B2B Webinar Benchmarks: Registration, Attendance and Meetings

Across the largest published datasets, a B2B webinar draws roughly 250 registrants and converts somewhere between 40% and 60% of them into attendees. Goldcast measured 40% across 26,190 webinars in 2025. ON24 reported 60% for the same year. That 20-point gap is mostly a disagreement about what counts as an attendee. Both platforms are describing much the same behaviour.

Below is every webinar benchmark I could trace back to a named dataset, with the publisher and the year attached to each figure. ORRJO's own numbers are labelled as ours. Where a benchmark does not exist, the cell says so rather than guessing.

The benchmark table

Two rules for reading it. Platform data describes that platform's paying customers, so Goldcast's 40% is a fact about Goldcast's book of business before it is a fact about B2B. And an average drawn from a skewed distribution is not a target, which is the trap sitting in the very first row.

What is a good registration number for a B2B webinar?

The published average is 251. The one published median is 80. Use the median.

Goldcast's 2026 B2B Webinar Benchmark Report covers 26,190 webinars run by 522 B2B organisations through calendar 2025, which makes it the largest B2B-only webinar dataset I could find with a stated sample size. It reports 251 average registrants per event, up from 238 the year before. Then, in the day-of-week breakdown, it says something more useful. Thursday events averaged 486 registrants, and Goldcast adds that the median Thursday event draws 80, calling that "a more typical benchmark for most programs".

Read that twice. On the day that pulls the most registrants, the mean is six times the median. A handful of very large recurring events are carrying the average, and any programme measuring itself against 251 is measuring itself against a distribution it is not part of.

The shape is not new. GoToWebinar's Big Book of Webinar Stats, published in 2019 from 250,000 webinars run in 2017 by more than 17,000 businesses, found that 44% of webinars had fewer than 25 attendees. A different platform, seven years earlier, with the same skew showing up.

Budget makes the point harder to argue with. Wistia's 2026 industry benchmarks, published on 22 April 2026 from a survey of more than 900 professionals alongside its own platform data, found that 43% of the marketers surveyed said their company spent under 1,000 dollars on webinars for the whole of 2025, with another 35% spending between 1,000 and 10,000 dollars. That is 78% of the marketers Wistia surveyed spending under ten thousand dollars a year on webinars. A sub-1,000-dollar budget and a 251-registrant average do not belong to the same company.

What to plan against. For a first webinar to your own list, 60 to 150 registrants is a normal outcome. A mature programme with a partner's audience behind it reaches the high hundreds. ORRJO's Jua webinar series produced 556 sign-ups and Aveni's programme produced 1,000, both across a series rather than one session. Those are ranges we plan against, not promises, and the variable that moves them most is whose list you are borrowing.

What percentage of registrants actually attend?

Between 40% and 49% attend live, depending on the platform. The 60% figure you will see quoted is real, and it is counting something different.

ON24's blog of 19 June 2026, summarising its 2026 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report, states a registration-to-attendee conversion of 60% for 2025. The same page says 67% of attendees joined live and 43% chose on demand. So ON24's attendee is anyone who watched, live or later. Goldcast's 40% is live attendance, with on-demand counted separately as 15.9% of total viewership. Univid, whose Webinar Insights 2026 covers more than 2,000 mostly B2B webinars, publishes both cuts and shows the size of the effect precisely: 49% live, rising to 57% once replay-only viewers are included.

Line those up and the industry disagreement mostly dissolves. Live attendance sits in the forties. Total viewership sits in the high fifties to sixty. Anyone comparing their live rate against ON24's 60% is losing an argument with a definition.

The more interesting number is who you are. Banzai's Webinar Statistics 2024, published in January 2024 from more than 800,000 webinars hosted on Demio during 2023, breaks attendance rate down by the host company's revenue.

Source: Banzai, Webinar Statistics 2024, January 2024, 800,000+ webinars on Demio in 2023.

A startup under a million in revenue runs at roughly half the attendance rate of a company past ten million, on the same platform, in the same year. Very little of that gap is about content. People show up for names they already recognise, and the distance between 22% and 48% is the price of not yet being one of those names. If you are early, budget for it in the registration number rather than blaming the topic afterwards.

Why does the attendance rate decide whether a webinar was worth running?

Because you pay at the registration line and you get paid at the attendance line. The emails, the paid promotion, the partner fee and the two weeks of your team's time are all spent by the time someone fills in the form. Whether 22% or 48% of those people turn up, that cost is identical. Attendance rate is the multiplier applied to money you have already spent.

GoToWebinar disagreed, in print. Its 2019 report told marketers that "while you should track this metric, the reality is your impact on it is limited" and to drive registrations instead. That advice was reasonable on 2017 data and it is wrong on current data.

Banzai's 2023 sample settles it. Webinars using the platform's own reminder emails ran at a 35% live attendance rate. Webinars without them ran at 9%. Reminders are not the only variable, and Banzai notes the comparison excludes reminders sent from other systems, so the 9% means no Demio reminders rather than no reminders at all. Even allowing for that, a 26-point spread on an operational choice is not a metric you have limited impact on. Goldcast's own platform rate moved from 33% to 40% across a single year and 26,190 events, which is a 21% relative improvement that no shift in audience behaviour explains.

There is a second reason, and it matters more for pipeline. Attendance is where segmentation gets created. Sequel.io's April 2026 breakdown puts high-engagement attendees at 12% to 15% conversion into sales conversations, passive attendees at 3% to 5%, early leavers at 1% to 2%, and registrants who never engage at under 0.5%. Everyone in the top band was in the room. Your attendance rate is therefore the size of the only pool where conversion is meaningfully above zero.

