8 Essential Webinar Success Metrics & KPIs to Track Performance

Webinar KPIs and success metrics are reliable tools for evaluating your webinars. These key performance indicators accomplish two tasks: They help you assess whether your webinars are working as intended and identify weak spots you can improve. This empowers you to maximize the success of future webinars and secure even greater results.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• What webinar metrics and KPIs are
• How they work
• The important metrics to start tracking
• Interpreting the data
• Optimizing future webinars

What Are Webinar Metrics and KPIs?

Webinar metrics and KPIs are measurements of your webinar’s performance. They encompass overall success as well as how effective specific parts of your marketing efforts are.

These measurements are built into webinar software and can often be customized as well. That ability automatically  uncovers the success of your:

• Marketing channels
• Registration process
• Email marketing reminders
• Attendee engagement
• Conversion actions

The most important benchmark is webinar return on investment (ROI), which quantifies the overall success of your webinar. You must measure webinar ROI first so you have a solid starting point. However, focusing on ROI alone is an incomplete strategy that’ll hinder your optimization.

Why Webinar KPIs Matter

KPIs provide valuable insights that enable you to drive high webinar ROI.

The results a webinar produces are the culmination of all its components, from marketing to the presentation and post-event follow-up. Although ROI offers a summary of effectiveness, you can’t fully understand webinar performance without tracking every important event in the attendee experience. 

That starts at your event marketing campaigns and sales funnel. Boosting the total number of attendees is the first step to increasing ROI, but you shouldn’t sacrifice quality for the sake of filling seats. A full audience is great, but what if too many attendees fail to convert? What if people attend your webinars but don’t interact with webinar content? What if you gain a large audience but they’re unengaged, uninterested, or otherwise decide not to continue their journey with your brand?

The answers to these questions require the consistent and professional monitoring of webinar KPIs. If any step of the attendee experience is broken, their chances of converting also drop. 

A successful webinar is a complete and tailored experience that:

• Attracts many quality attendees
• Keeps audience members engaged
• Provides genuine value to viewers
• Leads webinar attendees to follow the CTA

Tracking webinar KPIs lets you hone in on what’s really going on. For example, you may have a high number of registrations but a low attendance rate. This means you have a problem attracting qualified leads and may need to work on your marketing campaign. Another example is having low engagement metrics and conversion rates. That indicates your webinar content and engagement features need improvement.

Alongside attendee feedback, webinar KPIs give you data that enable you to fix issues and double-down on successes. Capitalizing on webinar data collection features allows for a deeper understanding of your audience’s experiences.

Webinar Success Metrics and KPI Examples 

Below, we’ve listed the most crucial KPIs and provided accompanying examples. Marketing teams must pay close attention to these through each webinar’s lifespan.

Registration

The first metric is registration rate. This is the number of people who register for your event.

Webinar marketing can improve registration rate in a few ways: Social media and other marketing channels can increase the number of attendees who are new to your brand. Lead generation also expands registrations, but you can utilize other more relevant channels as well.

It’s important to consider your choice of subject matter and presentation content based on audience research. Choose webinar topics that align with customer concerns to increase your registration rate.

If you have an email list or leads from other channels, leverage them in your webinar marketing campaigns. Use your existing email lists to capture more qualified leads who have already demonstrated an interest in your brand.

Attendance

Although related, registration rate is distinct from attendance rate. High registration doesn’t equate to high attendance; in fact, you can almost always expect more people to register for a webinar than attend it.

You can improve attendance through a combination of increasing your registrations and scheduling stronger, more frequent email notifications.

Email is the most effective channel for sending event reminders to registrants. Promotional efforts on social media, LinkedIn, and your website can complement your efforts to ensure registrants see reminders and are further encouraged to attend.

Engagement

Engagement metrics are more numerous and multi-faceted than any of the other metrics on this list. These measure attendee interactions with your event’s engagement features and how influential these elements are in moving them through your sales pipeline. 

Q&A session interactions:

• Chat box activity
• Poll participation
• Use of hand raises and emojis

Audience engagement is also tracked via:

• Average viewing time
• Social media mentions
• Audience retention (drop-off rates and timestamps)
• Number of attendee questions
• Replay count

In total, these represent the rate at which audience members take action during the webinar. Webinars aren’t meant to be passive experiences like watching a movie — they’re meant to engage; higher engagement rates are associated with higher conversion rates.

