Seven in ten industry professionals say that the face-to-face relationships built at in-person events are the hardest aspect to replace. That is according to the latest Events Industry Council study on the global economic significance of business events, published this summer and covered by PCMA. Yet when the event ends and it is time to report back, the first question in the room is usually the same as ever: how many people came?
Understanding why that question is no longer enough, and what to ask instead, is probably the most useful thing any event marketing team can do right now.
Why attendee numbers fall short
Attendee numbers are easy to explain and easy to compare from one edition to the next. That is why headcount has remained the go-to metric for so long. The problem is that it measures presence, not outcomes. One event can fill a room without generating a single real sales opportunity; another can attract half as many people and lead to the year’s strongest sales quarter.
The Events Industry Council study puts figures to this gap between attendance and outcomes: for every dollar invested in attending or exhibiting at an event, businesses report generating $11 in incremental revenue. Of that revenue, 28% would disappear without the in-person element of the event. And 22% of new customer acquisition is attributed directly to face-to-face events. None of those three figures has anything to do with how many seats were filled.
That does not make headcount useless. It remains essential for logistics, catering and venue capacity. The distinction is that this number answers an operational question, rather than the business question: was this event worth it? Simple as it may seem on paper, that distinction is exactly what separates counting attendees from the real ROE vs ROI debate.
Two questions to distinguish in the ROE vs ROI debate
This is where the ROE vs ROI discussion comes in. It is a debate that has been circulating in the industry for years and, with the current pressure on marketing budgets, is worth revisiting.
ROI (return on investment) asks the familiar financial question: how much have we earned compared with what we have spent? It can be calculated, compared across events and used to decide where next year’s budget should go. It is essential, but it only tells half the story.
The other half is ROE (return on experience or, in some earlier interpretations, return on emotion). This measures how someone feels about the event they have attended: whether they leave with a better impression of the brand, whether they would recommend the event and whether they would return. We have already explored this distinction in detail on our blog. An attendee’s emotional experience may be harder to capture in a spreadsheet than ROI, but it directly influences loyalty, recommendations and, over the medium term, financial returns themselves.
Search for ‘roi and roe in events’ and this is the tension that tends to emerge: teams that have spent years reporting only the financial half of the equation are now trying to incorporate the emotional half without losing rigour. This is not a new shift, but few small teams have fully put it into practice.
While the question behind ROI is clear, the opposite of ROI is less obvious than it might seem. It is not simply losing money: it is not knowing what happened to the investment. It means organising an event, spending the entire budget and being unable to answer either the financial or the emotional question with data. In practice, that information gap is the real opposite of ROI that many event marketing teams face.
The same room and two very different stories
Imagine two editions of the same industry conference, with the same budget and almost the same number of attendees. In the first, the post-event report contains just one headline figure: 400 people registered, a full room. In the second, the report adds three more figures: 52% of attendees had also attended the previous year, the NPS was +38, and 35% of event revenue came from sponsorship, compared with 65% from registration fees.
Through the first lens, the two editions are indistinguishable: 400 people are 400 people. Through the second, details emerge that change the budget discussion: repeat attendance below the healthy threshold of 50% may suggest that the content is falling short for people already familiar with the event. And an NPS of +38, while respectable, leaves room for improvement before reaching the +45 that Lutz identifies as a reasonable starting point. Neither of those insights appears when the only number reported is headcount.
In practice, this is what separates reporting both ROI and ROE from reporting ROI alone: the fuller report provides enough information to explain why a figure has changed from one edition to the next. That explanation is almost always the first thing the person approving next year’s event budget wants to hear.
What to measure beyond raw attendee numbers
Before looking at specific metrics, remember that resolving the ROE vs ROI question means deciding what to measure on each side, rather than choosing between them.
Writing for PCMA, meetings and events industry consultant Dave Lutz suggests a set of metrics that reveal much more than headcount. One of the most useful for a corporate event or industry conference is repeat attendance: how many of this year’s attendees also attended either of the previous two editions. Lutz puts the healthy threshold at around 50%. It tells you far more about whether the event delivers real value than any attendance figure.
Another is satisfaction measured through NPS, based on how likely an attendee is to recommend the event to an industry colleague on a scale of 0 to 10, with a reasonable starting target of around +45. A third metric is less obvious but says a great deal about an event’s health: its revenue mix. If at least 30% comes from registration fees and another 30% from sponsorship and exhibition stands combined, the event has a stronger financial base than one that relies almost entirely on a single source.
None of these metrics replaces ROI. They give it context, explaining why this year’s ROI was better or worse than last year’s, something headcount alone could never tell you.
The data you already have but probably are not using
Almost every event organiser has a source of information in front of them that few use to its full potential: attendee data collected directly through registration, check-in and participation in the event. With third-party cookies providing increasingly unreliable information, the first-party data an event generates is an asset that often goes unanalysed once it ends. This includes which sessions each person attended, which content they downloaded, who they networked with and how they responded to the post-event survey.
Bringing these sources together is the real bridge between ROI and ROE: the financial side draws on revenue and cost data; the emotional side draws on behaviour and satisfaction data. When both appear in the same report, the ROE vs ROI conversation moves from a theoretical discussion to a dashboard that any leadership team can understand.
Making it work for a small team without overloading the report
None of this requires you to multiply the number of indicators you report. In fact, fewer is better, provided they are the right ones. Most organisers we speak to have small marketing teams. For them, it makes more sense to choose two or three ROI indicators and two or three ROE indicators, then track them consistently from one edition to the next, than to try to measure everything and have no time left to analyse any of it. The aim is to report both, rather than choose just one.
Repeat attendance and the revenue mix are good starting points on the ROI side. On the ROE side, there is satisfaction measured through NPS and qualitative feedback collected during the event. Between the two sits the first-party data already being collected through registration and check-in, connecting both sides without turning the ROE vs ROI debate into an endless spreadsheet.
Ultimately, the real purpose of this measurement exercise is to avoid being left without answers, rather than to avoid financial loss.
The ROE vs ROI debate will remain open across the industry, probably for years. But a team that starts reporting both sides of the same event will have a very different budget conversation the next time it has to explain why its events deserve continued investment.