Rittal / Hannover Messe 2026: Trade Show Performance Measured Systematically for the First Time
Initial Situation
Trade show appearances are among the largest marketing and sales investments for many industrial companies. Yet the question of their actual impact often remains unanswered.
Ahead of Hannover Messe 2026, Rittal faced a key challenge:
How can the success of an exhibition booth be objectively evaluated beyond visitor numbers, leads, or subjective impressions?
Which areas truly attract visitors?
Where do visitors genuinely engage with content, and where do they simply pass through?
How can these insights be used to optimize future trade show formats?
To answer these questions, the exhibition booth was approached as a measurable system in collaboration with CALA.
Technical Solutions
The project focused on systematically structuring and analyzing the entire exhibition booth by dividing it into clearly defined areas and zones.
The entire booth was divided into functional segments, ranging from product areas such as Electrical Engineering, Automation, and Cooling to catering and communication zones. Additional sub-zones were defined within these areas to provide more detailed insights at the individual exhibit level.
Precise data was collected for each zone, including:
Visitor numbers and movement flows
Dwell times as an indicator of interest in the content
Occupancy levels over time and peak periods
Entries and exits across defined tracking lines
Particular emphasis was placed on the methodological quality of the data.
Only visits lasting between 5 and 60 minutes were included to capture relevant interactions and minimize distortions caused by brief visits or booth staff.
The data was compiled into structured reports, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the exhibition booth across all event days for the first time, including trends over time, space utilization, and visitor movements.
Benefits for Rittal
Through this analysis, the exhibition booth was transformed from a traditional presentation space into a fully measurable and analyzable environment.
Rittal was able to understand exactly how visitors moved around the booth and which content they engaged with most intensively.
Key findings included:
More than 33,000 qualified visits with measurable dwell times
An average dwell time of over 12 minutes
Significant differences between individual topic areas
Clearly identifiable peak periods and usage patterns over time
These insights enable a new level of informed decision-making:
Targeted optimization of booth concepts and exhibit placements
Data-driven allocation of staff and resources
More accurate evaluation of the return on investment of individual measures
At the same time, systematic data collection lays the foundation for a fundamental shift in perspective:
Trade show performance becomes comparable – not only across different areas of a single booth, but also across multiple events.
Another key aspect is sharing these insights with the wider industry. Rittal actively promotes knowledge exchange with other exhibitors to encourage mutual learning and establish new standards for data-driven trade show performance evaluation in the long term.
Client Testimonial
"We had previously worked with other technologies and providers, but Hannover Messe was the first time we chose CALA. We were truly impressed by the professionalism of the project planning and implementation, and especially by the seamless collaboration with other contractors and service providers.
The quality of the results is outstanding and enables us to evaluate our exhibition booth based on reliable, validated data.
We were able to clearly identify which areas actually perform well, how visitors move around our booth, and where we can make targeted improvements.
What is particularly valuable to us is the ability to compare these insights across different events and continuously build on them.
For us, one thing is clear: Data-driven analytics will become a central component of our future trade show and exhibition concepts."
Fabian Stark, Head of Fairs & Exhibitions, Rittal GmbH & Co. KG