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How to… …calculate trade show ROI

By  Ben  ·  5 minute read

Just before NAB 2025, I wrapped up a month-long LinkedIn challenge where I posted a daily tip for vendors preparing for a trade show. The final tip - ‘Track your metrics and calculate your ROI’ - sparked more reaction than any other. Many said calculating ROI on shows is ‘super hard’ or even ‘impossible.’ I get it. Trade shows are complex. But with tighter budgets and declining attendance, ROI is more important than ever. So, here’s how I’d do it...

 

The Quick and Dirty ROI Formula

Let’s start with an assumption: most vendors attend trade shows to generate new leads and move existing opportunities further along the pipeline. If that’s the core goal, then the most logical metric to focus on is the value of your pipeline before and after the event.

This leads us to a quick, straightforward method for estimating ROI:

R = ((P2 − P1) × W) − C

Where:

R = ROI

P1 = total pipeline value before the event

P2 = total pipeline value after the event (once revenue teams have input all new and progressed opportunities)

W = average win rate (e.g. 20% expressed as 0.2)

C = total cost of attendance (all direct and indirect costs)

For example, if your pipeline increased from $6,000,000 to $7,000,000, your average win rate is 20%, and your total cost of exhibiting was $100,000, then:

ROI = (($7,000,000 − $6,000,000) × 0.2) − $100,000
ROI = $200,000 − $100,000 = $100,000 net return

This method is fast and easy to calculate, gives you a ballpark figure that's tied to tangible business outcomes, allows for comparisons across different events and gives you a data point that's commercially relevant and immediately understandable to the executive team.

It’s certainly better than nothing. And so long as you apply the same method consistently across equivalent events (such as comparing NAB year over year), you’ll have a clear, comparable data point to help guide decisions and justify spend.

However, the approach also comes with limitations. First, it assumes that lead generation and pipeline progression are the only goals for participating in a show.

Second, it relies heavily on sales and account teams to input and update (detailed) opportunity data promptly.

Third, this method doesn’t tell the full story. It over-simplifies both the "return" and the "investment" side of the equation.

Expanding the "I" in ROI: What Are You Really Investing?

Most marketers will start with the visible costs—booth space, design, build, T&E, freight, collateral and swag. These are the line items that show up in the finance system and tend to dominate the post-show debrief.

But if you want to truly understand ROI, you need to go deeper to find the “hidden” costs. There’s the internal time investment - weeks or even months of effort from marketing, sales, product, leadership, operations, and finance. Add to that the staffing required on-site, including setup, booth management, and meetings throughout the event itself.

Opportunity cost is another essential but under-discussed factor. What weren’t you doing while preparing for the show? For many companies, trade shows soak up a significant portion of strategic focus—often at the expense of ongoing demand generation or brand-building activity. If you’re shifting time, budget, or attention away from other business priorities, that’s part of your investment too.

Larger organisations often have the advantage of systems in place where employees log hours against projects. In those cases, it’s possible to generate reports on internal time given to trade show activity and apply an average hourly rate to estimate the resource cost.

Smaller companies may not have this data readily available, but it’s still possible to build a reasonable estimate. Add up the number of people involved, the hours spent in planning meetings, the time on site, and the estimated hours for follow-up tasks. Multiply that by a sensible blended hourly rate across the team. The result may surprise you - what often feels like a modest effort can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars in hidden costs.

Expanding the "R" in ROI: What Are You Really Getting Back?

Acquiring new contacts and generating sales opportunities are typical responses when asking why companies exhibit at shows. But trade shows also offer the chance to progress existing deals, strengthen relationships, protect renewals, and reduce churn. Then there’s the wider community aspect: building credibility and reinforcing your standing within the industry.

Return can and should be measured across these objectives. That includes:

  • Awareness: booth traffic, press mentions, social engagement, or branded content views.

  • Engagement: meetings booked, demo attendance, session participation.

  • Customer health: strategic conversations with key accounts, renewal support, upsell potential.

  • Partner and channel development: new introductions made; co-selling activity initiated.

If you’re considered and consistent in your formula, you can easily assign estimated dollar values to your broader return metrics:

  • Awareness: Use advertising cost equivalents. For example, if you achieved 50,000 impressions and your average CPM is $15, that's $750 worth of media exposure.
  • Engagement: Apply your historical conversion rates. If 10 qualified meetings typically convert to $80,000 in closed revenue (10 × 0.4 × $100,000 × 0.2), then that engagement is worth tracking.
  • Customer health: Renewal at risk? If a $300,000 renewal is salvaged thanks to an in-person conversation, that’s a tangible impact.
  • Partner development: Use potential reach or shared marketing costs. A new channel partner enabling access to $1M of new pipeline—even conservatively valued—could represent a six-figure strategic upside.

Some of these will be estimates but what matters is that you define what return looks like for your business and track it consistently.

With this, we can put together a more complex, but more accurate ROI calculation.

R = [((P2 − P1) × W) + Ra + Re + Rc + Rf + Rm] − (Cd + Ct + Co)

Where:

Ra = awareness return

Re = engagement return)

Rc = customer retention and expansion return

Rf = partner/future opportunity return

Cd = direct costs (booth, travel, logistics)

Ct = internal time cost (estimated hours × blended rate)

Co = opportunity cost (deprioritised projects, agency hours diverted)

While this is undeniably more accurate and holistic than our initial formula, it carries two significant limitations.

First, it’s complex. Calculating each of these inputs with any degree of confidence takes time, alignment across departments, and a level of data discipline that not every organisation has baked into its processes. It’s achievable, but it’s not fast.

Second, and more importantly, this formula still treats the trade show as a discrete event. It assumes clear boundaries around the impact - before, during, and after.

Attribution and the Campaign Context

Rather than asking, “What did we get back from NAB?”, the more strategic question is, “What did NAB contribute to our year-long marketing effort?”

Attribution helps map a lead’s journey across multiple touchpoints. Choose one attribution model - such as first-touch, last-touch, linear, or W-shaped - and apply it consistently to help you understand the show’s role in context. But attribution alone doesn’t provide a per-lead cost, which is where CPL becomes useful.

CPL = Total Cost / Number of Leads

If your show cost $150,000 and you gathered 250 leads, your CPL is $600 - although that number can be misleading if you’re including unqualified badge scans “meaningful engagements”. To get more value from CPL, you can segment your leads by qualification and pair the metric with conversion data.

At this point, CPL is a useful comparison metric but doesn’t consider trade shows being a part of a broader campaign and/or any attribution. For that we have the weighted CPL:

wCPL = Trade Show Cost / (Number of Leads × Attribution Weight)

For example, if your $150,000 trade show influenced 100 leads, and on average the show represented 40% attribution, the effective number of attributed leads is 40, giving a weighted CPL of $3,750. This better reflects the true cost of the leads the show helped to generate.

wCPL is useful when lead volume is your focus. But when lead quality or progression is more important, CPCv, or Cost per conversion may be a better metric.

CPCv = Total Cost / Number of Conversions

If the same event generated 50 demo requests (the criteria for conversion from MQL to SQL) your CPCv would be $3,000. This shifts your analysis from counting contacts to measuring qualified engagement.

 

Final Thoughts

Calculating ROI from a trade show isn’t easy. But in today’s environment, it’s increasingly necessary.

The media tech landscape is changing. Buyer behaviour is evolving, sales cycles are compressing, and the role of the big international shows is being redefined. At the same time, smaller, more focused events are gaining traction, and lower-touch engagement models are becoming more viable, especially for products shifting toward platform and SaaS-based delivery.

In this context, understanding your ROI isn’t just about proving past performance. It’s about informing future decisions.