How to Track the Success of Your Billboard Ad: Tools and Tips

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Billboards are one of the most trusted and visible forms of advertising, but measuring this success can feel very different than digital channels. Unlike online ads and social media campaigns, billboards don’t come with data dashboards and instant analytics.

Despite out-of-home (OOH) advertising’s differences from the digital landscape, this legacy ad channel comes equipped with tools and strategies that allow advertisers to accurately track performance and measure ROI.

Here’s the guidebook.

First, What Is Your Campaign Goal?

Before you can accurately measure OOH success, you must define what success looks like for you.

A few common questions you can ask yourself are:

  • Are you building brand awareness?
  • Are you attempting to drive physical, in-person visits or online traffic?
  • Are you promoting a time-sensitive campaign like an event, sale, or product launch?

The strategy you will use to track your OOH campaign will depend on your objective. Each of the above objectives have different data points which can be gleaned like potential reach or the exact number of store visits.

Use Impression and Reach Data

The foundation of billboard measurement stems from the amount of audience impressions and reach an ad may receive. Impressions = the estimated number of people who see your ad, and this is typically OOH gold that is often the deciding factor for where advertisers will run their campaign.

There are modern OOH platforms like Geopath that provide:

  • Impressions count based on location, visibility, and traffic data.
  • Demographic data such as age, income, and behavior that are tied to audiences passing by your OOH placements.
  • Frequency metrics that show how often audiences see an ad.

For awareness, these metrics provide a precise data set that can offer invaluable information for exposure and reach.

Include a Trackable Call to Action (CTA)

CTAs with tracking information can provide measurable data directly to your device. This can include elements such as:

  • Unique URLs
  • QR Codes
  • Custom discount codes
  • Phone numbers

When these elements are tracked individually, they are able to reveal how many actions take place from an OOH ad.

Wrapping It Up

Billboards, in this digital day and age, have the capability to be data-rich sources. It all starts from defining what your campaign goals are and the rest is quite straightforward. By tracking both direct and indirect actions, advertisers can bring data to back up how valuable their OOH ads really are.