Bizzabo’s 2026 events industry benchmarks find that 78 per cent of organisers rate in-person conferences as their most impactful marketing channel, with 54 per cent of attendees planning to attend more events than last year — but networking effectiveness ratings are declining as expectations rise.

In-person events have come back from the pandemic years not just recovered but repositioned. Across the B2B marketing mix, in-person conferences, summits and industry gatherings are now rated by organisers as the single most impactful channel for driving commercial outcomes. The expectation placed on those events has risen with their status.

Bizzabo’s 2026 benchmarks put the figure at 78 per cent of organisers ranking in-person conferences as their most impactful marketing channel. Forty per cent plan to host more events this year; 40 per cent plan to hold steady. Fifty-four per cent of attendees say they plan to attend more in-person events compared with last year. In-person is growing in both supply and demand, despite — or partly because of — the digital overload that followed the pandemic years of virtual-only programming.

Why in-person has pulled ahead

The shift in Freeman’s attendee research tells a specific story. In 2021, 39 per cent of B2B event attendees cited networking as their primary motivation for attending. By 2025, that figure had risen to 58 per cent. The primary value proposition of an in-person event is no longer the content — it is the access to people that digital channels cannot replicate. Attendees can watch a keynote on demand; they cannot replicate a conversation in a conference corridor or a dinner with ten peers facing the same challenge.

Seventy-one per cent of attendees believe in-person B2B conferences offer the most effective way to learn about new products or services, according to Bizzabo’s 2026 data. The in-person format creates a context — focused, time-bounded, away from the inbox — that elevates both the attention brought to content and the quality of conversations around it. The competitive intelligence value has also sharpened: a well-chosen conference delivers a read on where the market is moving that is difficult to assemble from digital sources alone.

The expectations problem

Sixty per cent of organisers rate their networking opportunities as only somewhat effective in 2026 — a figure that has been declining year over year even as attendance grows and the networking motivation strengthens. The demand for meaningful peer connection is rising; the delivery is not keeping up.

This gap reflects the structural difficulty of engineering quality networking at scale. Attendee satisfaction correlates much more strongly with the quality and relevance of the people in the room than with the size of the gathering. An event of 2,000 mixed-seniority attendees with a generic networking reception produces worse peer connection than a curated summit of 150 pre-vetted participants with structured roundtables. Fifty-four per cent of event planners report that most of their events now bring together 250 people or fewer, according to Blackthorn’s analysis.

What event ROI now demands

The rating of in-person events as the most effective channel sits alongside a measurement challenge that is only partially solved. Cvent’s 2026 State of Events report found that 54 per cent of marketers do not track event registrations against pipeline targets, and 53 per cent do not track opportunities created from events. An event rated as the most effective channel is not, in most organisations, being measured as rigorously as paid media or email.

The consequence is that event budgets are defended on reputation and anecdote rather than demonstrated pipeline contribution — a defence that is vulnerable when budgets come under pressure. As marketing budgets flatline at 7.8 per cent of company revenue, every channel is being asked to justify its allocation with data. The most effective marketing channel in B2B is also the one with the most measurement work still to do.