While the power of webinars to inform and educate is well known, only post-webinar data provides true understanding of a webinar’s effectiveness.

By studying key benchmarks, marketing teams can lock in on performance weaknesses and make crucial improvements.

To be sure your webinar is having the desired effect, take the following considerations and start building towards a more precise marketing future.

• Registrant-to-attendee conversion rate

Your fantastic webinar may be pulling in the cyber-crowds during registration, but how many of your followers actually convert into attendees to take heed of your teachings? Beyond that, what kind of conversion rate should you be aiming for?

Studies conducted by ON24 find that “strong” registrant-to-attendee conversion rates stand anywhere between 35 per cent and 45 per cent.

If you’re logging lower figures, start by asking questions about your promotional methods. A poor end-of-campaign – a change of time or day, or a clash with another key industry webinar – could be among the reasons for the drift-off in your audience figures.

• Average attendee rate

The beauty of webinars lies in their ability to pull in a truly global, geographically diverse crowd of viewers. The sky, or cloud, is the limit.

To calibrate your expectations, ON24 found that attendee figures hit 148 for webinars of more than five attendees.

For events with fewer than 100 attendees, the average size of an audience stands at 392. Going one step further, for webinars of over 100 attendees, the average size stands at 522.

If your numbers are dwindling, look beyond your promotional campaign for the reasons why. Examine what you are delivering as the reward for the response to your campaign’s calling. Incentivising with free resources is a great way of bolstering value and expanding your final audience.

• Average viewing time for quality, live webinars

While ‘snackable’ content is in fashion for short, sharp and impactful marketing, webinars are bucking the trend and offering something deeper. This is reflected in the average length of webinars which is greater now than it was five years ago.

ON24 notes the average webinar duration as 50 minutes in 2015, significantly longer than the 2010 average time of 38 minutes.

Webinars are rightly seen as an opportunity to step away from the snappy soundbites and actually invest time in offering quality, sustained content.

How much time and effort are you putting into the material you push? Furthermore, what techniques are you employing – are you taking full advantage of a range of multimedia to get your messages across?

Q&A has become an almost expected feature in webinars, supported by 90 per cent of webinars studied by ON24. Social media (31 per cent), polling (21 per cent) and surveys (20 per cent) are proving popular tools to promote interactivity. Group chat and collaboration are building in popularity, each bringing their own potential for unique insight.

You can be well versed in planning, promoting and executing great webinars, but as with all things, real success will be revealed in the data you recover after the webinar has taken place.

As a webinar host, you need to integrate data analysis and performance evaluation into your marketing team’s methods. To make this approach more organic, ask your audience what you could be doing better; ask questions and respond to polls. Participate in the interactive element that webinars so abundantly afford and it will pay off in the long run.

 

*About ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report
The study measured statistics across the entire lifecycle of a webinar, including webinar promotion and registration metrics, webinar interactivity metrics, audience viewing habits, and both live and on-demand attendance and conversion metrics.

Click here to download a copy of the ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report.

About ON24
ON24, the world’s leading webinar marketing platform. In 2015, ON24 supported over 60,000 webcasts globally.

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