On your dashboard, you will notice two buttons on each webinar: Run a Test and Your Links. There is only one, very important, difference between them. Your Links is to be used only when you are ready to go live. You can use Run a Test to be sure that your webinar is fully functional.
Run a Test creates a perfect clone of all your webinar settings. There you can test any aspect of your live webinar, but it will not affect the real thing in any way. We recommend running a test of your webinars at least 24 hours ahead of time. This will give you plenty of time to fix whatever needs fixing and test again before going live.
Different Links
Let’s look at what is inside…
Registration Page
The first link visible is the registration page. This is the link you will send to your leads so that they can become registrants. The pencil icon allows you to customize the link. Note: customizing this link, called “Branded links” is only available on EverWebinar or WebinarJam Professional or above.
Embed in your website
Embed in your website (shown below) allows you to place registration on your own page via a button or bar with a button. You can read more about how to customize these here.
Direct Link to Live Room
The final registrant link tab shows the Direct link to live room. This is immediate access to the webinar room, without the need to register first. Because it skips our registration and tracking, this link should only be used for emergencies. If you have a user trying to enter the webinar after registration has closed, this may be the choice for you.
Presenters Links
Moving on to the Presenters links, you will find two links available here: Live Room and Control Panel.
Live Room is the link you will use to stream your audio and video to the audience.
Control Panel can be used to moderate the webinar and view statistics on attendees. Both of these links (by clicking the email icon) can be sent to the presenter they belong to and can be opened directly by clicking the arrow.
Replay
The Replay links (shown below) will only become available once you have run a webinar. Select a session and the link will appear. To the right are icons to download the video file and open the replay page. If the download button is greyed out (as it is below) it means that the recording is still being processed or if the webinar never went live.
Download Chat Log
After the webinar ends, you can download the chat log in the next area (shown below). Just as with the replay, select the session and a download button will appear.
Survey Results
Finally, if you set up a Thank You Page Survey, the results will be available for download as a CSV file here (as shown below).
When opening the presenter link for the live room, the system will need to perform a simple audio and video test to check your computer’s bandwidth and syncing. Take note of the last minute checklist (shown below) as each of these are important for a successful webinar.
Test Your Video and Audio
Click Continue and you will be informed of the webcam/microphone tests (shown below). As it says, you’ll be able to turn them ON/OFF at any time once you are in the webinar room.
Click Start The Test to begin. You will see drop down menus for selecting your webcam, microphone, and a live video stream (shown below) . If the screen shows your webcam and you can hear sound (make sure your computer is not muted), go ahead and click ‘yes’. If you do not see or hear yourself, click no and the system will attempt again.
If you cannot seem to get it working, click the camera icon in the URL bar. The drop down menu will show you whether the camera and microphone are blocked, or if the wrong camera or microphone are being used. Reload the page if you have changed any of these settings.
Enter the Room
When you enter the room (shown below), your camera and microphone will be off by default. The option to turn these on are at the top of the page alongside the screensharing feature, and whiteboard tool (pointed out below). You can find these same options in the center of the window on your video screen.
In the upper left is a highlighted star indicating that you are an administrator for the webinar. If you have co-presenters, their windows will also have this star, but it will be greyed out. You can click it, turning it yellow, to give them administrator abilities (such as ending the webinar or adding more admins).
Virtual Background & Blur
The very next button (marked below) allows you to blur or replace the background of your webcam.
Use one of our preset backgrounds, or select “My uploads” (shown below) to choose your own up to 4 megabytes.
Go Live and Panic Button
Next to these buttons are the Go Live (marked 1 below) and Panic Buttons (marked 2 below). If you’re having trouble connecting or something has gone wrong, you can use the Panic Button to create a new webinar room that all attendees will be moved into. This button should be reserved for emergencies only.
Sidebar
Let’s take a look at the sidebar. At the top, you can find information about the webinar room itself. Whether you are live on air, how many people are currently in the room, how long you have been broadcasting, and how strong a signal you have for broadcasting.
Below this, you have all your options and settings for your stream. There are a lot of features and they have all been separated into tabs you can find on the left. The first that is open shows the room settings.
Here you can disable or enable chat, change whether chat messages are public, private, or allow both.
You can disable showing the number of attendees to your attendees, as well as disable their ability to request to speak.
You can also redirect all attendees to a URL of your choosing by entering a URL here and clicking the icon on the right.
Finally, if you are screensharing, showing a presentation, or using a video, you can choose where your webcam thumbnail is positioned.
