LogMeIn announced upgrades to GoToWebinar today. I had a chance to speak with Daniel Waas, the GoToWebinar Director of Product Marketing at Logmein. He took me through the latest updates and shared a few thoughts about future developments (many of which are not ready for public disclosure yet).
Today's announcement focuses most prominently on "behind the scenes" improvements for webinar hosts and administrators. Attendees and presenters will most likely see no changes to the user interface and controls they are already familiar with.
Daniel says that they are now handling on the order of 2.3 million GoToWebinar sessions a year from their customer base. They wanted to make the platform more useful and intuitive for the people charged with scheduling, managing, and analyzing all those Webinars.
One of the first and most obvious priorities was to make sure that administration worked well on mobile devices, so all organizational screens are now mobile-responsive.
A new interface for administrators allows a streamlined approach to scheduling and editing webinars. This had been a pet peeve of mine in the past… Working on different aspects of a webinar (eg: branding, email customization, user roles) required opening secondary pages, making the desired changes, and returning to the master page. Now everything is on one screen, with sections that expand and collapse to allow access to all aspects without navigating between web pages.
Similar streamlining makes it easier to get analytics during registration and after a webinar completes. A new analytics dashboard puts many different statistics in one place for quick reporting and visualization. You can also see upcoming webinars in a calendar mode and now you can quickly scan through all your upcoming webinars to see the number of people registered for each without having to run a report.
In addition to just seeing raw numbers for a single webinar, the new analytics interface lets you compare performance of webinars against each other and against a master trend line for all webinars (in chart and table format). You can add filters to include only desired subsets of your webinars and you can download the information in Excel, CSV, or PDF formats.
Another cute new feature is integrated help suggestions implemented through tool tip popups. For instance, you can ask for advice during the scheduling process and get suggestions based on GoToWebinar's compiled webinar statistics and best practices to help you craft webinar titles or pick webinar days and times that are likely to attract more attendees.
LogMeIn also added new integrated interfaces with third-party providers such as AWeber, Hubspot, Unbounce, and Zapier.
If you record your webinar (and why wouldn't you?), you can now click a single button to publish it to your GoToStage account. This gives viewers easy access to all your recorded content in one place. There are new capabilities for customizing theme colors and banner image branding on your page, as well as giving you the ability to add custom text (typically used for satisfying GDPR disclaimer notifications). Daniel told me to look for additional enhancements to be announced later, with ways to make GoToStage recording portals even more useful and powerful.
The only other future plans announcement LogMeIn is admitting to in public is the ability to use automated speech-to-text transcription for recorded webinars. This is currently in beta mode. Plans call for timecodes to be automatically built into the text transcriptions, letting users search for a term, click on a sentence, and go immediately to that point in the recording playback. Very nice!
Based on my conversation with Daniel, I feel safe in saying that this is by no means a "one and done" enhancement release. Keep your eyes open for other improvements in GoToWebinar that will further extend its usefulness for both organizers and webinar participants.
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