Everyone talks about measurement but everybody has a different idea of what that means. “We got 4,000 leads at the show!” is a typical misunderstanding of trade show ROI or ROO measurement.  Statistics and measurement can be simple or spun to be so complex that it becomes statistics and graphs for the sake of, well, graphs and statistics. It reminds me of a discussion I had once with a movie producer friend of mine.  I was in the video editing business back then and a client wanted me to edit a two week project for a piece of the “sure-bet-can’t-lose-gonna-make-a killing” back end profit.  My wise friend advised against it, adding that “figures lie and liars figure!”  (I took the advice; good thing because the project was a financial disaster!)

So it can be with trying to measure trade show ROI. A typical request is to know how many sales resulted from the trade …