When someone enters an art museum, they typically spend less than 30 seconds viewing each painting. And this isn’t just true of art museums. Any experience falls victim to the same pitfalls, since the world around a visitor is vying for their attention. When an event attendee logs on to a virtual event, they’re not only watching a moderator interview the keynote speaker, they’re also texting their friends, checking LinkedIn to congratulate folks on work anniversaries, and maybe even ordering lunch through a delivery app.

It can be difficult to keep people focused, and that’s something we have to navigate in our interconnected world. But when it comes to measuring your return on investment (ROI) for any business asset, it becomes more complex than just quantitative results; you have to look at qualitative information as well.

Think about developing engagement KPIs to check ROI.

In a museum, traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) might include number of visitors, donations received, new memberships sold, and number of acquisitions. There’s more to a visitor than just the statistics you have on them, though. These are people who are going to converse with docents and with each other. If you can capture that valuable information in creative ways, the quality of your visual assets and the content within your exhibits will improve to meet the standards of your guests—and you can do that through encouraging engagement.

Here are four engagement KPIs we find to be most helpful when thinking through museum exhibit development, event experiences, and trade show booth strategies.

Track the quality of your social media engagement.

After you’ve identified what social media platforms your target markets are most likely to use, come up with ways for people to engage with your business assets such as a photo scavenger hunt, during which your customers tag your business on platforms like Instagram. You can create an event hashtag to prompt participants to comment on what’s going on. Or in your day-to-day social media posts, ask your followers questions they can respond to.

While the number of likes and shares are useful KPIs to track, the quality of comments on a social media post and the thoughtfulness of followers’ event posts are equally as important. This assessment is sometimes neglected because the quality of comments and posts is subjective. However, if you have a perception of your followers, and their posts seem to match those views, that’s valuable! If the way they speak isn’t in line with your expectations, it’s useful to dig into why that’s the case.

Keep track of the quality of these comments and posts, and make sure you’re always responding to them in order to learn more or to clarify something someone said.

Measure audience retention through knowledge checks.

While you don’t want to give your customers an exam, knowledge checks can be useful at increasing engagement. You can incorporate knowledge checks into email campaigns—asking for responses to a prompt related to your business’s expertise and getting permission to publish the most introspective answers. During a virtual event, you can ask open-ended questions and allow people the time to respond in the comments section.

No matter how you collect knowledge check responses, have some sort of mechanism in place to record answers. If you’re using a video platform like Zoom, save the chat so your team can review comments; you can measure the effectiveness of a webinar by scanning that saved chat for comprehension.

Categorize usefulness of free-form answers from feedback surveys.

Asking for your audience’s opinion is crucial for growth. When you send a feedback survey, the qualitative data you get back helps you understand what you need to focus on to improve your business. A survey should always include quick-answer components such as Likert scale questions. For example: Rate this dinosaur exhibit on a scale from 1 to 10.

You should also include prompts with paragraph-style text boxes. If visitors indicate they didn’t enjoy the dinosaur exhibit, they might be able to articulate why that was. Not only do the amount of survey respondents matter but understanding their reasoning behind a positive or negative rating can help shape future exhibits, in this particular instance.

Measure value of engagement on long-form and short-form business assets.

Engagement can be tracked long after an event, trade show, or otherwise has ended. For example, if you hosted a multi-day virtual conference and have all of the content recorded, you can utilize those videos afterwards. While you don’t want to suffocate your audience with only content related to that conference, here are some ways you can reuse it:

• Come up with two to three valuable quotes from each seminar and post them on social media over the following months.

• Identify one-minute clips within the webinars to create easy-to-watch YouTube videos.

• Take topics that arose in the comments section of the seminars and use those topics for podcasts.

Test both long-form and short-form content for quality of engagement by comparing comments you received during the conference itself to comments you received in your reiterations of the conference content. This not only allows you to track engagement KPIs but also increases your ROI well after a conference, event, or exhibition ends.

Engagement KPIs are just one way to calculate ROI.

Qualitative information is one part of the ROI puzzle when you’re determining what business assets are going to be most effective for you. It’s a constant test based on what you think your target markets are going to like, factoring in historic information. With the wide array of virtual and in-person experience options out there for people to partake in, make sure your team is aligned on goals and how you can track them both quantitatively and qualitatively.