How to Measure Trade Show Performance for Continuous Improvement

Measuring the success of your trade show program by tracking key metrics allows you to continually refine your brand’s strategy and improve your return on investment over time. If you are unsure how to measure the performance of your trade show program, here are the key metrics that matter and how to capture them accurately.

Center Your Exhibition Booth Design Around Your Business Objectives
Understanding your business objectives will ensure your booth accurately communicates your brand messages to your audience. Once you know whether you want to generate leads, create brand awareness, or promote a product, a custom exhibit booth vendor can help you create a visually stunning exhibition booth design centered around your specific business objectives. In addition to your business objectives, the metrics you gather and track will also inform your booth design. A booth designed for capturing leads can look very different than a booth highlighting a new product line. 

Gather and Track Key Metrics
Tracking metrics like lead generation, booth traffic, brand awareness, and post-show sales gives you the information you need to determine whether you met your business objectives. You can also use this data to create reports for stakeholders and work with your custom exhibit booth vendor to enhance your exhibit design for future events. Effectively tracking these four metrics will help you increase your return on investment at future shows.

• Lead Generation: You can gather leads by scanning attendee badges and utilizing digital activations such as gamification and a universal lead capture tool. This allows you to easily integrate the leads with your CRM and transfer all important information directly to your sales team.
• Booth Traffic: How attendees move through your booth gives you valuable insights that allow you to make smarter decisions about your booth design. You can track your traffic with floor sensors, WiFi monitors, security cameras, and RFID technology to see how attendees interact with your trade show booth.
• Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is the buzz you create around your brand at trade shows. You can measure this holistically with exit surveys, booth traffic, number of leads, social media interactions and engagement, press mentions, website traffic, referral traffic, backlinks, and branded search volume.
• Post-Show Sales: Sales tracking software and customer relationship management systems can help you collect and track leads as they move through your sales funnel. Once you know the total sales from your trade show, you can determine your closing rates, cost per sale, total revenue, and return on investment.

Present Your Results to Stakeholders with Easy, Accurate Reports
After you’ve attended your trade show and captured your essential metrics, you can easily create accurate reports to share with stakeholders with a custom measurement dashboard centered around your business. This dashboard helps you organize and share your data in a presentable way so you can communicate your objectives, strategies, and outcomes with stakeholders. This will help you create and maintain a data-driven, success-oriented approach that will pay dividends in the future.