Conversions seem to be disappearing. 

For years, they were the number one measure of success in paid media campaigns. If conversions went up, campaigns were working. If conversions dropped, it signaled a problem. 

But in today’s digital landscape, many event marketers are asking the same question:

“Where have all the conversions gone?” 
The truth is that conversions haven’t disappeared — they’ve become harder to track. People still register for events. They still search. They still engage with your brand. They’re just doing it in ways that don’t show up in traditional analytics. 

This is the impact of the zero-click era, and it’s changing everything about how we measure performance.

What  does  the zero-click era mean for event marketing? 
The “zero-click era” describes how users now get the information they need without ever clicking through to your website. 

Here’s a snapshot of how online behavior has shifted: 

• 58.5% of U.S. searches end with no click (77% on mobile). 
• Social platforms suppress external links by around 30% because they want to keep users in-app. 
• 90% of users consume silently — viewing content without liking, commenting or clicking. 

This means your audience is absolutely seeing your content, but not taking the visible actions you’re used to measuring.

AI has changed the search journey. 
Google’s AI Overviews, featured snippets and “People Also Ask” boxes now provide complete answers directly on the search page, quickly delivering information and satisfying attendees’ curiosity. This has a direct impact on your event’s campaigns: 

• Fewer users click through to landing pages. 
• The buyer journey is shorter and more self-contained. 
• Your event is influencing decisions long before a click happens. 

Top-ranking listings are seeing up to a 34.5% drop in click-through rates, simply because Google answers the question for the user first. 

Your event may still be chosen, but the attendee may never click an ad to get there.

The rise  of  silent consumption. 
Falling engagement doesn’t mean falling interest. Social engagement is collapsing across platforms. For example, Instagram’s engagement rate has dropped from 2.94% to 0.61% in a single year. But clicks and reactions are just the tip of the iceberg. 

Beneath the surface lie: 

• Profile visits 
• Saves 
• Story views 
• Private shares (DM shares now exceed public shares by 300-400%)

These actions show strong intent, but don’t show up as conversions or engagement metrics. Even when prospective attendees do take action, you may not see it.

Why  old ROI models  don’t  work  anymore. 
Most event marketers were trained to focus on: 

• Cost per click 
• Conversion rate 
• Cost per acquisition 

But these metrics only work when users click, and they are clicking less than ever. Marketing hasn’t become less effective. Our measurement tools simply don’t reflect real behavior anymore. 

What should event marketers measure instead?

How to measure in the zero click era. 
Incrementality 
Measure the overall lift your campaigns create. Ask, “What impact does my marketing have on our bottom line?” For example: What happens to my sales when you introduce a zero-click content strategy? Do branded clicks rise? Do registrations accelerate?

Measuring for incrementality shows whether your marketing actually causes growth without relying on direct conversion metrics.

Share of Voice  (SOV) 
SOV = total industry mentions/brand mentions x100 = SOV.  

SOV tracks how often your brand appears alongside key industry topics and helps measure how effectively your marketing tactics are positioning you as a leader in the conversation.  

Teams typically use tools like SEMrush to monitor topic visibility across social and digital channels. 

When you own the conversation, conversions tend to follow.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 
Events are often recurring purchases. The real ROI comes from: 

• Returning attendees 
• Multi-event attendees 
• Group bookings 
• High-value decision-makers 

Visibility, influence and trust build CLV, even if clicks decline.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 
Including Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) in your metrics provides a more holistic view, measuring the cost to acquire each new attendee and helping ensure efficient spending across your campaigns.

The good news:  Conversions  haven’t gone,  measurement has changed.
Your audience is still converting. They’re just converting in ways that traditional analytics can’t fully capture. 

Clicks used to be the clearest signal of intent. Today, they’re just one part of a much bigger picture.

The event marketers who adapt now by embracing zero-click behavior and modern attribution will build stronger funnels, more resilient campaigns and higher-performing events.

Those who don’t will keep asking: “Where have all the conversions gone?”

Change at work rarely announces itself with a bang.

Most of the time, it doesn’t arrive with a strategy deck or a clear moment where everyone agrees something needs to be different. It sort of just … happens. One day you realize you’re working in a completely new way, and when you stop to think about it, you can’t quite remember when the old way stopped feeling normal.

This is all worth keeping in mind when conversations turn to AI in 2026. Not because AI is identical to everything that came before it, but because the way we tend to react to change usually follows a familiar pattern.

1. Landline Calls > Video Meetings
Not that long ago, having a landline phone on your desk was just part of working life. 

