B2B marketers have embraced many new strategies to cut through the influx of content in our increasingly digital landscape.
Yet, many tried-and-true marketing strategies continue to generate results. Among such strategies, webinars come out on top.
Webinars are live or prerecorded online events, used to teach attendees about a specific topic or service. This virtual event format allows companies to engage with prospects and customers, receive feedback in real-time, and ultimately generate leads. As these statistics show, webinars have become a favorite tactic of many B2B marketers:
- Over 60% of marketers use webinars as part of their content marketing programs (source).
- 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads (source).
- In 2017 webinars were reported as one of the top revenue drivers for B2B marketers (source).
But marketers often struggle to quantify the success of B2B webinars. Here’s why – many marketers look at one or two webinar metrics to tell them if a webinar is successful. Yet, B2B webinars require several different metrics to gain a complete picture of their effectiveness.
Today’s blog post looks at some of the most important metrics surrounding B2B marketing webinars. Keep reading!
10 Measurable B2B Webinar Metrics
- B2B Webinar Registrations
- Webinar Landing Page to Registrant Conversion Rate
- Source of B2B Webinar Registrants
- B2B Webinar Costs
- Registrant to Attendee Conversion Rate
- Time Spent in the Webinar
- Live Webinar vs. Recording Views
- Attendee Feedback
- Attendee to Qualified Lead Conversion Rate
- Revenue Generated from the Webinar
1. B2B Webinar Registrations
Your total number of registrants is an obvious metric to track, but it’s one of the most important. The number of registrants indicates how successful your promotion efforts were leading up to the webinar. Before you announce your B2B webinar and begin to promote it, set a goal for total registrations. If you fall short of your goal, it might be for one of several reasons:
- Your promotional efforts leading up to the webinar were insufficient.
- The webinar topic was not engaging or useful to your audience.
- You targeted the wrong audience.
There’s no definitive number that indicates a “good” amount of registrants. Your registration numbers depend on the size of your audience, your webinar topic, budget and more. Yet, it’s still important to grow your number of webinar registrants over time. Doing so means you’re learning from each and every webinar and making adjustments to your webinar strategy as you go.
2. Webinar Landing Page to Registrant Conversion Rate
Keep track of how many pageviews your webinar landing page receives – but, more importantly, track the percentage of page visitors that go on to register for the webinar. If you receive a high number of visitors to your page, but very few convert to registrants, there may be flaws with your marketing landing pages.
Make sure that your registration page aligns with the rest of your promotion, and that the registration process is simple and direct.
3. Source of B2B Webinar Registrants
Most businesses promote their B2B webinars across several different marketing channels, from social media to email to paid search ads. To determine the effectiveness of each channel, track the number of registrants each specific promotion brings to your site. When you track the source of registrations, you’ll be able to alter your strategy to focus on the channels that bring in the most registrations.
For example – let’s say you spend a large portion of your advertising budget on paid search ads. These ads generate a lot of traffic but very few registrants. Conversely, your social media channels generate a higher percentage of registrants. You decide to allocate more resources to your social media promotion and increase your total number of registrants.
4. B2B Webinar Costs
To determine the ROI of a webinar, you must keep track of the total cost that goes into webinar creation and promotion. On average, B2B webinars are more cost-effective than the average marketing campaign. For reference, the average webinar costs between $100 and $3,000 depending on promotional and technological costs (source).
5. Registrant to Attendee Conversion Rate
While registrations are important, your webinar is only considered a success if registrants actually attend the live event. Often, webinars receive a high number of registrants who don’t actually attend. In fact, an average of only 35% to 45% of registrants attend webinars they’ve signed up for (source).
If your ratio of registrants to attendees is below average, your post-registration, pre-webinar promotion might be insufficient. Analyze your registration page, your marketing campaigns, your automated reminders, and other promotions to make any necessary adjustments.
6. Time Spent in the Webinar
As a marketer, your goal is to keep attendees engaged throughout an entire B2B webinar– but it’s unavoidable that some attendees will log out before the webinar ends. Keep track of the average time attendees spend engaged and look for common drop-off points to determine which specific sections of your webinar sway attendees to leave.
For instance, you may find that a large number of attendees left after your introduction where you explained the content and goals of your webinar. This may mean that you didn’t promote your webinar accurately or that the introduction needs some work. Tracking time spent in the webinar will allow you to analyze these drop-off moments and make changes to keep attendees engaged.
7. Live Webinar vs. Recording Views
Don’t assume your webinar was a failure if your live attendance isn’t as high as you’d hoped. 84% of B2B customers opt to watch replays over live webinars (source). For this reason, it’s important to keep track of views and leads generated by recordings of past webinars. You may determine that you need to invest more into promoting your webinar replays if they end up being more effective than your live event.
8. Attendee Feedback
Be sure to collect attendee feedback following every webinar. Send all attendees a survey that asks a variety of questions regarding the webinar. Include basic questions about which parts of the webinar they enjoyed or found useful, as well as specific questions about the topic you covered.
After collecting feedback, be sure to integrate common responses into future webinars.
9. Attendee to Qualified Lead Conversion Rate
While webinars are proven to be effective lead generators, you can only reach your revenue goals if you generate qualified leads. Recent studies suggest that 20% to 40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads (source). If you generate a high number of webinar leads, but many of those leads are unqualified to purchase your product or service, reconsider your topic selection to ensure that your B2B webinars speak to the interests of your ideal buyers.
10. Revenue Generated from the Webinar
The end goal of any marketing or sales strategy is to close deals– and B2B webinars are no different. But, quantifying revenue from webinars can be trickier than with other campaigns. Webinar attendees may be at various stages of the buying cycle.
To get an accurate revenue figure, track deals closed as a direct result of your webinar as well as customers who interacted with a webinar at any stage of their buying journey.
Final Thoughts About Webinar Metrics
This list of webinar metrics is by no means comprehensive. But, if you use the above webinar metrics to analyze your performance, you’ll be able to improve your strategy as you continue to produce more webinars in the future. For more metrics, check out our entire list of marketing KPIs.
Contact ZoomInfo today to learn how our contact database can help you generate more success with your marketing webinars.