2024 Industry Benchmarks for Your Webinar Analytics

Have you ever looked at your webinar performance data and wondered if your webinar strategy is successful? You have all the numbers, but are they good numbers? Lucky for you, there’s a way to find out: Stack your data against industry benchmarks!

We’ve got plenty of key benchmarks right here. We surveyed businesses for our annual State of Video Report, looked at webinars hosted with Wistia Live, analyzed 5,000+ webinars uploaded to Wistia each month, and rounded up the numbers for you.

Let’s dive in!

Why are marketers hosting webinars?

When we asked marketers why they hosted webinars, we found that we could group their responses into two areas:

1. Guide prospects or customers down the go-to-market funnel by engaging with them or generating leads
2. Establish industry expertise by building brand awareness or expanding their content library

Hubilo’s State of Webinars 2024 report backs this up. They found that 75% of webinars targeted the top and middle of the funnel (TOFU and MOFU), with 39% being TOFU webinars to spark interest and 36% being MOFU webinars to nurture leads.

What types of webinars are marketers doing?

We found that a quarter (25%) of live events uploaded to Wistia were company updates, 17% were product updates, and 16% were branded live events. Then we’ve got educational lectures making up 9%, training sessions at 7%, and how-tos and walkthroughs rounding out the list at 2%.

How often do marketers host webinars?

Over half of the companies who responded to our State of Video survey run a live virtual event at least once a month.

Hubilo found that nearly half (46.5%) of businesses take three to six weeks to plan a webinar. For those that manage to pull it off in three weeks or less, it’s likely because they’re using webinar templates or running a series, both of which speed up the planning process.

How much money are marketers investing in their webinars?

According to Hubilo, most businesses are investing between $10k and $40k in webinar platforms every year.

But that’s just the start. Many companies also spend extra to run their webinar programs, most likely to book speakers or run ads to boost live and on-demand registrations. Out of these businesses, nearly half (47.6%) keep this budget under $10k a year, 42.9% spend between $10k and $30k, and just under 10% splurge over $30k.

How are webinars performing?

We looked at Wistia Live data between January and July 2024, and here’s what we found:

Average number of registrations

On average, each webinar brought in 68 registrations.

If your numbers are falling short, consider ramping up your efforts. You can spread the word through different channels, and don’t stop promoting your event until the big day!

Average attendance rate

The typical turnout for a webinar was 42 attendees. When you divide this by the average number of registrations, you get an attendance rate of 62%.

Anything over 50% is good. If you want to improve your attendance rate, look at your own data and ask yourself:

• Are you sending your registrants too many or too few reminder emails?
• Are you hosting the right amount of webinars?
• Can you identify trends in your past webinars where certain topics drew bigger crowds?

Average chat participation rate

On average, 20% of attendees participated in the chat during live events.

If you want to increase your chat participation rate, try engaging your audience by asking them open-ended questions or encouraging them to share their thoughts and experiences.

On-demand recordings

We also looked at the performance of on-demand recordings from these live events. Here’s what we found:

• On-demand recordings averaged 21 plays per month, which is 50% of the typical number of live attendees per event.
• Viewers watched, on average, 14.6% of each recording.

Want to get more eyes on your on-demand webinar recordings? We’ve got a few ideas:

• Include the recording in a follow-up email to your registrants.
• Repurpose the recording into a different piece of content and link to the full recording.
• Create a dedicated landing page for the recording.
• Showcase your webinar recordings in a video gallery (Wistia Channels is great for this!)

Start crushing your webinars

Now that you’ve got these webinar benchmarks, it’s time to compare them with your own webinar metrics and see how you’re stacking up!

If your numbers need a boost, just keep tracking your performance and fine-tuning your strategy.

Want more tips on improving your webinar metrics? We’ve got plenty in this post about the best analytics to track!