When you exhibit at a trade show, how do you know whether your booth has been successful? Exhibiting generally entails a significant financial investment. That’s why it’s important to have some means of measuring trade show success, so you can determine whether your investment is worthwhile. Using these key metrics to gauge your trade show success can help you confirm that you’re on the right track.

1. Contacts, Leads, and Qualified Leads

Exhibiting at a trade show means meeting a lot of new people. Of the people you meet, some are potentially new networking contacts, some are leads, and some are qualified leads. All are useful, but not all represent potential sales.

Tracking Leads

This requires that before the show, you define what constitutes a lead and what constitutes a qualified lead. Leads are simply people or organizations that have interacted with your company. They might become a customer or client in future, but they might not, and you don’t have any data to predict which outcome is more likely. 

Qualified leads are different. They’re individuals or organizations that have been vetted by you or your sales team. A qualified lead has been assessed on their readiness to buy and is considered a potential client or customer.

Any leads generated are useful, but the more qualified leads generated from an event, the higher the probable ROI. Before the event, determine what your goals are for contacts, leads, and qualified leads.

2. Booth Visits

This simple trade show metric is just the number of visitors who set foot inside your booth. It’s not necessarily useful on its own, because not every visitor becomes a lead, and not every lead is a qualified lead. But it’s still important to know how many visitors you get. It’s a measure of your visibility at the show, and it can help you determine whether you’re targeting the right demographic. 

For instance, if your foot traffic is sky-high, but you’re not generating many qualified leads, it’s likely that your demographic criteria are too broad. This is a problem because if most of your booth visitors are unlikely to become customers, your booth staff are wasting time they could be spending on nurturing real leads. You may not get the ideal return on objectives, if you make foot traffic your goal, without determining how many qualified leads you hope to generate.

How to Calculate Booth Visits

The simplest and most accurate hands-off method is to use RFID technology that tracks each unique visitor. The alternative is to have a member of your booth staff use a click counter or employ other forms of manual counting. After the show, compare booth visits with leads and qualified leads to determine how well you’re doing at attracting the specific audience you’re interested in.

3. Close Rate

If you’re attending the show to make sales or find new clients, then you’ll definitely want to track close rate. This is an event metric for measuring the proportion of qualified leads that make purchases. It’s most useful as a way to evaluate your lead-gathering system. The higher your close rate, the better your system is at identifying qualified leads.

As with certain other event metrics, this isn’t one you can calculate right after the show. In some cases, you can’t accurately determine your close rate for the event until after your next sales cycle is completed. 

How to Calculate Close Rate

Close rate is the total number of sales, divided by the number of qualified leads. Multiply by 100 to express as a percentage.

4. Cost Savings

Attending trade shows have direct, obvious benefits in terms of leads and sales. But often there are indirect benefits too. One of these is cost savings, which is a presentation of what you save by attending a show. For instance, by gathering leads at a trade show, you may be able to avoid spending lots of time on sales calls or save money on the purchase of customer lists. A trade show booth costs money, but you also save money by not having to travel to sales meetings. Plus, there are things you might achieve at a trade show, such as recruiting new staff or finding new suppliers, meaning that you don’t have to spend extra time or money on them during normal business hours. If you’re getting high cost savings, the trade show is likely a strong resource utilization.

How to Calculate Cost Savings

It’s not necessarily possible to accurately determine cost savings. However, it’s definitely worthwhile to keep track of where those savings are made at each show you attend as an exhibitor. It’s all part of the big picture that proves your event ROI.

5. Cost Per Lead (CPL)/Cost Per Qualified Lead (CPQL)

CPL is a metric for measuring the cost of generating individual sales leads. However, because it doesn’t provide a means of distinguishing the quality of leads, CPQL can step in to fill the gap.

How to Calculate CPL/CPQL

Both are calculated in the same way, but with slightly different data sets. Divide your overall costs for exhibiting at the show by the number of leads or qualified leads to find your CPL or CPQL.

6. Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI is one of the most important metrics, but it’s also one of the most difficult to calculate accurately. Your trade show ROI is a measurement of the direct return on your trade show activity, relative to what it cost to exhibit. ROI is most important when your trade show goals relate to sales or revenue.

How to Calculate ROI

The calculation to find ROI is simple. To calculate ROI, first take total revenue minus total costs and then divide that by total costs. That figure is then multiplied by 100 and expressed as a percentage. If ROI is a positive number, it means a positive financial return on investment. If it’s a negative number, it means the event was a net financial loss.

However, while ROI itself is an easy calculation, measuring trade show ROI isn’t so simple. For instance, some forms of revenue are not easy to quantify. This means things like publicity, in terms of brand recognition, social media buzz, or industry clout. Those sorts of things are invariably left out of ROI calculations, because it’s impossible to put a price tag on them. Increased awareness for your brand or social media interactions may lead less directly to increased revenue.

The more pressing issue is that ROI for a trade show is usually tied in some way to sales. And the longer your sales cycle is, the harder it is to pin down. If you expect the majority of your ROI to come from trade show sales, it might be easier. More often, it’s not possible to get an accurate ROI until many months after the show is over. 

7. Estimated Revenue

Revenue is hard to quantify right after a show, for the same reasons that ROI is hard to quantify. Fortunately, there’s always estimated revenue to bridge the gap. With this calculation, you rely on past trade show averages as a basis for calculating revenue for the current event. 

How to Calculate Estimated Revenue

ER is number of leads, multiplied by close rate, multiplied by the average value of a sale or contract. This lets you approximate the revenue you can expect from long-term leads, before you have confirmed sales figures.

8. Projected Business Value (PBV)

PBV is an alternative to return on investment, so it’s a useful interim metric to keep in mind when you’re waiting on sales figures for ROI calculations. Instead of counting up figures PBV projects how much value you get from an event. It’s particularly helpful when you have a long sales cycle, or where upselling is a significant revenue stream or long-term goal.

How to Calculate PBV

For PBV, you need three data sets:

• Number of qualified leads (QL) – the total number of qualified leads from the event
• Average historical close rate (CR) – the percentage of qualified leads that result in sales. 
• Added business value (BV) – the average difference in value between event sales and non-event sales 

To find the PBV, multiply QL x CR x BV. The final figure represents the value generated by the event, that you wouldn’t have generated if you hadn’t attended.

Monitoring Event Metrics Lets You Plan for A Successful Trade Show

Exhibiting at trade shows generates lots of data: potentially hundreds of booth visits, and dozens of leads to follow up on. And the more popular your trade show booth is, the more visits, leads, and data you generate. What you need to know is whether attending the event was a smart sales strategy. By choosing a few key trade show metrics for success, you can quickly turn your trade show exhibit data into meaningful information that helps you gauge your trade show success and improve your performance at future events.