Links and codes for events, before during and after

Three phases, three link sets

Before the event you are selling tickets or registrations to people who are not there. During it you are serving people standing in front of a sign with a phone in their hand. Afterwards you are following up with attendees and reaching the people who did not come. Each phase wants different destinations, and mixing them into one link destroys the ability to tell them apart.

Pre-event: one link per promotional surface

Email, partner newsletters, paid social and the speakers' own posts should each have their own link. Speakers in particular will share whatever you give them, so give each speaker a personal link — it is a small courtesy, it lets you show them their impact afterwards, and it is the cleanest way to see which speaker actually drives registrations.

On-site: design for a phone at arm's length

Every on-site code should be dynamic, sized for its reading distance, and labelled with what it does. A code on a session-room door is scanned from a metre away and can be small; one on a banner across the hall is read from five metres and needs to be large. Put a typed short link under every code for people whose camera will not cooperate.

Give each physical placement a distinct link

The badge, the programme, the booth banner, the session slide, the table tent. This is the only way to learn which on-site placements work, and that learning is what makes next year cheaper. It also lets you spot a code that is scanned zero times, which usually means it is behind a plant or above eye level.

Prepare the post-event redirect in advance

On the day after, every one of those links should point somewhere sensible: recordings, slides, a thank-you page, next year's waitlist. Decide the destinations before the event and switch them in one batch. Links printed in a programme will be scanned for months, and the difference between a dead code and a recordings page is entirely a matter of ten minutes of preparation.

Have a plan for the room that has no signal

Conference wifi fails and basements have no reception. A QR code that leads to a heavy page is useless in that room. Point on-site codes at light pages, and where the content is critical, consider a code that encodes the information directly — wifi credentials, a phone number, a calendar entry — rather than a URL.

Report by phase, not in aggregate

A single number for the event tells you nothing actionable. Report pre-event registration sources, on-site placement scans and post-event follow-up separately, and keep the same link structure next year so the comparison is real.