Attendees Speak
If you enable attendees ability to speak, you will find their requests in the bottom tab (shown below, labelled “Speak”) where you can accept or deny the request. If you accept, they will be brought in as presenters with video!
Chat
The next tab is where most of your interaction will happen: Chat. You can not only chat with your attendees (or have a moderator chat with them) but you can also create sticky messages to remain on screen for them to see.
When chatting, you can also choose to only chat with administrators or with the whole room so you can send important messages to each other without the attendees seeing them.
Finally, you can change the chat mode into Q&A mode and attendee messages will be marked as questions while your messages will be Answers. You can change any message by clicking the bubble next to a message.
Polls
In the third section, you can poll your audience. If you used the Full Configuration during setup, you will have the option to select a poll you created ahead of time, but if you used Express to setup your webinar, you can create a new poll on the fly! After the poll is over, you can opt to show the results to your audience as well.
Offers
Similarly, the fourth tab allows you to offer a product or simply link somewhere. While you can pre-configure these in Full Configuration, you can also create these on the fly, even adding images to the offers!
Video
WebinarJam also allows you to share videos with your audience directly, without the need to share a video on your screen. Here you can add a video from YouTube or a direct link to an mp4 video file. Keep in mind that links like Wistia and Dropbox will not work for this feature. Using this feature for video sharing means that the video will be adjusted for each attendee’s bandwidth and it won’t rely on your own bandwidth for video quality!
File Sharing
File sharing lets you upload small files to share with your audience directly! Perhaps you have an audio file for your attendees to listen to later, or maybe a compressed folder of resources. This is the feature for sharing those things with the audience! You can configure it ahead of time, but you can still use it on the fly!
Slide Presentations
Another awesome feature is Slide Presentations. You can upload a Keynote, Powerpoint, or pdf presentation to the system directly and control the slides from within the webinar room itself! No need to screenshare your presentation program window.
Additional Presenters
At the bottom of the sidebar, you can invite additional presenters by clicking the plus icon, and entering their name and email. They will be emailed their own link to enter the webinar as a presenter (since your link will not work for them).
Minimize Sidebar
Finally, you can minimize the sidebar by clicking the red tab on the side. When you are ready to go live, press the green button at the top and confirm Yes. WebinarJam will prepare for live streaming and go live while the button will change to red. When you are done, click it again, confirm yes, and the broadcast will end.
Room Expiration
If you have not yet gone live, a timer (shown below) will be in the lower portion of the frame showing how long you have to go live. If you do not go live in one hour, you will need to visit the live room link again to reinitiate the room.
In this article we’ll discuss various parts of the Moderator Control Panel.
The Control Panel
The Control Panel (as shown below) is the center of operations for your moderators.
Chat Box
The first of the three boxes visible (shown below) is dedicated to chat. From the first tab (Chat) you can chat with attendees, and edit/delete their messages if needed. The second tab (Q&A only) shows only the messages marked as questions. A response there will be marked as an Answer.
Click the three dots next to a message and you will see the user’s name, email, and options to:
Edit their comment
Delete their comment
Reply to them in private
Broadcast their comment to everyone
Invite them to join as a presenter in the live room
Ban them from the live room
If you are opening the Control Panel in EverWebinar, this will be the only box available. In addition, since each attendee is in their own room (separate from anyone else watching), they will not see the chat from other attendees. However, if you chat in the lower field your message will appear to anyone watching. To prevent confusion, it is best to reply in private to any message.
Live Elements
The next box (shown below) is dedicated to live elements like polls, offers, videos, files, and slides. Each of the preconfigured live elements can be controlled here, or new ones can be created on the fly.
Attendee Box
The final box lists your current attendees. The tabs on top filter the lists into all Attendees, only those who purchased, and only those requesting to speak live as a presenter.
At the bottom of the box, you can redirect all attendees to a URL of your choice and resend email notifications to registrants.
The top bar in white (shown below) displays, from left to right:
The current number of attendees
How long the webinar has been live
How many attendees have been in the room for each 5 minutes (shown as a graph)
The current attendees compared to the peak number of attendees
The number of sales made
The total revenue earned
Upper Right
In the upper right are two icons (shown below). One shows if you are on or off the air (live streaming or not), while the other is for additional settings. Clicking that icon, you can:
Restrict chat messages to public, private, or both
Display or hide the number of attendees
Allow or block attendees from requesting to speak live
Change the position of the live webcam thumbnail
Change the size of the webcam thumbnail
Add New Presenter
Just to the left of these icons (shown below) is listed each of your presenters. Clicking the + icon allows you to add a new presenter with their name and email.
