Our last blog shared research into why confidence in event marketing measurement is so low. No two event marketing leaders we spoke to were measuring the same things in the same way, and few had solved attribution and reporting.

This week we look at what must be in place before anyone can produce attribution reporting worth trusting. In short: a properly built analytics setup, done by a technical specialist who knows the events business.
 

Your reporting is only as good as the setup underneath it

Event marketers need reliable data for three jobs: answering board-level questions with confidence, optimising campaigns day-to-day, and giving stakeholders across the event team numbers they believe and act on.

None of that is possible if GA4 and Google Tag Manager (GTM) are set up badly. The numbers your marketers report will be incomplete at best and misleading at worst. Bad data also trains the AI algorithms in your paid media platforms, which points spend at the wrong people.

So, ask yourself: are the numbers in front of your board and directing your ad spend built on an analytics setup you know you can trust?
 

This is specialist work, and you only need a fraction of a specialist

Analytics and attribution setup goes well beyond the skill set of an event marketing generalist. It needs someone who lives and breathes GA4, GTM and attribution.

That doesn't mean a full-time hire. Unless you run a very large events portfolio, a fractional specialist is the sensible way to buy this expertise.

Some organisers decide not to invest in it at all, yet still expect their marketers to produce robust KPIs and optimised campaigns. That isn't fair. Marketers can only be held accountable for commercial results if they're given the tools and the technical support to measure them.
 

GA4 expertise isn't enough: your analyst has to understand events

Most organisers we work with have already paid for in-house analysts, agencies or freelancers with excellent GA4 knowledge, and the setup still doesn't work. The reason is almost always the same: the people who built it didn't understand events.

Beyond the tools, an analyst needs to know two things:

• Event marketing: what event marketers do day-to-day and what they report on.
   
• The commercial model of conferences and exhibitions: how organisers make money, and what marketing must do to support that.

One organiser came to us after three agencies had failed to fix their analytics. On our first call, our Head of Analytics & Reporting put their setup into the context of how their events make money, and you could see the light go on.

At another large international organiser, in-house and external analysts had spent nine months on a setup that still wasn't working. In both cases the analysts knew GA4 but not events.
 

7 things to get right

This list expands on the three essentials in our practical guide to event marketing measurement and attribution, published in June.

1. Build your GA4 and GTM foundations properly. We've audited dozens of organisers' setups and keep finding the same gaps: missing or misconfigured key ‘events’ (an analytics term not to be confused with the actual events themselves!), and attribution that can't show how channels contribute to registrations.
    
2. Prioritise clean conversion tracking, consent and signal quality. Consent choices, browser restrictions and cross-device journeys limit what you can see, so the quality of what you do capture matters more. Fix this before debating attribution models.
    
3. Use data-driven attribution, and know its limits. Neither first-touch nor last-touch is the answer. Data-driven attribution, Google's recommended model, shares credit across the touchpoints that contribute to a conversion. It shows how credit is assigned, not which channel drove an individual registration.
    
4. Set conversion windows that reflect how event tickets are bought and sponsor/exhibitor leads make themselves known. GA4 now allows custom conversion windows which suits the longer buying cycles typical in today’s B2B customer journeys.
    
5. Work with analysts who understand business events. In-house or external, technical skill on its own isn't enough.
    
6. Measure what matters commercially. MPG’s Event Marketing Performance Measurement framework covers delegate acquisition, delegate retention, channel performance, sponsorship acquisition and sales performance. Reporting should work at three altitudes: the board and SLT, event marketing leaders, and the marketers running campaigns. Get in touch to request a copy of this framework relevant to your business.
    
7. Turn data into decisions with dashboards you actually use. Bring GA4, CRM/marketing automation and ad platform data into one place, with good visualisation, benchmarking and a RAG system. GA4's native dashboards, launched in September, are worth exploring. For a view across all your data sources, Team MPG builds event marketing dashboards in Google Data Studio (drop us a note to get a look at our dashboards).
    

How we get clients there

Since MPG started in January 2014, we've worked on the analytics setups for over 1,000 events. Three steps need to be completed, in this order, and we can deliver one, two or all three of these for you:

Attribution audit. As a neutral third party that wasn't involved in the original setup and with our experienced expert analysts on our team, we can identify exactly what needs fixing. MPG’s analysts have extensive experience and knowledge about GA4, GTM and attribution, and they understand the events business just as well.

Fixes and optimisation. Sometimes that means a rebuild from scratch. More often it means filling the gaps the audit found, either ourselves, or alongside your analysts so the knowledge stays in-house.

Training for your event marketers. A couple of online sessions on GA4, GTM and attribution modelling for your team, so they can use the analytics to make good tactical decisions and report accurate numbers.

Skip a step or take them out of order, and your event marketing function won't get what it needs from analytics. 

Head of Event Marketing, Roy Maybury, recently shared this on LinkedIn about MPG’s analytics work:

 

If you'd like to know where your analytics and attribution setup stands today, request a conversion tracking audit.