How and why to measure the impact of your online events and campaigns

Did you know that approximately 70% of marketing professionals say that the most common metric for measuring ROI (Return on Investment) of an event is it the number of messages generated and the reach achieved through social media?

Increasingly, companies are committed to holding different types of events to publicize their products and/or services and that these are disseminated through the media and social networks. But we still find many entrepreneurs or marketing managers who admit that they don't have established standards to measure the success of their events.

1- What to do before the next event, whether you are the organizer or sponsor?

Define the objectives

All objectives should be “SMART”: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, results-oriented and defined in a time of achievement. Some basic objectives of the event they could be:

• Generate leads
• Increase website traffic
• Offer new products to attendees

Each event is different and the objectives will depend on what the company wants to achieve.

Define what to measure

Once the objectives have been defined, we have to specify what really interests us or want to measure. If we have correctly defined the objectives, this point will be very simple, we can determine What are the data that interests us the most. For example:

• Number of brand mentions
• Hashtag created especially for the campaign
• Generated reach
• Impressions
• Engagement achieved
• Ranking of the most active participants
• Influencer ranking
• Most mentioned words (Tag Cloud)

Define how to measure

This is one of the most essential points, now we know our objectives and what we will measure, but we need to know how we are going to measure it, what technology or tools we will use to be able to measure the different data. It depends on the data we want to monitor, Google Analytics or the networks themselves can serve us, but depending on the data we will need to invest in more professional tools and for a fee.

2- What should we do during the Event?

Once we have defined the objectives, the KPIs that interest us and how we will collect the information, during the event we will verify that the data is being collected correctly.

We want to highlight that many monitoring tools do not collect data retroactively, that is, if today we configure the tool with the Keywords that we are interested in monitoring, surely we will not be able to collect one hundred percent of the mentions that were made before implementation. It is best to have the keywords defined and implement them in the tool a few days before the event begins so that it begins to collect the data.

3- What should we do after the event?

Measure and analyze the impact of our actions in online media. The tools will provide us with a series of data that we will then translate into a report. The data analyzed will help us to know if we have achieved the objectives set, in addition, The monitored datas will help us to detect valuable insights for subsequent events. We could also view the data in real time through a Dashboard. 

Recommendations when monitoring an event or campaign on social networks

• Establish a specific monitoring period.
• Define a hashtag or keywords to monitor.
• Determine on which networks the campaign will be carried out.
• Find out if it is also necessary to monitor other media besides social networks.
• Be clear about the data we want to collect.
• Know the limitations of the monitoring tool.
• Have control over the channels of the influencers who attend the event.

Success story of a one-off action at a musical event

A well-known beverage brand took a specific action during a festival in Barcelona, its objective was to know how many mentions were made and what was said about its brand in relation to the festival before, during and after the event.

Novicell, together with the beverage brand, established the most relevant keywords that should be monitored and we implemented them in our monitoring tool so that it would start collecting data. Once the festival ended, we imported all the data and made a quantitative and qualitative report for the brand.

(Example of a dashboard of some data collected after the event)

There are also projects in which the monitoring is carried out in real time, sometimes, brands need to keep track of what is being said about their event at all times, so they can interact with users and resolve all their concerns. This would be the case of the project we carried out for the Mobile World Congress.

Based on all these elements and examples, you will now be able to monitor and carry out a general analysis, and at the same time, go deeper with the contents of the mentions that will serve to help us Build our brand and improve in upcoming events and campaigns.

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