Explains how your analytics and registrant data becomes cleaner and more accurate, even on your webinar dashboards, when you enable the Universal Dashboard.
The Universal Dashboard is a subscription add-on that lets you track unique registrants and run analytics across all – or any combination – of your webinars.
It also lets you manage all chat from one central inbox.
But perhaps its most valuable feature happens entirely behind the scenes.
Once the Universal Dashboard has been enabled, your analytics and registrant data gets processed in a different way. Instead of everything being based around webinar sessions, it becomes organized around unique registrants, using their email addresses as the unique ID.
The result is cleaner, better data everywhere, even on your webinar dashboards. More specifically, you get:
- More accurate analytics
- No duplicate registrants
Watch this 4-minute video – or keep reading – for an overview of how this works:
How the Universal Dashboard improves your data everywhere
Let’s imagine a basic scenario for one of your webinars to demonstrate how your analytics might change from before enabling the Universal Dashboard to after. Though the principles described below apply more broadly, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll focus on three core metrics: attendance, completion and conversion.
What is a conversion in eWebinar?
"Conversion” is typically a sales term. In eWebinar, however, it can mean a number of different things, depending on your goals. For example, a conversion could be when a webinar attendee:
- Purchases your product
- Signs up for a free trial
- Tests out a feature in your SaaS product
- Signs up for the next webinar in a series
- Fills out a contact form
- Puts time on your calendar
- Y más.
Tracking conversions is simply a way to measure how well attendees respond to your webinar’s primary call to action. Learn more
Before enabling the Universal Dashboard
Starting with what the data would look like before subscribing to the Universal Dashboard, here is the scenario:
Three people sign up for your webinar. The first two sign up for one session eachy the third signs up three times.- Registrant A attends the webinar, watches the whole thing, and converts from it.
- Registrant B attends the webinar and converts, but doesn't complete it.
- Registrant C does something different with every session.
- The first session, she misses entirely.
- She attends and completes the second session, but doesn't convert.
- For the third, she comes back and converts without finishing.
In the end, you get 5 registrant sessions and, when you do the math, 80% attendance, 40% completion, and a 60% conversion rate. This approach is standard among webinar platforms and what you are accustomed to seeing in your analytics.
After enabling the Universal Dashboard
Now let’s look at the exact same scenario, except this time, it’s after the Universal Dashboard has been turned on.
When someone registers multiple times for the same webinar using the same email address, the system, using common sense logic, automatically combines the data from all of their sessions into one master session record for that one registrant. (The logic used is what we call multi-session logic. More on that below.)
In this case, though different things happened in different sessions, we know Registrant C attended the webinar, completed it, and converted from it. All of this gets captured in the master record for Registrant C and is what would be sent to your CRM for them.
So now, with the Universal Dashboard turned on, you get 3 unique registrants, 100% attendance, 67% completion, and 100% conversion. And most importantly, you have more reliable, higher quality data! – made possible by the fact that your data is now organized around unique registrants, by email address, instead of around sessions.
When you compare the before and after, it might seem like the number of registrants went down, but the second number is the one that’s correct. It is the actual number of registrants who signed up for your webinar. And since data from repeat sessions is combined, attendance, completion, and conversion rates went up across the board.
The bottom line: when you subscribe to the Universal Dashboard, two significant data improvements come with it:
- More accurate analytics: You get a better, more accurate picture in your analytics of how your webinars are actually performing
- No duplicate registrants: You get only unique registrants on your registrants list – without any duplicates!
These improvements show up everywhere, on your individual webinar dashboards and on the Universal Dashboard itself.
Did you notice a change in the analytics on your webinar dashboards?
If you recently subscribed to the Universal Dashboard, you may have noticed a shift in your webinar analytics for the reasons described above.
If you saw only a very small change or no change at all, it is probably because:
- It is not common for you to have registrants sign up for your webinars more than once.
- The number of registrants and attendees you have is high enough such that, even with the changes, your overall rates are about the same.
Where to find data derived using multi-session logic
As explained above, when you are subscribed to the Universal Dashboard and a registrant signs up for the same webinar multiple times using the same email address, we use multi-session logic to combine the data from all sessions into one master session record.
The question then is, "Where and how does this show up in eWebinar?"
When you open a registrant's record and go to the Webinars tab, you can easily see which webinars a registrant had multiple sessions for. (The data in these rows comes from the master session record.)
To illustrate, if you look at the top example above, the Registered date is in May (the first time this registrant signed up for the webinar) while the Session date is in February of the following year (their latest session time), giving you the breadth of time this person has interacted with this particular webinar.
If you hover over one of these rows and click View, it opens the master record for that webinar and registrant, showing data combined from all of their sessions.
A message at the top of the page indicates when you are looking at a master session record where multi-session logic has been applied.
How do I know the specific logic used when session data was combined?
When looking at a master session record, if you want to know the specific logic applied to a property when data for it was combined from multiple sessions, hover over the info icon next to the property and you will see.
If the info icon shows no multi-session logic, it means the data was taken from the most recent session. (Either that, or multi-session logic is simply not relevant in that case.)
If you would like to review the original sessions that the data in the master session record came from, expand and show all sessions of the webinar. (The original sessions appear as nested rows beneath the master row.)
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Then, hover over any of the rows and click View a be taken to the record for that one session. This way, you can always view the source data on a session by session basis.
Multi-session logic is not foolproof.
There are times when the logic we apply does not surface the "best" value for a particular property. This is usually caused by outlier behavior on the part of the registrant. However, if you think you see a flaw in our logic, please report it to support@ewebinar.com and we will take a look.
Cross-webinar multi-session logic
In the majority of cases, multi-session logic only applies to a registrant's sessions of the same webinar. There are two exceptions, however, where data may be pulled from different webinars. They are:
Name-related properties
First name and Last name (and, hence, Full name) come from latest session of any webinar where both First name and Last name are not empty. (If there is no session where this is true, we take the latest value for each from any webinar session.)
The reasoning behind this is, depending on how your registration forms are set up, you may have instances where someone gives you their first and last name in an earlier session or webinar but not in a later session or webinar. This logic helps ensure that a registrant's full name is preserved if they share it any time.
Custom properties
In cases where a custom property exists for the same registrant in different sessions, the value preserved by multi-session logic is the latest value from the registrant.
Custom properties include responses to interactions, like polls, and answers to custom questions added to your registration forms and widgets.
Whether that value comes from one of the registrant's webinars or any of them, however, depends on context.
To illustrate, let's say you had a Poll interaction in two different webinars asking, "What is your favorite color?", and you gave the custom property the same name in each webinar (e.g. favoriteColor).
For multi-session logic to be applied to custom properties from different webinars, they must share the same property name.
Setting aside the flip-flopping of the registrant 😂, the table below shows which value would be surfaced where by multi-session logic, based on context.
| Date | Response | Session of | Where value is surfaced with multi-session logic |
| 4/1/2025 | Blue | Webinar 2 | On Registrant info tab in registrant's record |
| 3/1/2025 | Yellow | Webinar 2 | Not surfaced |
| 2/1/2025 | Yellow | Webinar 1 | In Webinar 1's session record for that registrant |
| 1/1/2025 | Blue | Webinar 1 | Not surfaced |
If you think about it, it's common sense. If you are looking at a particular webinar, you want to see the latest answer from that registrant for that one webinar only.
If, however, you are looking at their master registrant record (the Registrant info tab, shown below), you want to see the latest answer from across all of their webinars.
