If you think your attendee database is a goldmine, think again. Chances are, it’s riddled with errors, half-truths, and a surprising amount of make-believe.

Event registration forms look simple enough: name, job title, company, a tick-box or two. But the devil is in the details, and those details are often unreliable at best, deliberately misleading at worst. In fact, it’s estimated that around 60% of registration data is either missing, inaccurate, or invalid.

For event owners and marketers, these small untruths quickly snowball into big problems: poor segmentation, wasted marketing spend, and flawed reporting on ROI.

Let’s break down the six most common mistakes and mischief happening in your reg forms.

1. The Inflated Job Title Trick

Plenty of attendees know the golden rule: “C-suite” gets perks. Free passes, VIP access, priority invites. So what do they do? Suddenly, a mid-level marketing exec becomes a “Director of Global Strategy.” Someone in IT support gets a shiny upgrade to “Head of Innovation.”

For you, this isn’t just cheeky; it wrecks your audience profile. That “high-level” lead you’re reporting to sponsors might not be high-level at all.

2. Organisation Blind Spots

Ask an attendee to categorise their organisation, and brace yourself. Is it a charity? A start-up? An SME? A government body? You’ll get wildly inconsistent responses, often because people don’t know how you define those terms. Or, worse, they pick whichever option gets them the cheapest ticket.

This leaves you with a patchwork database full of contradictory entries that don’t stand up when you try to segment.

3. The “Just Get Me Through the Form” Answers

Let’s be honest; some attendees just want the registration form over with. Faced with too many fields, they type anything:

• “asdf” in the job title box

• “N/A” as the company size

• “Xyz Ltd” when they don’t want to share the real company name

The result? Noise that clogs your database and makes it look bigger than it really is, but infinitely harder to use.

4. Misleading Information by Design

Sometimes, it’s not laziness; it’s strategy. People bend the truth to unlock benefits: students claiming they’re employed, suppliers disguising themselves as buyers, or delegates hiding seniority so they don’t get sales calls.

It’s understandable behaviour. But it leaves you with flawed intelligence, poor lead-matching, and sponsors who wonder why they’re meeting “decision-makers” who don’t actually decide anything.

5. Outdated or Legacy Details

Not every attendee lies, but plenty fail to update their details. People register with old email addresses, former job titles, or company names that have since changed. By the time your sales team calls, the lead’s already irrelevant.

Multiply this across thousands of registrations, and your CRM quickly becomes a graveyard of expired contacts.

6. The “Copy-Paste Chaos”

Some reg forms ask for detail after detail, and attendees take the fastest route out: copy-pasting the same thing into multiple boxes. Suddenly, “Company Name” and “Job Function” both say “Consultant,” or “Address” just reads “London, London, London.”

It’s lazy data, but it looks legitimate until you actually try to use it. Then you realise your segments don’t make sense, because the fields weren’t filled in properly in the first place.

Why This Is a Headache for Event Owners

On the surface, these errors look small. But at scale, they create massive problems:

• Untrustworthy data: You can’t rely on your database for segmentation, targeting, or reporting.

• Wasted costs: Marketing campaigns misfire, VIP perks go to the wrong people, and sales teams chase dead leads.

• Strategic blind spots: When presenting audience insights to sponsors or internal stakeholders, the picture is skewed, undermining trust and future deals.

• Operational pain: Fixing this after the fact is expensive, time-consuming, and often impossible without starting again.

When up to 60% of your data is flawed, you’re not just dealing with a few typos; you’re dealing with a systemic issue that undermines the entire value of your event.

The Bottom Line

Your reg forms are only as good as the data they capture, and right now, they’re letting in a lot of bad data. Inflated job titles, vague organisation types, random “just get me through” entries, outdated records, and deliberate misdirection all combine to turn your attendee database into a bit of a minefield.

Event owners who don’t address this problem find themselves with flawed insights, wasted spend, and stakeholders who lose faith in the numbers.

The good news? With the right processes, tech, and strategy, you can filter through the noise and build a database you can actually trust. Get in touch to see how we solve this problem for event owners.