5 Sponsorship KPIs to Track in Your Event Dashboard

Do you regularly attend conferences or trade shows? To get the most out an event sponsorship, these events require good planning upfront, and careful measurement afterwards.

Since the Luzmo team is heading off to SaaStr Annual as a sponsor next week, we wanted to share some tips & tricks to properly track the results of your event sponsorship in a dashboard.

Here are 5 key KPIs to measure the ROI of your event, including a few simple tactics, examples and a template dashboard for you to reuse.

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Sponsorship KPIs for marketing events

Not everyone you meet at the conference is ready to buy at that moment. Yet events are a great way to put your brand out there & to build your top-of-funnel pipeline.

Usually, these KPIs have a less direct impact on your short-term pipeline, yet equally as important in the long term. Here are a few tips on how to track the impact on brand awareness.

Brand Impressions

On events, brand impressions can have multiple interpretations:

• Visitors at your booth
• Impressions on your social media posts associated to the event
• Mentions in press releases, on social media etc.
• Or even the number of people that spotted you walking around in a branded tshirt!

What you’ll measure exactly will depend largely on the goals you’ve set for the conference. Are you aiming at a high volume for awareness? Then it makes sense to track visitors at your booth to automatically count the amount of people dropping by at the booth.

Are you less focused on quantity, but more on quality? Then you could track the amount of valuable brand interactions, rather than impressions. For example, the number of conversations had at the booth, the number of lead badges scanned, the amount of swag handed out, etc.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Compared to brand impressions, marketing qualified leads or MQLs have indicated a clear interest in your product. Usually this means they will leave their contact data in exchange for an offer. However, they are not necessarily looking to buy your product right now.

Align beforehand with your team on what qualifies as an MQL. Typical examples are:

• Subscribing to a mailing list at the event
• Registering to get a downloadable piece of content
• Registering for a free trial or a discount
• Participating in an activation at your booth

Tip: take advantage of combining offline & online! Try to let people at the booth leave their email address or contact details, so you can retarget them through online campaigns as well.

Sales KPIs for tracking event sponsorship

Your sales KPIs will focus on building the bottom-of-funnel pipeline and generating new opportunities on short and middle-long term.

Here are a few KPIs you can track to measure the direct outcome of your event.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

Sales qualified leads or SQLs are real business opportunities that were generated shortly after the event.

When measuring SQLs, agree on a time window after the conference to allow for a proper follow-up. For example, you could wait for 1 more month before actually evaluating the number of SQLs, as it may take some time to follow up and get the sales conversations going.

On the other hand, avoid making that time window too long. This will ensure you can evaluate the short term impact of the event on your pipeline.

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Cost per lead

Assess the total cost of your event, which will include more than just the sponsorship cost.

• Costs for sponsorship & booth
• Costs for swag & marketing material
• Travel, logistics & accommodation costs
• On-site expenses

When you have a good view on the total cost, this will allow you to calculate an acquisition cost per lead:

• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

By doing this, you’ll be able to make a 1-on-1 comparison with other marketing acquisition channels such as online advertising. Who ever said offline marketing is not measurable?

5. Revenue & ROI

The ultimate goal of sponsoring an event is to drive new revenue. So most importantly, measure the actual value of your post-event sales. Again, align on a time frame for when you’ll measure the outcome in terms of revenue.

A good tip is to use your average sales cycle as a reference point. Does it take you 40 days on average to close a deal? Evaluate your post-event sales 50 days after the conference, so you still have some slack for deals that take a bit longer to close.

As a result, you can compare the total new revenue to the cost of the event to calculate the ROI of your event. This is a great way to benchmark your event performance against past or future events.

Template dashboard for event sponsorship

In order to track all your event sponsorship KPIs in one place, it’s useful to create an event sponsorship dashboard. Check out the template dashboard below for some inspiration, and start using it on top of your own data!

Are you attending or sponsoring a conference soon? Apply these tips for measuring event ROI to your next event!