This article is for both WebinarJam and EverWebinar. Make sure to paste any example code to a single line, as some information has been split to ensure it is displayed properly.
The One-Click Registration Hotlink is an advanced way to allow people who are already on your autoresponder mailing list to get quickly registered for your webinar by clicking on just one link.
The link must be sent through your autoresponder, with the #shortcodes# specific to your autoresponder being used for name and email. So when the link goes correctly through your autoresponder, it will automatically replace the #name# and #email# parameters with the name and email from your list.
The main benefits are:
People on your list are more likely to register for the webinar because they simply click a link in an email you send them.
If you have a tagging system, you can tag that the person clicked the link.
This friction-free registration leverages your autoresponder to bypass the registration page, automatically register your subscriber to the webinar, and directly forwarding them to the Thank You page so they can grab their unique link to the event.
IMPORTANT:Due to anti-spam policies compliance, WebinarJam and EverWebinar only allow the use of the One-Click Registration Hotlink if it’s used through a well-reputed, long-established autoresponder such as Aweber, MailChimp, InfusionSoft, Kartra, iContact, GetResponse, Ontraport, etc. Any other use is forbidden and will result in the termination of your account.
Get Your One Click Link
First of all, you need to set up your webinar and a registration page for those who are not currently on your list.
NOTES:
If the “One Click Registration” link does not have the right #shortcode# for your autoresponder, it will not replace the name and email and will leave it empty.
If you require last name or phone number on your registration page, you will need to also add those #shortcodes# to your One Click Registration Link.
Then you need to go to My Webinars. You’ll see it in the top left of the webinar dashboard.
Choose the webinar where you want to get the “One Click Registration” link and click the “Advanced”
Notice that some information is URL encoded — %40 in place of ‘@’ and %2B in place of ‘+’
One Click Variables
While a One Click link looks similar to the following, there are some different parts to it.
The first part of the code is Webinar hash, the identifying code for your Webinar. This is automatically generated in the link and looks like this: a1b2c
First Name
The first_name=John is required and gets the registrant’s first name to add to your list. “First” will need to be replaced with your autoresponder’s first name #shortcode#.
Last Name
The last_name=Smith is optional, but if it’s been set as required, it must be used in the one click link. “Last”, if required, will need to be replaced with your autoresponder’s last name #shortcode#. If you don’t want to use it, you can simply remove it from the Hotlink.
Email
The email=JohnSmith%40Domain.com is required and gets the registrant’s email to add to your list. Note that “JohnSmith%40Domain.com” will need to be replaced with your autoresponder’s email address #shortcode#.
Phone Number
The phone_country_code=%2B1&phone_number=5555555555 is optional but if it’s been set as required, it must be used in the one click link. “%2B1” and “5555555555“, if required, will need to be replaced with your autoresponder’s corresponding country code and phone number #shortcode#. If you don’t want to use it, simply remove it from the Hotlink.
Timezone
The timezone parameter is only required for EverWebinar events configured to take place “under the user’s own time zone“. If that is how you’ve configured your webinar, you must enter the time zone in GMT terms (example: GMT-7, GMT+7, GMT-2, etc). For any other type configuration, be it WebinarJam or EverWebinar, simply delete this parameter from the link altogether because you already configured the event’s time zone from the configuration wizard.
Schedule ID
The “schedule_id” number refers to the actual number displayed in your interface while configuring your webinar dates. For example, in the screenshot below the only possible values for the Schedule parameter would be either “1” or “2“. There is more detail on the schedule further down.
Modifying the One Click Hotlink Link for Your Webinar
The One Click Registration you copied above contains last name and phone number. If you made these optional fields, they are not required to be part of the One Click Registration. So from this link from EverWebinar
Now we’ll gather your code for your autoresponder…
If your autoresponder is not in this document or your One Click Registration code is not working, then you will want to look for the unique email code and name code that your autoresponder uses and replace
“First” and “YOU%40YOUREMAIL.com”
With the appropriate code; some example codes are
name: {!name} OR {!firstname} or [fname] or ~Contact.FirstName~
email tag: {!email} or [email] or ~Contact.Email~
You’ll typically find these in the shortcodes when you set up an email.
Selecting the appropriate Schedule ID
The “schedule_id” number refers to the actual number displayed in your interface while configuring your webinar dates. For example, in the screenshot below the only possible values for the Schedule parameter would be either “1” or “2”.
In the example above, if your one-click link includes “schedule_id=3”, then the user will be registered for the webinar scheduled for 2020-01-05 at 02:30 PM Central European Time.