In 2019, it wasn’t unusual to be in a small office and pick up the phone to call someone in another room. Boardrooms had dial-in conference phones. Calls were audio-only by default. No one really questioned it — that was just how communication worked. 

Video calls existed in some form, of course, but they felt slightly awkward. Slightly unnecessary. A phone call did the job, and we were fine with that. 

Then the following year, video meetings became unavoidable and expectations shifted — almost without anyone noticing. People realized that seeing who they were talking to felt better. Screen sharing made conversations easier. Meetings felt more focused, more human. 

The key point here is that video didn’t win because it was new. It won because it made day-to-day communication easier. Once that became clear, going back to calls on a corded device started to feel outdated.

2. Spreadsheet Reporting > Live Dashboards
For a long time, reporting meant spreadsheets. 

Campaign performance lived exclusively in Excel files. Numbers were copied across manually. Reports were shared on fixed schedules. If someone missed a deadline, everything stalled.  

They were trusted. Familiar. Tangible. 

As live dashboards became more common, the shift wasn’t really about automation for its own sake. It was about how teams talked about results. 

Instead of asking whether the numbers had been updated, people started talking about trends and meaning. Reporting became something you could check at any point, not something you waited for. Conversations moved from “what happened?” to “what does this tell us?” 

Over time, the value shifted. Not from control to chaos, but from manual oversight to shared understanding.

3. Printed Decks and Reports > Digital-First Sharing
There was a time when printing things felt professional. 

Presentations were printed out for meetings, even though the same slides were on the screen. Reports were bound, packaged and sometimes even mailed. It wasn’t always clear what problem this solved, but it felt like the right thing to do. 

Then work habits changed. Meetings moved online more often. Information needed to be shared quickly. PDFs, links and online documents became easier than paper ever was. 

What’s interesting is that printing didn’t disappear because people argued against it. There wasn’t a big push to go paperless. It just became less convenient. 

It’s one of those changes that barely registers in hindsight, but it’s a useful reminder that many shifts don’t happen because we decide to change — they happen because the old ways stopped earning their place.

4. In-Person-Only Networking >  Hybrid Connection
For a long time, networking was tied almost entirely to being somewhere in person. 

That model worked for a long time, especially in the events industry. The experience was about showing up and making the most of the time you had in the room. 

What’s changed is that connection no longer has to start (or end) on the day of an event. 

Hybrid and online sessions have extended the life of events beyond a single moment. Conversations continue after the final session. Attendees stay connected through digital communities, LinkedIn groups, newsletters and follow-up content that keeps the experience alive long after people have gone home. 

This hasn’t replaced the value of being there in person. If anything, it’s made it clearer why in-person moments matter. But it has changed expectations. An event is no longer just something you attend — it’s something you stay connected to. 

For organizers, this has shifted the focus from “Who turns up on the day?” to “How do we build a community around this?” For attendees, it means relationships don’t rely on chance conversations alone. They can develop over time, across channels and at a pace that suits them.

5. Manual Notetaking > AI-Assisted Meetings 
This is where AI starts to show up in our conversation, but in a fairly unglamorous way. 

Not long ago, every meeting needed a scribe. Someone had to listen, write, summarize and share notes afterward. That role often fell to the same person, regardless of whether it was the best use of their time or attention. 

Now, automatic transcripts and AI-assisted notetaking are becoming the norm. Meetings can be recorded, transcribed and summarized without anyone having to split their focus during the call. Follow-ups can be clearer and more consistent. Nothing important gets lost because someone was busy writing. 

The real benefit isn’t novelty. It’s relief. 

This is a good example of AI working quietly in the background. Not replacing people. Not making big promises. Just smoothing out a part of work that’s always been a little inefficient.

The Pattern Is the Point 
When you look at these changes together, a pattern starts to emerge. 

Most of these adaptations didn’t happen because organizations suddenly became bold or visionary. They happened because the old way was no longer the easiest option. Once a better alternative proved itself, habits shifted and expectations reset. 

This is why, in many cases, the introduction of AI-powered tools doesn’t need to be framed as a dramatic turning point. It’s already following the same path as the tools that came before it.

Where This Leaves Us 
It’s understandable to feel cautious about AI. There’s a lot of noise around it, and not all of it is helpful. But AI doesn’t have to be an exception to the pattern we’ve seen before. 

For teams feeling unsure, the question isn’t whether to transform everything overnight. It’s whether there are small, practical areas where AI assistance makes work clearer, easier or simply less frustrating. 

