Larry Kilbourne has written a three-part series about the major reasons why some webinars fail. He suggests the best measure of success is how many people stay for the duration of the webinar:

This is the real measure of a webinar’s success. Because if we can hold someone’s attention for an hour, then I think we’ve established that some level of interest exists, and we’ve probably built sufficient good will to get a warmer (and higher) response to follow-up calls or emails – as well as to invitations to attend future webinars.

He looks at three major areas of failure: content, format, and process.

Part 1 – Content Failures

Regarding content, he says the first two points of failure are overuse of bullet points, and overwhelming amount of information on each slide:

Many PowerPoint decks used in webinars are either graphically deficient (nothing but bullet points) or so overwhelmed by graphics and complicated animation schemes (more on that in Part 3) that it’s impossible to discern what’s being conveyed.

I’ve experienced this in almost every webinar I’ve ever attended. About 5 minutes in, I’m looking at the sea of text and bullet points, and thinking “I could read this on my own and get through it faster.”

Finally, a third type of content failure results when the webinar becomes an unrelenting sales pitch – all about me, my organization, my fabulous product or service. I think we’d agree that most webinar registrants are prepared to get pitched, but they expect in return to receive information, data, or research that will benefit them.

This is when I typically sign off and get back to things that are a more productive use of my time.

Part 2 – Format Failures

Larry says the overuse of bullet points and clutter means the slides don’t have any visual stimulus to keep the audience looking at them:

Given the lack of any visual stimulus, the unmoving PowerPoint slide becomes like wallpaper on our monitor. At that point attendees can easily wind up flipping back and forth between email in Outlook and the webinar.

On top of that, many presenter simply read the bullet points, giving the audience even less motivation to pay attention. One solution, he suggests is to host webinars in “Charlie Rose” style format – a moderator introduces several people, then asks questions that kick off a conversation.

I think this is what makes the Q&A session at the end of webinars the most useful part of the whole experience. Larry’s idea to make that the format for the whole webinar is excellent.

Part 3 – Process Failures

Here, Larry suggests that animations and streaming video are problematic in webinars because audience members may not have the internet connection bandwidth to handle them. Stick with the most reliable form of communication – slide deck – and focus on the quality of the slides themselves.

The second process failure, he suggests, his having a software engineer give a product demo. Knowing the product well, the engineer often moves at a very quick pace – leaving the audience struggling to keep up:

The problem is that the viewing audience has probably never seen the user interface before. This makes it very hard to follow the demo – by the time we begin to figure out where things are on the UI or what is being pointed to, our expert presenter has drilled down eleven levels and might as well be performing brain surgery for all we can comprehend. Impressive, yes. Useful, no.

The last process failure he discusses is absolutely critical, but often overlooked, and easily noticed by the audience: winging it. When a presenter doesn’t do a dress-rehearsal, it’s obvious to the audience in the form of pauses, poor transitions between presenters, and a generally unpolished experience. A good webinar, Larry says, is a production, and should be treated as such.