It’s been long understood that measuring Out of Home (OOH) Advertisements is a bit trickier to do because you can’t be guaranteed exposure.
While internet advertising tools count precisely how many clicks an ad generated and TV and radio allow you to capture ratings figures, OOH ads display in the physical world where such metrics are harder to obtain.
So, how do we know how many people our OOH ads are reaching? Thankfully, the effectiveness of outdoor advertising is easier to measure than you may think. In fact, using the right platform, there are many different ways to measure the effectiveness of an OOH advertising campaign.
So – how is OOH marketing measured?
Most people carry a smartphone in their pockets. Smartphones are equipped with location services, mapping where a person has been throughout the day. Through movement tracking, companies can learn whether or not people are walking or driving by their ad spot.
These services also have the potential of determining how many of those who were exposed to an ad ended up walking into a brick-and-mortar location. Through location data, advertisers can learn which locations are more attractive. If you are concerned about privacy, rest assured all of this information is anonymous.
Even if a person is not carrying their smartphone, there are ways to track how many people walk or drive by an outdoor ad. Geopath, the non-profit organization that audits outdoor advertising, uses many tools and metrics to determine the viability of specific areas. Through audience location measurement solutions, Geopath can measure traffic volume, vehicular occupancy, and pedestrian volume. They can determine dwell time, or how long a person engages with an outdoor advertisement, by measuring driving speed and walking speed.
(Image Credit: True Impact Media)
Some common terms that you might encounter with location tracking are:
- DEC (Daily Effective Circulation) – the number of people & vehicles that pass a location per day
- OTC (Opportunity to Contact) – the number of people that could see your location.
- VAC (Visually Adjusted Contact) – the number of people who saw the location during the outdoor campaign.
One form of OOH that is gaining popularity is Mobile Truck Ads, according to the American Trucking Association 91% of the targeted audience notices a truck advertisement, and a large percentage recall the specific advertisement. thus, not just the wide visibility is the biggest advantage of this type of advertisement also include:
- Truck displays are a third or a half of the traditional billboards price which makes it more convenient for different types of brands.
- Truck sides are not easy to overlook by the crowd on the truck routes. The closeness and size of Truck ads have an enduring effect on people when contrasted with repetitive and unsurprising television or radio promotions.
- Trackside ads allow you to choose the routes so, it may take your ad more exactly where it needs to be, perfect time at the correct moment.
While using Movia’s patented beacon analytics and tracking technology you can measure results remotely in just a few steps in real-time.
Let Movia help by measuring impressions as most people leave the Wi-Fi signal of their phones on, and when a Movia mobile billboard goes by them, whether they are in a car or on the sidewalk, our proprietary beacon technology picks up that signal and counts it as an impression. Using this data, advertisers can learn how many people are walking past their ad, as well as (anonymized) demographic information of who those people are.
On average, you can expect 1.5 – 2.5 million eye-level views on your moving billboard every month.
These are the tools of the future, being implemented here in the present, and they’re available for anyone who ventures into outdoor advertising. Though some may see OOH as an older mode of advertising, the reality is that throughout the past few decades, tracking technology has made it simpler for companies to see where they should invest in outdoor advertising to reach their target audience.
TRACKING ENGAGEMENT
Impressions are one method of measuring success, but they are not the most crucial. If we really would like to know how many interactions our outdoor ads are generating we need to focus on these strategies. Even when these aren’t as “automatic” as Geopath or other forms of location tracking, they’re extremely useful, especially for those who interact with your marketing campaign.
Interactive surveys or communication attempts are a tried and true way to determine how your audience interacts with your ads. Here are some of the most common examples.
- Tracking numbers: Local or toll-free numbers that track all incoming calls.
- QR Code: Square and glitchy images that can be read by a smartphone.
- Vanity URLs: Unique website domains that lead to specific landing pages based on your marketing campaign or another page on your site.
