What’s it like to plan an event while blindfolded? Unthinkable, you’d say. True. But what if I told you that this is how you’ve been planning events all this time?
Don’t believe me? Then let me ask you a question: How much money do you spend just to attract one attendee? You likely have no idea, and that’s understandable. After all, your job is to plan events, not pretend you’re a marketing professional or an accountant.
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Imagine how much easier and efficient your work would be if you knew how exactly your efforts impacted your results.
“Is this even possible, to evaluate how much we spend just to attract one attendee?” I hear you wondering.
It’s more than possible, and not so difficult.
But let’s try to understand things gradually.
Tracking the right things
As you probably know, lots of companies and brands launch different Facebook, Google AdWords, and LinkedIn campaigns to promote their services, products, workshops, and events.
They usually spend big money on designing attractive advertising campaigns, trying to drive high-quality traffic to their website and then convince these people to take actions (aka convert) such as fill out a demo or registration form, schedule a meeting, download content, etc.
Considering the resources they invest into these activities, professionals are interested in proving the ROI (Return on Investment) and gathering the necessary data on how people behave after clicking on these ads.
Still confusing?
Let’s break down these steps a little bit.
Brand X creates an advertising campaign for Facebook to get people to try a free demo of their software.
The company is pretty confident this will work, so it invests a good amount of money into the advertising and makes sure the ads will reach the right leads. Once people start seeing the ad, they click on it, landing on the brand X website or one-pager.
Once there, they scroll through the copy and decide whether or not to take action (aka try the free demo).
Chances are that most visitors will close the page and forget about brand X all together.
Others, however, will take action and try the demo. This sole action will increase the probability of these people eventually becoming brand X customers. But things don’t end there—brand X marketers are smart, and they’re using a conversion pixel. What’s that?
What is a conversion pixel?
Roughly speaking, a conversion pixel is a JavaScript code used to track the actions users take when landing on your website.
As marketer Barbara Santos explains:
“This means that the conversion pixel can show you actions such as redirection to other pages, an additional product added to the cart, a product actually bought, among other kinds of conversion. This tracking is only possible because of the invisible image added to your website when you inserted the conversion pixel. What happens is that, every time someone performs the action there’s a conversion pixel acting, the invisible image sends a message to the server of the channel you use to advertise. After these messages are sent, you can have access to information such as the type of audience who was interested in that offer, which campaigns generate more sales, which ads work best with each persona, etc.”
How to calculate the acquisition costs
How exactly do conversion pixel work for evaluating acquisition costs?
Here’s a quick example.
Let’s say you’re spending USD 3,000 on a Facebook campaign. This campaign sends 300 people to your site. Of those 300 people, 30 will take a desired action (schedule a meeting, fill out a form, download a book, etc.).
This means that your acquisition cost is 3,000 divided by 30, or in other words, USD 100 per person.
Let’s say that you’re also spending USD 3,000 for the same marketing campaign, but this time on LinkedIn. This time, however, you’re getting 500 visitors, and 100 take the desired action. In this case, your acquisition cost is USD 30 (remember, 3,000 divided by 100).
Having this data, you can see that LinkedIn is more efficient, and instead of spending half your money on Facebook and getting poor results, you can double your money on your LinkedIn campaign.
Specific data, better decisions.
“That sounds great, but what does that have to do with events?” you might be asking.
Good question.
Let’s check it out.
How conversion pixel work for events
While different companies or brands might want to get people to download an eBook, schedule a meeting with someone from the sales team, or try a free demo of their product, you, as an organizer, may want to get your website visitors to register for your event.
To make this happen, you decide to launch a marketing campaign via Facebook and attract as many visitors as you can to your event website.
As in the examples mentioned above, the conversion pixel will help you understand what your attendee acquisition costs are and what marketing strategy works best.
Just apply the same formula, experiment with your marketing strategy, and decide the most efficient way to increase your attendance rate.
The more data you have, the smarter your decisions will be about how to spend your marketing money more resourcefully and get better results.
The only problem is that if you don’t add the conversion pixel, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google AdWords can’t show you the amount of traffic they’ve sent to your page or the conversion rates.
But don’t worry: Our mission is to make your life and the lives of other event professionals easier.
That’s why you can now add the conversion pixel by using Eventtia.
Here’s how:
Step 1. Click on the Registration module, then click on Types and select the attendee type.
Step 2. Click on the Messages tab.
Step 3. From the Success Registration Message, click on Source.
Step 4. Paste the conversion pixel code (Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google AdWords) and save it.
Congratulations!
Now you know how to set up conversion pixels that will help you not only measure your ROI, but also make better decisions to improve the attendance rate.
