You put a lot of time, effort, and money into hosting webinars that convert. It takes months of planning to register qualified attendees, develop an interesting program, and funnel leads to your sales team. 

Even so, it's not always easy to provide a clear answer when the VP of Sales or Marketing asks your team, "How did we do?" or "Is this really worth it?" 

In those moments, we all want to answer, "Of course!" But even if your webinars are well-attended, you will only know the return on investment (ROI) if you create a solid foundation for collecting and analyzing data.

Below, we'll help you identify which metrics to track to prove your virtual events' ROI. With the right data, you can determine lead quality, attribute sales to your efforts, and make an air-tight case for your webinar budget.

4 Tactics for Demonstrating Webinar ROI

If measuring webinar ROI is still a major challenge for your team, you're not alone. 64% of B2B marketers say their ability to demonstrate the value of their content marketing efforts is only average—or worse.

Here are the four strategies you should implement to demonstrate the ROI of your webinars and virtual events:

Track the source of webinar registrations

Attracting webinar attendees takes time, effort, and often money—in the form of attractive design work, email campaigns, and paid media.

Given how many channels you're using to promote each webinar, it's important to know which channel gave your webinar the biggest boost in turnout.

UTM tracking codes are snippets of code in URLs that track which channel was the most effective in reaching—and converting—webinar registrants.

To accurately measure your overall spend and assess your budget for next time, you'll need to know how much money and effort went into each marketing channel. UTM tracking is the perfect way to do just that.

Tally up all costs of spend

Hosting a webinar comes with a price tag. Regardless of your budget, be sure to track all the expenses that went into making your virtual event a success. These expenses include: 

• Advertising costs, like paid ads or media. 

• Boosting a Facebook post
• Running a LinkedIn campaign
• Sponsoring a blog post on a partner's website
  

• Production costs also add up quickly. Here are a few to consider: 

• Did you hire a graphic designer to make flawless slides? 
• A video editor to help with post-production for on-demand services? 
• Engage a production agency to help you manage run-of-show?
  

Thankfully, new webinar platforms like Welcome can help you streamline production costs. With in-platform tools for designing, editing, and hosting professional events, Welcome offers B2B marketers one way to consolidate costs—and boost their ROI for every event.

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Determine Lead Quality

One of the major benefits of holding webinars is generating qualified leads. As soon as a lead registers for your event, you receive key details, including where they work or their role at a specific company. And, depending on your webinar content, you'll know exactly where they are in their customer journey.

With the right webinar platform, you can also track additional metrics to determine the overall quality of the leads generated from each webinar. These metrics include:

• Engagement. How engaged was your lead in responding to polls during the webinar? Did they ask a question during Live Q&A? Are they still opening and clicking on your promotional emails now that the webinar is over? And, most importantly, did they click on your call-to-action at the end of the event?
• Content assets downloaded. Downloading assets would typically be considered a "soft" KPI. But this is still integral information for your sales team to have—and for you to assess the success of any content supporting your webinar topic. You may even wish to assign more value to download a "high intent" piece of content, like a comparison or pricing sheet.
• Demo requests. How many leads requested a product demo after attending your webinar?
• Meetings booked. How many leads requested a sales call or meeting after attending your webinar?
• Overall lead score. While every company generates lead scores differently, all the actions a lead takes before, during, and after a webinar can help you determine where they fall in the buyer's journey and how likely they are to become a customer. How many high-scoring leads does each of your webinars generate? 
  

The more qualified leads you drive to the sales team from your webinars, the more valuable your event content is. The right webinar platform will give you a detailed picture of overall attendee engagement, including their interaction with your CTAs. This way, you can know you're driving highly qualified leads to your sales team from every webinar you host.

Planning a webinar? Check out the Webinar Best Practices Guide to ensure your webinar program is a success!

Attribute sales and revenue back to your webinar

The best webinar platforms integrate seamlessly with your existing customer relationship management (CRM) software, giving you engagement and sales data at your fingertips.

With Welcome, you'll receive deep, account-level insights about each webinar attendee to help your sales team know who to follow up with and how to kick off each conversation.

Because our webinar platform is designed with B2B marketers in mind, we also help you track and measure:

• Net new pipeline from every virtual event
• The number of closed-won opportunities from each webinar
• And the total amount of closed-won revenue generated by your webinars
  

With data like this, you'll never scramble to prove webinar ROI again!

3 "Soft" KPIs that Demonstrate the Value of Virtual Events

We know how important real numbers are for calculating ROI. But any good marketer should also track "softer" key performance indicators (KPIs), from engagement to content downloads, to provide a more holistic view of their marketing efforts. 

Here are three KPIs you should keep top of mind:

Webinar engagement scores

With the right webinar platform, you can measure engagement scores for individual leads. But it's also important to understand overall engagement during your webinar:

• How engaged was your audience throughout the event? 
• Did audience members start dropping off at any point during the presentation? Or during a specific point in the on-demand video?
• Did the most engaged leads follow the customer journey, from clicking CTAs to setting up product demos? What actions did they take?
  

Understanding how engaging your webinar was can help you optimize future event content and support the sales team's needs once your webinar is over.

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Conversion rates

For every webinar, there are multiple conversion rates. First: how effectively did you transform a user into a webinar attendee? 

After all, before converting a webinar attendee into a paying customer, you need them to register for your event! (Looking for advice on how to boost your webinar registration numbers? We got you.)

You'll also want to attribute any product demo or sales meetings to your webinar. How many attendees became leads or customers? What throughlines do you see in the data from registration to product demo requests? Each of these conversion rates will help you make a case for ROI.

Metrics across each promotional channel

Chances are you're promoting each of your virtual events through multiple channels, from email marketing to the social media feeds of your webinar partners. 

To make a case for your efforts—and to know where to spend your time in the future—track and compare metrics across every promotional channel you have. Benchmarks for each channel should include the following:

• The number of webinar registrations
• The number of leads generated from your live event vs. on-demand video
• The number of content assets downloaded directly from the webinar
• The number of demo requests submitted directly from your webinar
• The number of meetings booked as a result of your event.
  

While "soft" KPIs aren't a leading indicator for ROI, they can support your overall efforts for attribution. Tracking and measuring these indicators will help your sales team understand account-level metrics, target leads for follow-up touchpoints, and personalize their outreach. So keep your spreadsheets handy!

Final Thoughts

Without the right tools, tracking the ROI of your webinars is downright challenging. Thankfully, we built Welcome with B2B marketers in mind. You'll get the analytics you need to track engagement and conversion rates, so you can qualify leads, build a sales pipeline, and attribute revenue directly to your virtual events.

Schedule a demo with Welcome today to learn more about our powerful, easy-to-use platform for webinars, virtual events, and more.

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