A new report based on thousands of multi-day virtual events and single-day webinars has been released by Notified, a cloud-based provider of event-platform and -measurement tools. The firm’s 2022 Benchmark Report compiled data from online events that took place between June 2021 and June 2022.
For multi-day virtual events, the report found the following:
• The average lead time for starting specific promotional activities for an event is 56 days.
• More than two-thirds of attendees registered at least seven days ahead of a virtual event; the other one-third signs up within seven days.
• 78 percent of online events are less than three days long, with an average of 24 hours of agenda time. The average number of speakers is 20.
• Tuesday (29 percent) and Wednesday (27 percent) are the most popular days for sessions, with Monday (19 percent) and Thursday (17 percent) behind those. Friday is a dud: just four percent of virtual events have sessions that day.
• 50 percent of participants attended an event as it happened live, but 71 percent of the total minutes viewed by attendees were watched live. So, live participants spend more total time in the event.
• 18 percent of attendees accessed virtual events through a mobile phone; of those, 58 percent were iPhone users, while 42 percent were Android users.
For single-day webinars, the report found the following:
• The average lead time to begin promotional messaging rose to 44 days, up from 39 days in 2019.
• Only one-third of participants registered at least seven days ahead of the webinar; two-thirds signed up within seven days of the webinar.
• 65 percent of webinar registrants attended live, while 11 percent attended on demand. The other 24 percent of registrants did not attend at all.
• The most popular webinar times are 12 p.m. (17 percent) and 1 p.m. (13 percent), with 11 a.m. and 10 a.m. (both 11 percent) behind that.
• Pre-webinar engagement through a “lobby experience” is notable: The 24 percent of webinars that use this element see 57 percent of their lobby interactions taking place before the event begins.
• 70 percent of webinars have handouts/downloadable resources; 19 percent of resource downloads happen ahead of a webinar.
• 12 percent of questions for the presenter or panel are submitted ahead of a webinar.
• 97 percent of survey results are captured before webinar participants leave the session. One tip: Offering the use of emojis gives attendees more opportunities to express their thoughts and feelings in a measurable way; they can even be offered in the chat forum to make it easier to build buzz and then monitor group sentiment as the event moves along.
