Every booth report I have been shown leads with the number of cards collected.
It is the easiest number to produce and it is the one number that cannot answer the question the report exists to answer, which is whether the event was worth doing again.
Cards collected goes up when the booth is busy. It also goes up when the booth is busy with students, competitors, and people who wanted the tote bag. It measures how many hands you shook.
The three numbers that hold up
You do not need an analytics project. You need three counts, and every one of them can be taken by hand.
Qualified conversations. Not visitors. Conversations where you established that the person has a real reason to care and could plausibly buy. Somebody on the stand marks these as they happen, because nobody can reconstruct them on the train home.
Contacted within seven days. Of those qualified conversations, how many received a real follow up inside a week. Not a batch newsletter. A message that refers to what you actually discussed.
Meetings booked. The only one your finance team will ask about. It is a lagging number, which is exactly why you need the first two, since those are the ones you can still influence while the event is happening.
Three counts, one shared sheet, taken live. That is the whole system, and it beats every booth report I have seen that was assembled afterwards from a pile of cards.
The twenty seconds that decide everything
Here is the part most event plans get wrong.
The bottleneck at a booth is never the conversation. Your team is good at conversations, that is why they were sent. The bottleneck is the twenty seconds afterwards, when somebody has to record who that was and why they mattered, while the next visitor is already standing there.
Nobody does it. The card goes in the pocket with the promise of a note later. By the end of day two there are ninety cards and no notes, and the qualification you did in person has evaporated.
So the design problem for a booth is not lead capture. It is note capture, under time pressure, by a tired person.
Two things fix most of it. Make the record take one action rather than several, and let the note be three words. Interested in pricing. Buying next quarter. Wrong department. Three words with a name attached is worth more than a scanned card with nothing.
Where the card exchange fits
When you hand somebody a card at a booth, you have created the same problem in the other direction. They now have to type your details in later, and they are collecting cards all day too.
An NFC card closes that loop while you are still standing in front of them. They tap, your profile opens, they save it, and you can see they did. Nobody types anything and the contact in their phone is spelled correctly.
Two details matter more than people expect.
The profile has to load fast on venue wifi, which is always bad. If it takes six seconds the moment is gone and they will not come back to it.
And it has to work without an app on their side. If the answer to "how do I open this" is "download something", you have lost. Every iPhone from the XR and XS onwards reads a tag with no app at all, and Android has done it for years, which is the only reason this works at an event.
Take the paper card anyway
In Japan especially, refusing a card or failing to offer one reads as a real breach, and no efficiency argument survives that.
Take it. Do both. The paper card handles the formality of the moment and the digital one handles the fact that neither of you will type anything correctly at 4pm on day two.
The only thing worth changing is what the paper stack is used for. It should not be your record of who you met. It should be a courtesy you observed, with the actual record living somewhere that has notes attached.
What to do the week after
Most of the value of an event is decided in the seven days after it, and most teams spend those days recovering from it.
Block the time before you go. Not a vague intention to follow up, an actual calendar hold on the Monday and Tuesday, defended as if it were the event itself. It is cheaper than the booth and it is the only part of the whole exercise that turns conversations into pipeline.
Then run the three counts and put them next to what the stand cost. That is a booth report. Cards collected is a receipt.