One caution, because the rate on its own can flatter. A 60% attendance rate on 30 registrants is 18 people. In GoToWebinar's 2017 sample, 44% of all webinars had fewer than 25 attendees. Always read the percentage against the absolute number, and if you can only keep one, keep the absolute.

How many meetings should a webinar produce?

For 250 registrants, plan for 3 to 10 meetings.

Three sources with nothing in common land in roughly the same place, which is the strongest thing you can say about a number in this category. The two Sequel.io rows bracket the outcome. Neither of them is a forecast. Sequel.io publishes the conversion rate for each engagement band but not the size of each band, so anyone who hands you a single blended percentage has invented the mix.

Run it backwards and the planning problem becomes obvious. Twenty meetings from one session needs roughly 200 to 650 attendees, which at a 40% live rate means 500 to 1,650 registrants. Almost nobody hits that from one webinar to their own list. It is why a webinar meeting target belongs to a programme, and why the two ORRJO figures worth quoting here, 556 sign-ups for Jua and 1,000 for Aveni, were both accumulated across a series.

The honest caveat on our own numbers: Aveni's 500+ meetings are the output of demand generation and lead generation running together across a partnership now in its fifth year. Attributing all of them to webinars would be exactly the kind of arithmetic this article is arguing against.

What is a good webinar to pipeline conversion rate?

Webinar leads convert to closed customers at about 2.9%, against 3.0% for email and 3.7% for SEO. That is my arithmetic, compounded from stage rates published by First Page Sage on 11 June 2025, drawn from more than 50 B2B SaaS clients mostly in the 10 million to 100 million dollar revenue range.

Stage rates: First Page Sage, B2B SaaS Funnel Conversion Benchmarks, 11 June 2025. The bottom two rows are mine, multiplied out from the four above them. First Page Sage defines an SQL as an MQL who has indicated the product is desirable, is within budget, and is speaking with a salesperson.

The total is the least interesting row on that table. Look at the shape. Webinar leads have the highest lead-to-MQL rate of the five channels at 44%, meaning they fit the target market better than anything else measured. They also have the highest opportunity-to-close rate at 40%, meaning that once a webinar-sourced deal is real, it closes better than a deal from any other source in the table. And yet webinars finish mid-table, because of one step.

The loss is at MQL to SQL. 39%, against 51% for SEO and 46% for email. Webinar leads are well-targeted and they close well, and they fall over at the handover to sales.

Sequel.io's segment data says the same thing from a different angle. The attendee who asked a question converts at 12% to 15%. The attendee who sat in silence converts at 3% to 5%. If you export the registrant list and hand all of it to sales, you have chosen the 3% to 5% band on purpose, and your MQL-to-SQL rate is going to look like the webinar column above. More registrations will not move that number. Qualification will, and the qualification decision has to be made before the session: what does an attendee have to do to earn a sales call?

What nobody publishes

These gaps are as useful as the numbers, because they tell you which benchmarks to treat as opinion when a vendor quotes them at you.

• Meetings booked per webinar. No primary source publishes this with a stated dataset and method. Sequel.io publishes conversion by engagement band but not the size of the bands or the sample behind them. LinkedOtter published 3 to 7 meetings per 100 attendees on 19 June 2026, from its own client work, with no dataset attached. The other figures I opened traced back to one of those two, or named no source at all.
• A UK-only benchmark. I could not find a B2B webinar benchmark built from a UK dataset. Goldcast, ON24, Wistia, Banzai and Univid all report platform-wide populations that are either US-weighted or unstated. If you are running a UK B2B webinar programme and someone quotes you a UK attendance benchmark, ask them for the dataset.
• Attendance by list source. Nobody publishes the split between your own list, a partner's list and paid registrations, which is the single cut that would explain most of the variance in the table above.
• Any industry sample at all. Every large attendance dataset here is a platform reporting its own paying customers. Companies that buy Goldcast or ON24 are companies that take webinars seriously enough to buy Goldcast or ON24. There is no neutral B2B webinar population being measured by anyone.
• Precision without provenance. Several pages ranking for this query state medians and means to one decimal place with no publisher named. I could not trace those figures to a source. Treat a decimal point with no dataset behind it as decoration.

And ORRJO does not publish a webinar attendance rate. We publish sign-ups and meetings, because those are the numbers a client is buying. A webinar attendance rate that cannot be compared across platforms, list sources, company sizes or definitions tells a prospective client nothing they can act on, and adding one more incomparable percentage to this category would not have made it more honest. The attendance number we do publish is 90%+ on booked meetings across 12,500+ of them, which is a different metric measuring a different promise.

How to use these numbers without fooling yourself

Four checks, in order.

1. Match the definition before you compare. Ask whether the rate you are holding is live-only or live plus on demand. That single question accounts for most of the 20-point spread in this article.
2. Benchmark against the median, and against your own revenue band. 80 registrants and a 22% attendance rate is a normal first year for a company under a million in revenue. Measuring that against 251 and 60% will make you cancel a programme that was working.
3. Count attendees, not registrations, then count engaged attendees. Registrations are a cost line. Engaged attendees are the only population with conversion above 5%.
4. Set the meeting target on the programme. Twenty meetings needs 500 to 1,650 registrants at published rates. Across four sessions that is a plan. From one session it is a wish.

If you want the format that produces those numbers rather than the benchmarks that describe them, our webinar and event programmes run inside demand generation, which starts at £2,500 a month.

And if you record only one number after your next webinar, record how many attendees did something during it. Asked a question, answered a poll, clicked a link, stayed past the halfway mark. That number predicts what the follow-up will produce. The registration count predicts nothing.