How do you calculate the ROI of your event?

Your first event just ended, and it has been a massive success. Large numbers of people showed up and lots of interactions happened among the guests, guest speakers, and vendors. But how do you justify the investments you’ve made into this event? That is where ROI comes in.

What is ROI?

ROI, defined as return on investment, is a performance measure that is used to evaluate how profitable investment was. It accomplishes this by measuring the amount of return of an investment, relative to its investment cost.

The ROI formula:

A positive ROI means your investment has been worthwhile while a negative ROI means that there was a net loss.

Why should you calculate ROI?

Justify your investment

Calculating ROI, enables you to justify everything you spent in the budget. ROI allows you to directly link those expenses to potential lead generations through its calculation process, allowing for a more holistic view of the event.

Improve efficiency

The calculation of ROI, it allows you to look back at everything that happened at your event so that you can have a better overview of what clients liked and disliked. By hosting your events through platforms such as EventX, you will be able to gain more analytics, enabling you to tweak certain elements of your event here and there to ensure that the money invested into the event has been maximized.

How do you calculate the ROI of your event?

Now that you understand the basics of ROI and its benefits, how do you actually calculate the ROI of the event you put so much time into?

Below is an easy 4-step process for you to follow, which will guide you through exactly how ROI is calculated for events.

Step 1: Define your main objective for the event

ROI is meant to measure your revenue relative to its cost. For events that are focused on generating leads instead of generating sales from tickets, ROI can be adjusted so that it measures your net value rather than net revenue.

But first, you must decide on what the main objective of your event is. Is the objective of your event to generate sales? Is it an event that is focused on generating more sales leads for the company? Maybe you want to attract employees?

List all your objectives down and slowly cross them out until you’re left with the single most important one. That is the main objective and the remaining ROI calculations will be built around this objective.

Step 2: Define your KPIs and set achievable objectives

Once you have defined your main objective, you will need to start looking at what exactly you need to do to achieve the desired outcome.

For demonstration purposes, let’s say the main goal is to increase your brand awareness. Now you must define some KPIs (key performance indicators) related to brand awareness. For example, you could use the number of registrations, social media impressions, visits to the event sites, and level of satisfaction of participants just to name a few.

Once you have defined the KPIs you want to use, you then need to start setting objectives that are achievable. For example, you could set your objectives to increase social media followers across all platforms by 1000, improve social media engagement by 5%, and attract 3000 attendees to your event. Moreover, by using EventX’s chat and polls feature, you can immediately ask your attendees about their views on different topics, not only improving interactivity but also giving you valuable amounts of feedback.

Step 3: Gather all the necessary data to track your progress

Now that you have everything set, it’s time to find the data that’s needed to see if the goals you’ve set have been met.

If you host your events through EventX, we provide comprehensive data from pre-event to post-event that you can use to analyze. We provide event attendance reports, event conversion funnel reports as well as content engagement reports to ensure that you have all the data you need to further refine your next event.

Step 4: Analyse the results

Now it’s time for the final piece of the puzzle, the part where everything comes together. Everything you’ve gathered so far will be able to inform you whether your goals were met at this event and what you might be able to do in the future to ensure even more success.

Let’s say you managed to increase your social media engagement by 5% but ended up increasing it by 10%. You can then use this information to calculate the cost per % of engagement by dividing the cost of holding this event by the increase in social media engagement. For this example, even though there wasn’t a direct generation of revenue, it is still considered a positive return on your investment.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve found out how profitable of an investment your event has been, why not host another one to further increase your brand awareness and networking opportunities? Contact us at EventX now, and make use of all our unique features such as virtual lobbies and more interactive chats to make your next event even more successful than the last!