Conversion

Conversion actions are more self-explanatory and also simpler to measure. Make sure you track CTA click-through rate and any other converting actions your webinar is meant to inspire.

Feedback and Satisfaction Scores

Audience satisfaction scores and feedback are subjective, so use proper wording to limit bias and leading questions. The goal is to invite genuine feedback that helps you improve webinar experiences, so word your questions clearly.

Revenue Generation

Revenue generation is the total amount of money earned through your webinar and marketing efforts. You calculate it by subtracting your expenses from your revenues.

Total revenue is an overall sum that must be broken down to paint a complete picture of your webinar’s performance. Track each potential source of revenue closely, including:

• Ticket sales
• Paid access (i.e., recordings)
• Subscriptions
• Sponsorships
• Partnerships
• Affiliate marketing
• Product/Service sales
• Upsells
• Brand merchandise sales
• Advertising
• Software or platform fees
• Online course fees

The indirect revenue webinars produce is harder to quantify: Attendees may become leads, for example, but it’s difficult to track the revenue earned from each lead if they simply view a webinar and then come to your brand later to make a purchase.

What Are the Most Important KPIs to Measure?

Now let’s move on to the bread and butter of webinar marketing. The following KPIs should rule your webinar strategy and drive your decision-making processes.

Registration-to-Attendance Ratio

This is the ratio between the number of registrations to the number of attendees. It yields the percentage of registrants who actually attended your webinar.

To calculate this ratio, divide the number of attendees by the total number of registrants. For example, if your event saw 200 registrants, and 50 attended, the equation would be: 50/200 = 0.25.

Then, multiply by 100 to find the percentage:

0.25 * 100 = 25%

To strengthen this crucial ratio, you can take several actions:

• Carefully formulate and then A/B test webinar titles and descriptions
• Craft compelling copy to highlight the benefits registrants can expect from attending the webinar
• Include high-quality visuals and test them
• Employ trusted, professional speakers
• A/B test different versions of your landing page and adjust it based on the results
• Adopt email marketing software to follow up after sign-up and lead registrants toward attendance
• Develop a clear social media promotional strategy
• Experiment with releasing “teaser” content
• Incorporate engaging content in your email marketing strategy (polls, games, etc.)
• Segment your email lists according to interests and commitments
• Release replays or highlights from previous webinars (this may work better for registrants who are new to your brand)

Webinar Costs

You must track your webinar costs to be able to determine your ROI accurately.

Keep in mind the below expenses. You may not incur all of these but you’ll likely pay for most:

• Webinar software/platform subscriptions/fees
• Video conferencing software (when not included in the subscription/membership)
• Hosting costs for physical space
• Audio and video
• Microphones
• Cameras
• Lighting
• Set & props
• Screens
• Projectors
• Recording and editing software
• Email marketing tools
• Other marketing tools
• Landing pages
• Social media ad spend
• Customer relationship management (CRM) subscriptions/memberships
• Content creation costs
• Graphic design
• Creative content
• Copywriting
• Affiliate marketing fees
• Other outreach expenses
• Video production such as animations and effects
• Speaker fees
• Content development (such as editing and scripting)
• Music licensing
• Copyrighted image or video licensing
• Data storage
• Content hosting
• Physical promotional materials (posters, flyers, etc.)
• Giveaways
• Branded merchandise costs
• Team salaries
• Customer support systems and compensation
• Outsourced/Contracted work payments
• Legal compliance costs
• Travel expenses
• Insurance
• Taxes

Beyond these costs, your finances may fluctuate before or after the event; refunds and cancellations are common occurrences with webinar marketing. So, you’ll need to adjust profits or deduct expenses from your final tally, depending on circumstances.

Add up the total cost of each to determine your webinar costs. This KPI should be optimized to maximize your ROI. By breaking down each individual cost thoroughly and meticulously, you have many metrics that represent opportunities for improvement.

Attendee Drop-Out

Attendee drop-out is the percentage of webinar attendees who leave the event before it ends. There are many reasons why an attendee would exit an online event early, but high drop-out rates point to something seriously wrong with the webinar experience — namely, that it isn’t engaging enough.

