you're trending with registration. You can actually see where you had a spike in registrations because you had an email go out. It's like a full, complete view of where you're getting registrations in from.”

When it comes to event marketing, attendance is pretty darn important. It’s probably the first KPI that comes to mind when you reflect on your last event.

Not only does attendance feed into every other metric—after all, you can’t engage with an event if you don’t show up—but it can also be super noticeable during the event. If you’ve been promoting the mega “event of the year” and you only have 50 people show up, it’s not a good look for your brand.

No matter which way you cut it, your show rate matters.

Sales intelligence platform Cognism increased their attendance rate from 33% to 50% with:

• Automated calendar invites and magic links that make logging into the event super simple
• Seamless technical production that keeps attendees in each session longer

A stellar attendee experience that encourages attendees to come back for the next event

Once you’ve got attendance locked down, it’s time to turn toward engagement. Nearly half of marketers say audience engagement is what makes or breaks an event.

And believe us when we say, there are dozens of engagement metrics you can track for your events. Let’s dig into two of the big ones: booth and discussion room attendance.

There’s a huge difference between someone passively attending your event and an attendee who is actively participating in a discussion. The latter is much more engaged and therefore, more likely to engage in the future at another event or in your sales pipeline.

Booth and discussion room interaction is an indicator of lead quality, so you’ll want a platform that tracks detailed discussion room analytics.

When analyzing your booth and discussion room metrics, look for details like:

• Discussion room attendance by domain to group company reps together
• Discussion room attendee activity to show how users interacted with the room
• Engagement metrics like number of chat messages per room

This info will help you identify which booths and discussion topics were the most successful, and which accounts showed the most interest.

In demand gen marketing, the word “engagement” can mean many different things. That’s why summing it up in one clear event engagement score is critical. This score helps you compare apples to apples across your events, and can be a meaningful metric to share with marketing leadership.

In Goldcast, engagement scores are calculated automatically and integrated straight into your CRM and other platforms.The team at Benchling went all-in on webinars and it quickly became a top-three channel for account engagement.

For us, webinars are really there to increase account engagement and create interest that drives new or accelerated pipeline,” says Maryann Ibrahim, head of community and customer marketing.

“We’re not a horizontal company. We know exactly who we’re going for, so for us, a webinar is a really great way to do that.”

Benchling events are synced in Marketo and Salesforce and engagement data goes straight to the sales team for immediate action.

Using Salesforce or Marketo? Then you’ll want to check out our Streamline Event Operations webinar series to learn all the ways you can maximize event impact by unleashing the power of automation and CRM integration.

If your sights are set on generating high-quality leads, event engagement time is a great account-specific metric to track. In today’s age of multitasking, an attendee who actively spends a good chunk of time in your event is one you’ll want to follow up with.

Again, integrations are key here so you can feed each attendee’s engagement time (in minutes) directly into your lead scoring mechanism in your CRM.

Overall engagement time is great to know, but if your event had multiple opportunities for attendees to engage, you’ll want to know how each of those features performed.

You can gain valuable account insights by breaking down detailed engagement times, like:

• Discussion room engagement time
• Booth engagement time
• Broadcast engagement time

Our friends at Onspring have this one down to a science. They use granular engagement analytics to answer questions like:

• Did people stick around to the end of sessions?
• Which sessions did people skip or drop out of?

This helps the team keep a pulse on customer engagement and improve content programming for future events. And it’s obviously working.

During their three-day conference, Onspring Connect, 87% of attendees were engaged throughout the experience, spending an average of 8.8 hours in the event.

If you’re looking for detailed, irrefutable information on what’s important to your top accounts—look no further.

It’s a no-brainer to share downloadable resources with attendees during your events. And it should be a no-brainer to track who’s downloading what and use that info to fuel your sales follow-ups.

Unfortunately, not all platforms make this easy. It’s one of the reasons Anna Suslova, director of global marketing programs at Axonius, loves using Goldcast.

“Goldcast gave us data beyond who attended and who didn't attend,” she explains. “We knew exactly how engaged they were and how many resources they downloaded.”

After each event, marketing gives sales detailed information about each attendee and what resources they downloaded, so they can send personalized follow-ups to top accounts.

We know marketers. (We are marketers.) And whether your focus is demand gen or customer marketing, we all care about the CTA.

You’ve worked so hard to get your audience to this point. You’ve promoted, invited, engaged, and delighted. And now, they’re sitting there with a CTA in front of them. Knowing whether that CTA is effective? Well, it’s everything.

Whether it’s your primary event CTA or a booth CTA, if an event attendee clicks it, you want to know ASAP. Your sales reps feel the same—so this is one more area where integrations are crucial.

Goldcast’s integration with Slack was designed for high-value data points like this one. It lets you send attendee info straight to your sales team so they can take immediate action to follow up with any handraisers in your event and help accelerate the MQL to SQL journey.

It’s hard to overstate the value of detailed, goal-driven event data. For our friends in demand gen, proving attribution and ROI is a top priority—so you absolutely must make sure your event platform is set up to collect the data you need.

At Goldcast, our platform was purpose-built to meet the needs of demand gen marketers. From event registrations to MQLs to revenue, Goldcast tracks everything you need, with detailed reporting on key KPIs at every stage of the funnel.

With the right platform and the right data, you can drive net-new pipeline, amplify your influence, and build a community of loyal fans and customers.

Curious what kind of insights you’ll get when you run your events on Goldcast? We’d love to show you how it works.