If you run events you probably want to compare your marketing numbers with someone else’s. I always wanted to, and nobody would share theirs. So here are all of ours.
The raw numbers
£4,046 in ad spend produced 499 orders and 528 registered attendees. That is a cost per attendee of £7.66.
Split by channel: Meta took £2,660 and delivered 199,524 impressions at £0.77 CPC. LinkedIn took £1,386 and delivered 110,912 impressions at £1.15 CPC. Paid was not the whole story though. Of the registrations, 23% came from our own list, 15% from co-organisers, and 6% from a paid newsletter.
What the split actually tells you
The lesson is not “Meta is cheaper”. It is that the channels do different jobs. If you need volume, Meta fills the room. If you want quality, partners and newsletters win. LinkedIn remains questionable for filling seats, though it may be better for recruiting speakers than attendees.
Notice that nearly 40% of registrations came from owned and partner audiences rather than paid. That is the same argument as community being about value rather than size, and it is why community beats content when you are trying to get real people to show up.
The number nobody publishes
Only 112 people showed up live. That is a 21% show rate, which is genuinely solid for a free online event, and it will still sound low to anyone who has never measured it. Registrations are a vanity number. Attendance is the real one.
This is why I am wary of any metric that looks good in isolation, the same reason conversion rate is becoming a weak metric and why you should benchmark before you optimise. A number without a comparison is just a feeling.
Why publish this at all
Because everyone quotes their wins and nobody quotes their cost per attendee. Sharing the real figures is the same instinct as being open about what our tooling actually costs us. If you are planning an event, you now have a benchmark to argue with.
If you want help reading your own acquisition numbers honestly, book a call.