Hybrid Events: How to Gather Data and Evaluate Analytics

Hybrid events bridge the gap between live, in-person gatherings and webcasts and virtual events that have grown in popularity over the past year. They fill a gap for people who are not yet ready to travel — or can’t for various reasons — and those craving in-person interactions. They provide a cost-effective means to hold town halls and allow companies to reach more people for internal and lead generation events. But it’s important to capture the right data for hybrid events to gauge the success and make improvements for next time. It’s relatively easy, with the right software, to capture data for virtual events and webcasts. But capturing the same analytics for in-person components — and then converting that data into actionable insights — represents a new challenge for businesses.

First, Determine Your Goals

Before you begin collecting data, it’s important to determine what you need to measure. For some consumer- or B2B-focused hybrid events, you may want to measure:

• Lead generation
• Revenue
• Conversions to sales
• In-person attendance
• Live attendance

For internal events, attendance and engagement might be the most important metrics. Engagement via a virtual platform is easy, as you can employ audience polling, Q&A, and a comments section to see who is actively engaged. It’s tougher to measure participation in person unless you keep a log of everyone who raises their hand to speak. However, you can employ tactics such as attendee surveys after the event to compare the reactions of in-person and virtual attendees.

Compare Hybrid versus Live Metrics

If you’re comparing the success of the live component versus the virtual elements, you’ll want to compare metrics such as engagement, lead generation, sales, and revenue between the two groups. To measure lead generation, you can look at things such as how many people opted into your mailing list, provided a phone number for SMS marketing, or visited your website. You may want to offer two different coupon codes for in-person versus virtual attendees to easily gauge sales figures. If you’re also making the event available on-demand after it’s ended, you’ll want to track how many live and virtual attendees re-watched it and how many new viewers the on-demand recording garnered. Again, you’ll want to track sales and engagement from the replay, as well. One of the tremendous benefits of virtual events is the ability to increase your lead generation efforts, revenue, or engagement through on-demand replays.

Adopt the Right Tools to Track Metrics

All of this may sound complicated, but it can be a simple process with the right software and tools that can automatically capture analytics and then generate detailed reports based on the live and virtual components of hybrid events. Let PGi help with our robust GlobalMeet Webcast platform, where we provide fully hosted, turnkey solutions for town hall meetings, internal and lead generation events, webcasts, and more.