Posted by
Barry Siskind
UFI’s Community Manager

Metrics used by retail and e-commerce companies can provide important clues for exhibition organizers.

In a recent blog, posted by Mashables’ Dani Frankhouser, the topic of metrics was discussed. Typically telecommunications companies and many e-commerce companies use Revenue per User (RPU) that is the revenue from each customer per visit. One benefit of this metric is that it helps investors put a value on the company. For example Twitter’s RPU is $0.55 while Facebook is $1.60. But RPU does not take into account the long term potential of the customer so retailers often look to average revenue per year per customer as a more meaningful metric.

Both of these metrics make sense for exhibitions. Exhibitors are impressed by the average orders placed at a fair and the long term potential by these same visitors. It helps them differentiate one exhibition opportunity from another. But there may be one more valuable piece of information they need.

The measure of social influence that attendees hold is also important to both organizers and exhibitors. For example, how large of a social network does the average attendee have and how actively involved with this network are they? Both are good questions that can lead to an understanding of whether these people can influence others to attend or purchase from exhibitors they meet at an exhibition.

An exhibition is part of a corporations marketing and it stands to reason that the ability to influence both today’s attendees and those who might attend in the future is a positive indication of the long-term health of the exhibition. Social influence might very well be a metric worth considering.

http://mashable.com/2013/12/05/revenue-per-user-metrics/?utm_cid=mash-prod-email-topstories&utm_emailalert=daily&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily