Every event marketer will be aware that reporting has become a bigger part of the job than it used to be. More data, more tools, more dashboards, and more people asking for numbers. What has not kept pace is any shared sense of what good looks like, and ‘the how’.

We have recently conducted research focused on this area - engaging some of the most progressive and world-leading commercial event organisers. They were of various shapes, sizes and stages of maturity.

The most profound discovery from our research - which we had suspected based on all our work in event marketing over the last 13 years - was this: there is no industry standard for event marketing reporting. No two event marketing leaders were measuring the same things, in the same way, with the same data-point definitions, or with the same person accountable for the result. And most of them relied on manual inputs from marketers on a regular (often weekly) basis. Few of them had solved the attribution and reporting puzzle.

And every event marketing leader we spoke to seemed well aware that their board level stakeholders, senior executive teams and marketers at all levels are frustrated by this situation.

The issue is: there are currently no quick, easy or cheap ways of measuring and reporting on marketing in a way that meets requirements at all levels of the business.

What further complicates matters is that there are countless tech tools flogging their wares as ‘the answer’ to this conundrum. We work with a number of these tools in the analytical and reporting work we do for clients, and we’ve looked closely at many relevant tools out there. And the fact is: no one tool can do it all, most tools being used aren’t being implemented or managed to their potential by the humans responsible, and those tools that claim to ‘do it all quickly and easily with no people involved’ are simply not telling the truth.

This does not surprise us. We know from extensive hands-on work in analytics and reporting on the performance of event marketing our team delivers that this is an area that needs deep, specialist expertise to get right, and that the human-in-the-loop makes a much bigger difference to outputs and outcomes than the tools being used.

 

Many marketers have dashboards, few trust them

Almost every business we spoke to has invested time and money in some aspect of event marketing performance reporting over the past 12 months. No event marketing leader was confident they were anywhere near where they should be.

Three of the most common issues that came up:

1. The board wants to see event marketing KPIs that the tools on their own can’t deliver in a reliable and meaningful way, and too often the skilled humans needed to handle and supplement the tools are missing.
    
2. Ownership is unclear - often inherited rather than properly assigned. In many organisations, ‘who is responsible for reporting’ is unclear. Sometimes the responsibility sits with whoever last built a dashboard. Often it sits with generalist marketers who have no choice but to spend many hours every week pulling numbers together in a manual way, knowing they may not be accurate and very little value can be gleaned from them.
    
3. Conversions counted differ based on where this figure is pulled from, and no one knows which number to trust. Finance, marketing and the ad platforms each report a different figure for the same metric, in the same timeframe.

And there are many more.

Event organisers are not short of data - they’re short of the knowledge and skills to get the most out of it. And that’s a problem we can and should solve with humans, not more technology.

 

So what are the ‘metrics that matter’? It depends on your vantage point.

Marketing reporting should operate at three ‘altitudes’.

TOP: Event business leaders (board and SLT): Total revenue, growth, margin, payback.

MIDDLE: Event marketing leaders: All of the above, plus pipeline contribution, cost per registration or lead (CPA), and conversion between stages - and how these are driven by metrics at the BOTTOM and how these all relate to metrics the TOP cares most about.

BOTTOM: Coalface event marketers: Same as the middle, plus a sharp focus on how performance by channel and activity is driving these numbers. Many tactical metrics here matter on a day-to-day basis for responsive, optimised campaign decisions.

Issues often arise when marketers report very confidently (but manually) at the BOTTOM altitude, and then get asked questions they can’t answer from the TOP.

It’s the missing MIDDLE that is often the biggest problem - a problem that is not at all easily solvable by marketing leaders who often lack the resources and means to solve it.

This really matters. According to The CMO Survey (January 2026), 42.5% of businesses now expect marketing to have significant responsibility for revenue growth, up 10.3 points in a single year. Over the same period, marketing’s self-rated ability to build a business case with the CFO has moved from 4.3 to 4.5 out of 7. The responsibility has shifted. The ability to speak that TOP’s language has not.

What should happen next? First and foremost, event organisers need to acknowledge the problem, its impact, and that resources need to be allocated to solve it.

To discuss what this looks like in your organisation, contact us. We’re always happy to have a no-strings conversation about event marketing challenges, and how we think an organisation should go about solving them.

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The starting point for any marketing measurement, at any altitude, is getting your web analytics set up fully and correctly. Team MPG has delivered many analytics projects for event organisers, giving them confidence in their data and helping them make good decisions that are truly data-led.

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