What is repeat attendance?

Repeat attendance is how many of last year’s people came back. It is the closest thing a conference has to a verdict, and it is rarely on the dashboard.

In practice at an event

Its authority comes from cost. A satisfaction score is an opinion given for free, weeks after the event, by a self-selecting subset. Repeat attendance is a decision somebody made with a budget, and it reflects everything about the event including the parts nobody put in a survey.

Read it alongside first-time attendee share. Both high is healthy growth. High repeat and low new is a shrinking event with a loyal core, which looks fine for two years and then does not. Low repeat and high new is an event that acquires well and disappoints, which is the expensive failure mode because acquisition costs more than retention.

What to look for

Split every other metric by first-time against returning attendees. The two groups experienced different events and averaging them hides both.

For associations, the strongest version of this measurement is renewal rate among attendees against non-attendees. It is the most convincing ROI evidence available to a membership organization and it is very rarely run.

How event67 handles it

event67 reports engagement within an event — active attendees, funnels, top sessions, session ratings, connections. It does not compute repeat attendance across events for you, because that comparison depends on how you identify the same person across two attendee lists, which is your decision and your data. The attendee records exist in both events; the join is yours to make.