If experience tells us anything, it’s that the changes that last aren’t the ones that shout the loudest. They’re the ones that quietly earn their place — and then stop feeling like change at all.

Freeman Chief Strategist Kimberly Hardcastle-Geddes will present a session at the next Attendee Acquisition Roundtable. Registration can be found on the Lippman Connects website and details are below.

March 26, 2026 
8:00am – 4:30pm
Convene (Rosslyn City Center) 
Arlington, VA

Adapting the Approach: How Shifting Audience Expectations Are Changing Attendee Acquisition 
Attendee acquisition is becoming less about volume and velocity and more about relevance, intention and fit. As economic uncertainty, AI disruption and changing work patterns reshape how people decide where to spend their time, event marketers are being forced to rethink not just how they promote events, but who they prioritize and why.

In this roundtable discussion, Kimberly Hardcastle, Chief Strategist at Freeman, will explore several emerging shifts influencing how audiences decide to attend — and return! — grounded in Freeman research and current industry observation. The conversation will focus on how evolving expectations should be reflected in more strategic, selective approaches to acquisition. Topics will include:  

• Strategic selectivity in who we invite and how we invite them. As budgets tighten and audiences face more friction, organizers must be more intentional about prioritizing high-value attendees and aligning outreach strategies accordingly. This includes rethinking audience segmentation, messaging relevance and the signals we send about who an event is truly for. 
• Using AI to support smarter, more personalized acquisition. Rather than scaling one-size-fits-all campaigns, AI can help marketers tailor messaging, channels and timing to better reflect audience needs — creating experiences that feel personal before someone ever registers. 
• Hospitality as an acquisition lever. What corporate events get right about comfort, care and intentional experience design and how these can be applied to B2B shows to influence who attends, how long they stay and whether they return. 
• Post-event engagement as the start of retention. Why the most overlooked phase of the attendee journey is often the most powerful and how thoughtful post-show communication, content and community-building reduce the need to “re-acquire” the same audience every year. 

Rather than focusing on tactics alone, this session invites organizers to step back and examine how external pressures and rising audience expectations are reshaping what effective acquisition looks like. The goal is not “more marketing” but more intentional marketing, aligned with the audiences most likely to engage, attend and come back.  

Kimberly Hardcastle-Geddes
As Chief Strategist, Kimberly drives participation, elevates experiences and future-proofs events for Freeman clients. With a Master of Science in business administration, over two decades of industry experience and a unique ability to shift between analytical and creative thinking, she brings both discipline and imagination to solving complex challenges. Her expertise in event marketing, strategic planning, tactical execution and organizational design was shaped during her 24-year tenure at mdg, the agency she helped build before eventually selling to Freeman. Kimberly is a CEM faculty member, a Krakoff Leadership Institute alumna and has been named by IAEE as an Educator of the Year and a Woman of Achievement. She has a monthly column in PCMA’s Convene magazine and is a frequent presenter at SISO, PCMA Convening Leaders, Expo! Expo! and Lippman Connects events. She’s also the mom of a TCU Horned Frog, wife of a retired Navy pilot, Peloton addict, reader, runner and believer in civil rights. 

For the thirteenth year in a row, mdgers performed Random Acts of Kindness to start the new year off on a charitable note. The initiative originally began in response to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. To honor the 26 innocent lives lost, the agency performed 26 Random Acts of Kindness. Each year since, the mdg team has collectively performed good deeds throughout January — spending quality time (or sharing food) with strangers; donating supplies, clothes and gifts; and generally acting in ways that exhibit compassion for our communities and put a little more love into the world.

Abbey D. — gave out cake pops to grateful seat neighbors on a flight.

Sveta P. — participated in Angel Tree Initiative; got Sofia an American Girl doll, kids’ Bible, leggings, a top and a winter coat.

Rachel G. — purchased a coat and gloves as part of a school holiday donation drive.

Ashley R. — left a box of treats and snacks out all month long for any delivery drivers.

Kate F. — coordinated donation drive for Homeward Trails Animal Rescue and created Valentine’s Day cards for kids in the hospital.

Pri C. — visited a nursing home with her boys and their dog, Nila.

Sara B. — surprised coworkers with cookies.

Emily G. — hid Post-Its with kind messages in library books with her kids.

Shauna P. — left kind notes and lottery tickets in neighbors’ mailboxes.

Steph B. — brought towels and blankets to a shelter for cats and dogs.

Liz I. — baked and decorated cookies for her kids’ teachers.

Caiti V. B. — bought lunch for the crew renovating her bathroom.

Ingrid T. — bought lunch for the maintenance crew at the D.C. office.