Tracking your campaign

As a marketer or business owner or person who happened to stumble across this page, you’re probably wondering how you can track your outdoor advertising campaigns effectively and let me tell you, it’s a great question and it’s not all too difficult.

There’s at least 5 excellent ways (and a few not recommended):

  1. The Before and After

  2. Promo Codes

  3. Landing Page Tracking

  4. Social Tracking

  5. Customer Surveys

We wouldn’t generally recommend:

  1. Using QR codes on standard frequency bookings or using QR codes on Passenger Screens

  2. Walking around streets near your screens asking every person if they saw and liked your advert - Who has the time?

 The Before and After

Before:

  1. Take a look at your current sales/sign ups/average calls or whichever metric you’d like to use to measure the success of your campaign

  2. Make note of the average

  3. Ideally ensure all other brand activity is stable so that you can accurately assess if your outdoor advertising is working effectively

After your campaign:

  1. Have you noticed an increase in that metric since running the campaign?

  2. If yes, and you can’t attribute that to other factors then it’s likely your campaign was a success, in which case perhaps it’s worth booking again!

Promo Codes

Promo codes can be an exceptional way to track outdoor advertising provided you follow a few guidelines:

  1. Ensure the code on your screens is only for this outdoor advertising campaign and that isn’t also available on your website or newsletter for example, so that you can attribute any sales/sign ups to the outdoor campaign

  2. Make sure the code is short enough to be read (and catchy enough to be remembered) in under 10 seconds! This ensures that anyone seeing your advert on our screens will have time to see and remember your code

  3. With a bespoke campaign you could even put a unique code on each screen to see which screens work best for you!

Simply create a promo code for your business, incorporate in your advert, and monitor how many people use it.

Landing Pages

Similarly to promo codes, landing pages are a great way to track your campaigns. With landing pages you just need to:

  1. Decide upon the metric you’re tracking e.g. sales, calls booked, sign ups etc

  2. Create a unique landing page for this specific outdoor advertising campaign that funnels user to your call to action

  3. Incorporate the link to the landing page in your advert (ensuring it can be read and recalled in under 10 seconds)

  4. Monitor how many people do the action you’re looking for (sales, calls booked, sign ups etc)

Social Tracking

Social media tracking can be a great way to monitor the success of your campaign but it’s often a lot more effective if you have a large social media presence, so if your social follower count isn’t too high it’s worth checking out other methods.

  1. Use unique hashtags on your advert (ensuring they can be read and recalled in under 10 seconds)

  2. Monitor company mentions or mentions of the hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn etc

Customer Surveys

Essentially what it says on the tin, ask your customers/audience how they found you by sending out a survey. Here’s the best practices:

  1. Use something like Survey Monkey to create and send a survey tailored to your audience

  2. Ask your audience if they found you from your outdoor adverts or if they saw them at all

  3. If the answer is yes, it’s likely that your outdoor advertising campaign is a success