Attendee drop-out rate is a crucial KPI in general, but especially when optimizing your webinar content. Lower drop-out rates normally mean:

1. You produce quality webinar content
2. Your audience engages with the webinar experience
3. Your revenue will reflect the above achievements

The best way to improve your drop-out rate is by creating better webinar content. That means it’s more meaningful for each viewer and is engaging enough to keep attendees focused during the event.

Webinar platforms make both of these jobs easier, which is why the included engagement features are particularly important when making your selection. 

When crafting meaningful content, aligning expectations and outcomes is key. The registration process, including your ad and landing page copy, should promise realistic results. If you lie or mislead registrants (even accidentally) into a webinar that fails to meet their expectations, expect a large number of them to leave.

Attendees-to-Leads Ratio

A cousin of the registrant-to-attendee ratio, this KPI quantifies how effectively your webinars turn attendees into leads. As such, it’s the main marker for gauging whether your webinars foster interest in your brand and products or services.

The attendees- to leads ratio is calculated as follows:

(generated leads / webinar attendees) x 100

It also gauges your ability to target the right audience: If you enjoy registration and attendance rates, that’s an excellent start. But if you miss your target audience, your attendee-to-leads ratio will be poor, which, in turn, will harm your ROI.

To improve this metric then, you need to hone in on the demographic you aim to serve and refine your webinar marketing strategy accordingly. Strong webinar follow-up is the other part of the equation. Post-event emails must abide by email marketing best practices to convert attendees into leads. That includes personalizing your messages, maintaining a consistent schedule, and incorporating value in your emails to entice attendees to take next steps.

Additionally, your funnel should filter out underqualified registrants. That entails building a landing page that’s concise and decisive; anyone who registers should know exactly what to expect and want to achieve that outcome. So, if this ratio is low, your funnel is a great place to look for areas in need of improvement.

Engagement Level 

Webinar platforms boast features that automatically measure engagement level. When you add interactive elements in your webinars, you can track each one’s level of use to see the response they earned. That information can then guide you on how to increase your audience engagement.

These features are applicable to both on-demand and live webinars. Lean on them to prevent audience members from growing too passive.

The specifics of what you can track depend on the platform you use. Demio, for instance, is a live and on-demand webinar solution that focuses on engagement. Users drive engagement with customizable and interactive features that spread brand awareness and illicit audience action. During the presentation, Demio enables:

• Polls
• Featured actions
• Handouts
• Breakout rooms
• Q&A sessions

These features are designed for full automation, allowing you to run real-time or on-demand automated webinars easily. Then, with Demio’s robust analytics features, you can pinpoint how many people interacted with these elements, for how long, where people dropped off, and more to pinpoint which features to keep and which to refine or remove.

Attendee Feedback

Attendee feedback is invaluable — if you know how to extract honest, useful information. Injecting bias into your feedback requests is detrimental to your brand and attendees alike. So, formulate questions that elicit genuine and meaningful responses.

It’s useful to collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative feedback from viewers. Let’s go over some examples of questions that gather each type of response.

Qualitative Feedback Questions

• How soon do you feel you can apply the information you’ve learned?
• How accurate do you feel the webinar description was?
• Was there anything else you think should have been covered?
• Where did you hear about our webinar?
• Was there any particular section that was difficult to understand?

Quantitative Feedback Questions

• Please rate your overall experience from 1 to 10.
• What percentage of this webinar’s information was new to you?
• Please rate the speaker’s knowledge from 1 to 10.
• Please rate the content of the slides from 1 to 10.
• Please rate the audio quality from 1 to 10.
• Please rate the video quality from 1 to 10.
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this webinar to a [coworker/student/colleague/etc.]?

Webinar Replay Requests

As the name suggests, the number of replay requests is simply a tally of how many attendees solicited a recording of the webinar. You should segment this KPI according to those who wanted to review the content further and those who missed the event to better qualify leads.

Webinar replay requests are a good indicator of the event’s engagement and value. It also implies a larger audience than just the attendance count; registrants who didn’t show and people connected to the requesting attendee are likely among the viewers.

People generally don’t review or share webinar content unless they find it useful. So, this is an important quality metric to track. Fortunately, it’s easy to monitor since webinar platforms provide it as a built-in metric.

