Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

As Zahid said, cost per lead is the cost for the show divided by number of leads.

This number says somewhat how the trade show did, but is not necessarily good. For example, if you raffled off something at the show, you likely got a lot of business cards from people who wanted to enter the contest. These folks aren't necessarily leads, as they may have no interest in your product. But they likely would get counted as leads.

Also, there are many ways to calculate the cost for show, ranging from just the cost for the booth space up through all costs (including travel expenses for those who work the booth - which can come from a different account within your company). A company I used to work for only calculated the costs that went back to MarCom (booth space, shipping, setup, if a MarCom person went to the show, etc.), but not the travel costs of people from other departments (sales and marketing), which often was considerable.

if we closed any business from that lead - how do you get a number for that?

If you did not have a system to track the information when you ran the trade show, then it is likely you won't get this data. Probably the best you can do is poll the sales force and ask if any of the leads from the show turned into sales (or are still potential sales).

There have been various questions and articles related to this on this site. If you use the search in the blue bar at top to search articles, or the search questions link to the right to search questions, you can find more information on "ROI" and "lead tracking".

Hi marybeth,

You have received some good input from above. Our firm has build to a ”Tradeshow Return-On-Investment Calculator” to make it easier for marketers to understand their “cost per lead” data from tradeshow events.
https://www.schraff.com/adv/helpdesk/ts_roi_calculator.php

It’s not perfect, but I hope you find it useful.

Best of luck,

- Steve

As I agree with the answers above, just 1 more thing to add for cost per business closed: you can ask each of your customers where they first learned about you and how they decided to do business with you: this way you will count customers that did not necessarily left their business card at your trade show, but noticed you and contacted you later on for business