If your schedule is configured as a series of events (as opposed to a one-off event), please note that the end user will be registered for all of the webinars in the series.
In the example above, if your one-click link includes “schedule_id=2”, then the user will be registered for the whole series running a webinar every Tuesday at 02:00 PM Pacific Time.
Sample Codes For Major Autoresponders
When you paste your one-click link into your autoresponder email composer, you must make sure to use the correct shortcode for each parameter (first name, email, etc).
Each autoresponder uses a different nomenclature for those shortcodes. Below, we’re going to look at some variations based on the Major Autoresponders, these may vary based on your own personal set up with the autoresponder. Check with your autoresponder for phone shortcodes.
You have two options to embed the webinar registration form straight into your own website, hosted on your own server/domain. Both options will, upon clicking, pop the registration form so your visitors can subscribe to your event.
The sticky footer bar
The embeddable button
Please note that both options will require some basic HTML and CSS coding skills on your end. If you don’t know HTML or CSS, any junior web designer will be able to do it for you for a very reasonable price.
The sticky footer bar
This option will overlay a horizontal bar at the footer of your page that will remain sticky as your users scroll down the page. By default, the bar is blue color but you can append some parameters to customize it.
The first thing you’ll want to do in your analytics area is select a webinar, session, and event to view (shown below) clicking “Go” when you’re ready.
Traffic
The first box deals with your traffic (shown below). You’ll see four numbers and three percentages. First, on the far left, is the number of visitors to your registration page. The total number of registrants is to the right with the Conversion or Sign Up Rate listed in the middle.
The number of registrants can be higher than the visitors to your registration page if people are registered through the One-Click Registration Link or by Auto-Subscription.
The final numbers are the Live Attendees, Replay Attendees, and the Show Up Rate for both.
Also please note, as shown below, that if you hover your cursor over each of these icons, we will display which devices your visitors were using!
Engagement
Below Traffic are details on engagement during your Live Webinar and your Replay Room (shown below). On the left is a graph depicting the number of viewers at a given time (shown at 5 minute intervals).
To the right are the statistics for number of attendees, total length of the webinar, average amount of time any one attendee stayed, the percentage of attendees that watched the whole webinar, and finally the user rating of your webinar (along with the number of ratings provided).
Monetization
If you are selling your webinar or tracking sales of a product through your webinar, you’ll need the next section: Monetization (shown below). First you’ll see the number of tickets sold and revenue earned from those tickets.
Following this are the sales made from the Live and Replay Rooms. Sales Conversion refers to the percentage of attendees who made a product purchase. People who registered but did not watch will not be considered in that number.
Earnings per attendee is the amount of money you earned per attendee based on total earnings. If you had $100 of sales and 100 attendees, this number will be $1.
Notifications
The final area is for your Notifications (shown below). Each notification you set up will be displayed here. Alongside them is shown how many were sent, opened by the registrant, and how many registrants clicked a link inside.
The reset icon on the far right will reset all of these statistics. If clicked, you cannot restore the previous email statistics.
If your business model relies heavily on webinars and your user base is fairly stable, you might want to activate this feature so your subscribers don’t need to register over and over again every time you put together a new live event.
Setting it up
For WebinarJam (not EverWebinar), you will find at the “Registration” step of the configuration wizard a feature called “Auto-subscription to future webinars”.
If activated, your webinar registration form will display an extra check box, giving your users the possibility to automatically sign up to any future webinar you might conduct in the future. Needless to say, it’s their choice and thus they must manually tick the checkbox themselves.
Importing them to the next webinar
Next time you configure a new webinar, you will want to roll over all those users who have opted for the auto-subscription feature. It’s a manual process you need to trigger yourself whenever you are ready to import all those users.
Click on the Your Links button for your new webinar, and you will see the number of people who have opted in. At this point, the only thing you need to do is to select the session you want to import/subscribe them into. As a result, they will automatically receive a confirmation email with all the information related to your upcoming webinar: the webinar topic, scheduled date and time, their unique link to the live session, etc.
Opting out from the auto-subscription feature
Every email notification sent by WebinarJam includes, at the footer, the mandatory unsubscribe link. Upon clicking on that link, your users will be given the opportunity to opt out from your contacts database.
Sometimes, you might want to give your webinars a more professional touch: better picture quality, crisp audio, a studio-like stage, etc. For those special occasions, your computer’s built-in webcam and earphones might not cut it… it’s time to plug in an external pro camera and microphone!
The setup is fairly simply, but you will need a bit of extra of hardware to connect everything together. The complexity will depend on whether you want to plug in one single external camera, or whether you want to go full ninja and sport a multi-camera production!