Replay requests can convert into leads or even direct purchases, so keep an eye on them and treat these viewers as highly qualified leads.

Webinar-to-SQL Ratio

The ratio of webinar to sales qualified lead (SQL) gauges a crucial junction in your sales funnel. Its formula is:

(SQLs from the webinar/Total webinar attendees) x 100

The outcome yields a percentage that represents how many webinar attendees became SQLs. This is an important indicator of how enticing your webinar content was to viewers. 

To increase your number of SQLs acquired from webinars, employ a unified call to action (CTA) that demonstrates real commitment, such as:

• Requesting more information
• Signing up for or subscribing to your service
• Requesting a trial or demo
• Joining your newsletter mailing list

How to Measure and Interpret Webinar KPIs 

Measuring webinar KPIs and interpreting them correctly entails two important elements: The use of reliable tools and software, which make collecting data a breeze; and the application of robust techniques for interpreting the KPIs. When you implement both these aspects correctly, you’ll easily learn the best actions to take based on the information gathered.

Reliable Tools and Software

Invest in robust tools and software to gather the most accurate data. Webinar platforms come with built-in analytics and reporting features to focus on KPIs for optimizing webinar experiences, and many are even customizable.

Demio is a complete webinar solution for marketing teams. Its built-in analytics features allow you to analyze webinar impact thoroughly and know exactly where corrections are needed. With Demio, you always have important webinar metrics at your fingertips. Your teams can then interpret them seamlessly and create useful goals.

Techniques to Interpret and Analyze Data

Take advantage of data visualization features, which you can find in most webinar software. Use them as benchmarks for your current webinars as well as to strengthen future performance.

This information can also justify investments: Break down data and sequence it in the order of the buyer’s journey. For example, if most metrics look healthy, but you earn few SQLs from your webinars, let the data direct your actions to improve your registration funnel (i.e., webinar landing page) and close with stronger webinar follow-up.

Strategies for Improving Webinar KPIs

Before the webinar, define your key objectives. These should align with the topics you cover so the data you gather is relevant and accurate. You can start to work toward those objectives prior to the live date by promoting the event through social media, on your website, and via email.

During the webinar, you can enhance your KPIs with engaging content and the strategic use of engagement features. It’s also good practice to have a moderator ready to enforce time management so attendees don’t become bored. With some practice and rehearsal, your speakers will be able to move between each section smoothly and maintain the audience’s attention.

After the webinar, follow-up should be your focus. Take advantage of this opportunity to collect raw data directly from attendees. Collect their honest feedback and share event highlights on your site and social media channels to generate influential social proof.

Together, these practices give you a bird’s-eye view of your webinar performance. 

Maximize Webinar KPIs for Stronger Results

Virtual event KPIs are the bread and butter of webinar planning. They paint a comprehensive picture of what takes place before, during, and after your webinars. Select and track the metrics most relevant to your goals, as well as those we covered in this article, then refine your webinars and event marketing strategy to realize the best results.

When working to optimize KPIs, a reliable webinar platform makes all the difference in terms of ease of data collection and accuracy. Demio offers the tools you need to track your chosen KPIs and refine your approach to produce stellar webinar marketing.

If you want to see the metrics analysis and other capabilities Demio has to offer, get started with a free trial.

Frequently Asked Questions About Webinar KPIs

What are the most important webinar KPIs?

The most important webinar KPIs you should track vary depending on your goals and nature of your webinars, but the key ones include:

• Registration-to-Attendance Ratio
• Webinar Costs
• Attendee Drop-Out
• Engagement Level
• Attendee Feedback
• Webinar Replay Requests
• Webinar-to-SQL Ratio

Which tools are best for tracking webinar analytics?

Use trusted, top-of-the-line webinar tools and software. This is the surest way to gain the most from your webinar analytics.

The best tool for tracking webinar analytics is Demio. Other great options are GoToWebinar, Webex, and Livestorm.

How can I increase webinar engagement?

Use Demio’s (or your chosen platform’s) engagement features to make your webinars more interactive and engaging. This can include incorporating polls, surveys, Q&A sessions, audience spotlighting, or even live chat with reaction features — whatever encourages attendees to participate. Test your engagement activities and optimize them over time for best results.