I was reading a post written by Dennis Shiao on Virtual Event ROI. Dennis participated on a panel at the 2009 Virtual Edge Summit talking about the return on investment on hosting virtual events.

His post got me thinking about all the ways I measure the return on my virtual event investment (ROVEI?). I’ve used both the phone and webinar technology to host my virtual events and you may think that these 2 tools lack a way to measure your results.

In one sense, yes. But where there’s a lack, I use other tools to help me measure what I’m doing. For example:

• I use Cartville to manage my affiliate commissions, clickthrough and sales. The image below is a screenshot from my 2008 Social Media Telesummit, an 8-day virtual event I hosted entirely over the phone. My affiliates used special links to share with their network to help me promote the event. The screenshot below shows which sales were referred by my affiliates and the total commission I paid out to them.

• I used a URL shortening service that tracked clickthroughs to a summary of the content I heard after the first day of the 2009 Social Media Telesummit. I just love budurl.com and used it to shorten my really long virtual event URL so I can share it on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Not only does it track clicks, but budurl.com tells you where it’s coming from. The screenshot below is a screenshot from budurl.com.

• To measure attendee engagement, I use a hashtag on Twitter. This helps me to monitor how engaged attendees are in what they’re hearing. The screenshot below shows a few tweets from attendees from one of my more recent virtual events. The Twitter hashtag my co-host and I used was #osmt.

There are certainly other tools that I use, but these are just a small sample of what’s in my virtual event measurement toolkit. This helps me to keep the costs low since most of these tools are free or low cost.

What other tools would you suggest to help virtual event managers measure sales conversions and audience engagement?