A single external camera and mic
By far, the simplest way to wire in an external camera and mic into your computer is via a USB Capture HDMI Adapter. This adapter is nothing but a dongle where you input your camera’s HDMI cable and your microphone’s mic+audio jacks, converting all that into a single USB output that will go straight into your computer.
You will find plenty of them in Amazon, such as for example the Elgato Camlink 4K or Magewell USB Capture HDMI Plus, but shop around as prices range significantly depending on brand and specifications. Whichever you buy, just need to make sure it converts HDMI to USB input for capturing video, and make sure your search query includes the term “video capture”.
Finally, right before entering your live room, WebinarJam will ask you to select your default audio and video device. Make sure to point both to your capture device of choice (see above).
A multi-camera setup
If you want the full potatoes, giving your webinar a studio-like production quality, nothing beats multiple cameras shooting your event from different angles. You will certainly need a bit more of an installation overhead, plus a human operator whose job is to switch in real time the input signal from the different cameras.
Let’s go step by step.
STEP 1: Connecting your VIDEO Sources
Firstly, you’ll need a piece of kit to plug in multiple cameras and to switch, in real time, between those camera sources as your webinar event takes place. A popular and affordable example would be the Black Magic Design ATEM Mini.
This hardware allows you to plug in multiple HDMI sources (Cameras, Computers, etc.) and then “cut” between them on the fly. The HDMI output on this device will be sent to your computer running WebinarJam.
STEP 2: Connecting Your AUDIO Source
Because you are now using an external switcher (the ATEM Mini), you need to make sure you have a microphone connected to send audio as well as video to the WebinarJam computer (via HDMI).
Any microphone with a 3.5mm output will do the trick, such as for the example the Fifine 3.5 mm Plug And Play Microphone. Plug the “Audio Out” from the microphone into the “Audio In” on the ATEM switcher.
STEP 3: Allowing WebinarJam to receive the ATEM MINI HDMI signal.
Although your computer may have an HDMI plug, that is usually an output signal. As a result, it will not receive the video input signal. For your computer to receive the video from the ATEM HDMI output, you need a capture device turning the HDMI signal into a USB signal… WebinarJam will view this device as a webcam, allowing you to use it.
You will find plenty of them in Amazon, such as for example the Elgato Camlink 4K or Magewell USB Capture HDMI Plus, but shop around as prices range significantly depending on brand and specifications. Whichever you buy, just need to make sure it converts HDMI to USB input for capturing video, and make sure your search query includes the term “video capture”.
STEP 4: Instruct WebinarJam to grab the input signal from the capture device.
Right before entering your live room, WebinarJam will ask you to select your default audio and video device. Make sure to point both to your capture device of choice (see step 3 above).
Finally, remember to conduct several test webinars before you go live whenever using 3rd party hardware. Sometimes it takes some tweaking and trial/error to the get the entire set up properly wired in, and you don’t want to do that in the last minute!
For the best webinar experience, we have the following recommendations for the webinar host and all co-presenters involved in broadcasting a webinar.
Computers/Laptops used for broadcasting the webinar should at least have a modern Quad-Core processor with 8Gb RAM.
Ensure that the camera and microphone used are connected either internally or externally via a USB connection.
Set the Camera resolution to 720p although you can go up to 1080p
A headset is encouraged.
Be sure you’re using the full bandwidth capabilities; no sharing of the same internet connection while broadcasting.
Run your webinars from a hardwired internet connection instead of WiFi, if possible.
The host and all co-presenters can run an internet speedtest via this link: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat The upload and download speeds should be at least 5mbps; however, the higher the better.
The Bufferbloat (Latency) should be at least “B” or higher or in other terms, less than 100 milliseconds (ms).
Close out of all apps, programs, windows, tabs, music, or anything that isn’t necessary to your webinar to free up as many of your computer and Internet resources as possible.
Clear your cache/cookies for “All time”, restart your machine and run your webinar from a fresh browser.
Use the most up to date version of Google Chrome. Firefox is a good secondary option. For iOS devices use Safari. This is also the same for all attendees.
Avoid hosting a webinar and watching as an attendee on the same bandwidth. If this is done, your bandwidth will be optimized for uploading the video, and the download of the stream will be compromised.
Lastly, we recommend creating a clone of the actual webinar for testing purposes, using the links from the “Your Links” button of the clone webinar. You can have test attendees join the webinar so they may revert back with any possible difficulties they may experience. This way you can thoroughly test any webinar without affecting the actual webinar in any way and make corrections where needed.
