How to Measure Exhibition Success: Leads, Sales, and Brand Impact

Whenever a company puts budget into a marketing exercise, there is one question that must be answered: How do we measure success? With event marketing, trade shows and exhibitions, the outcomes and returns can be difficult to attribute, so it is important to set clear exhibition KPIs that define the outcomes you should look to achieve. KPIs help you plan your exhibition as well as what to measure, so set these as soon as possible.

Choose Your Exhibition KPIs

To determine whether the expense of exhibiting was worthwhile (and to justify doing it again), you need to choose Key Performance Indicators. A good KPI is SMART:

• Specific to the event in question,
• Measurable with the tools you have / can easily get
• Achievable in the conditions you’re working with
• Relevant to the business strategy
• Time-sensitive, e.g. “in the next 6 weeks”, not open-ended.

For most event marketing and exhibitions, the best KPIs relate to Leads, Sales and Brand Impact.

Measuring Leads

Lead Quantity

The number of contacts you collected during the exhibition is often a primary KPI for businesses. Lead generation is the main motivator for exhibiting at trade shows, so the length of your email list can be a good initial indicator of how well your exhibition performed.

SMART Exhibition KPI example:

“Generating 100 leads for our digital marketing service over the 3 days of the exhibition.”

Lead Quality

While quantity can have importance, if the majority of those leads are dead ends, it’s a non-starter. Tracking lead quality is equally important, and can be achieved by measuring engagement levels, purchase intent, decision-making authority and timing.
Quality leads are a more engaged and receptive audience for your ongoing sales and marketing, primed for conversion in the weeks and months after a show.

SMART Exhibition KPI example:

“Gaining contact details for 40 decision-makers within the Food & Beverage Industry during the exhibition.”
“Added 500 people to our email newsletter list during the show”

Measuring Sales

Immediate sales can be measured by the number of transactions closed during the show. It includes sales that happen on the spot and before the event finishes.
This can be a lagging indicator, measuring post-event sales. An effective exhibit can lead to sales by accelerating opportunities that other marketing efforts struggle to move. Leads may be in a consideration phase before the show, and ready to purchase after seeing your exhibit.

Measuring post-exhibition sales can help you segment leads that perform well to target future marketing and sales activities.

SMART Exhibition KPI example:

“Making 50 sales to leads generated from the exhibition within 1 month.”

Measuring Brand Impact

This is a much harder metric to measure, but it isn’t impossible. If visitors to your exhibit learnt your brand name and remember it later, it’s an impact. If they actively look for your brand later on, it’s an impact. If their perception of your brand changed, it’s an impact.

You can measure brand impact from an exhibition by tracking branded searches online, surveying customers, or surveying leads about brand perception.

SMART Exhibition KPI example:

“Build awareness of our new quality control service within the logistics industry by 25%.”
“50 uses of our brand hashtag on social media within the week.”
“Increase website enquiries by 20% within 2 weeks”

Foot Traffic

How many people visited your booth? Whether they gave their contact information or not, the number of people passing through is similar to the number of impressions your social media post gained. It shows you how many people noticed you.

You can measure foot traffic using an hourly headcount and taking an average, or designating someone to use a click counter to tally each visitor. You may also install an electronic counter on your booth to track the number of people stepping inside.

Dwell Time

Counting foot traffic or booth visitors can also include how long people stay, or ‘dwell time’. This helps you understand the value of your foot traffic.
For example, if 60% of visitors stay less than 60 seconds, but 40% stay for 3 minutes or longer, you have a clearer picture of how many people were really engaged.

Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate

Compare foot traffic to the number of leads. You can analyse the proportion of passing traffic that was interested enough to sign up to a mailing list or have their passes scanned. This is a key KPI for exhibitions.

SMART Exhibition KPI example:

“Engage 2000 visitors for more than 30 seconds during the exhibition.”
“Convert 40% of exhibit visitors to leads.”

Tools & Techniques for Tracking

Without the infrastructure to measure your exhibition KPIs, you’ll never know if you were successful or not.

Tools for tracking leads include:

• Email lists in a database
• CRM systems such as Hubspot, Salesforce or Zoho CRM
• Mobile lead capture apps to scan business cards

Exhibition organisers sometimes offer lead capture technology such as pass scanners, RFID or QR codes. Make use of these to reduce friction for visitors.

Make sure your sign-up form has a field for decision-making capacity or seniority so you can track the value of each lead.

Tools for tracking Sales at an event:

• CRMs such as Salesforce include sales tracking to highlight conversions that come from trade show leads
• Marketing automation platforms also help attribute conversions to initial touchpoints.

Tracking Brand Impact:

• Event surveys and feedback forms, including questions such as:
  • ‘Were you aware of x service before the event?’
  • ‘Which 3 exhibits do you remember most strongly from the event?’
  • ‘Choose from the following phrases to describe our company.’
• Social media metrics such as hashtag use, new followers, and engagement
• Web traffic analytics can show spikes in website visits and enquiries during and after the event.

Most CRM and analytics software can help build reports to highlight your successes and areas for improvement. You can also build your own to show more customised data sets, though this is time-consuming.

How to Excel with Exhibition KPIs

The best way to meet your goals is to set them well in advance of the exhibition, before you design your stand. Knowing what you are trying to achieve will help you decide whether to book a shell scheme or space-only spot, design exhibition graphics that are relevant to your goals, write a quality brief for bespoke exhibition stands or decorate your shell scheme.

For help creating your ideal exhibition stand, view our Exhibitor Services and find out how we can help.