- Short-codes: About five-digit numbers that your audience can text to get more information or special offers.
- Coupon Codes: Specific promo code to the outdoors
(Image Credit: Movia)
So, how do we put all these tools in? Adding a call to action to any campaign to make it more engaging, so the results will be more easily measured by tracking their usage. In that case, If you receive a call to a “toll-free number” you used in your outdoor campaign, you know the person who called saw your ad. The same can be said for vanity URLs—you can direct people who saw your ad to a more engaging site because it assumes some prior knowledge they must have because they saw and interacted with your advertisement or the short-cuts messages, any time you receive an interaction for your CTA on your billboard, it would probably mean someone saw your add and got interested.
OOH & SOCIAL MEDIA
It is extremely beneficial to combine outdoor advertising campaigns with social media not only because that can boost your chances of reaching your target audience, but it can also add to your audience location measurement solutions.
A simple example of this uses the same awareness-tracking strategic plan as above, but with this, you can track your audience’s interactions using hashtags. When you’re using a specific hashtag in your outdoor advertisements, you are able to determine its effectiveness based on its use on social media platforms. For example, sharing a picture with the hashtag on Instagram or tweeting about a product or service. Even when a hashtag trend generally lasts for about 10 minutes you can be seen for being in a specific location.
Besides, there are a growing number of technological solutions to previous difficulties. For example, if you want to know where your customer comes from you can easily know now but some years ago, it was a really difficult question to answer.
These days with an Image recognition software you can pull social media images to quickly identify images that have the brand’s logo and determine whether an investment in outdoor advertising was worthwhile. You could even quantify the number of additional impressions generated by campaign images or tags.
(Image Credit: Movia)
You can also use a variety of social media image recognition tools, and the potential advantages of each tool will vary depending on the campaign’s needs and goals. Furthermore, to increase frequency and ad recall, a paid social media campaign can replicate the message on outdoor advertising. It is easy to target audiences near your outdoor ads with geolocation through social media targeting tools (like Facebook and Instagram), and display the digital versions of those ads. Thus, you will see how your engagement can grow about 30 to 50%.
Thanks to technological advancements it is easier to level up campaigns and ideas when combining social media and outdoor advertising. But the only thing you need to be aware of and learn every day is how to use this data and apply it to improve your ads campaigns.
Another method you can use is known as “Slogan Analytics.” If you have a memorable
and very specific tagline, slogan, or catchphrase to use in your outdoor advertising creative you will need to use one of the online analytics tools to help you determine how frequently those keywords are used and searched on the internet. Thus, the more search a phrase gets the more insight it could provide about how often people are viewing and taking action with the outdoor ad. Also, this tool is very useful for potential customers who can not remember clearly the promo code, or URL, social media users or even could not be able to scan the QR code. But they may remember a particular slogan or tagline you have used in the copy.
These can be considered the “technologically advanced” versions of the well-known engagement tracking tools such as URLs or QR codes. You need to pay attention to these methodologies due to them being imperceptible to the user. These ones are not the obvious choice of marketing tools, since they occur behind the scenes and offer a presumably more organic representation of your outdoor camping results.
Conclusion:
Whether the company invests in a truck ad campaign to help the business grow, get new and more customers, increase sales, and a chance to expand the business, it is vital to know the success of an ad, to know when to make changes to your strategy or keep going not the same track, to plan better your budget or try a different approach for your display; according to Harvard Business Review a company data improves a 10% to 30% when they use information base on data.
Knowing your results help you to “cultivate” your campaign, to learn about what you’re doing, and whether it is working or not. B.B. King said at what time “The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you”.
Remember, this is a process, and sometimes can give you perfect results but others good learning, something to work with a little bit more. Camping results can help you and your team better ways to create magnificent advertising campaigns. That’s why it is a tool shared between newbies or experts that help them understand the company target, what they like, what they do not like, and what they need or want. Now, with all this information you can perfectly know how to get your campaign results from a truck ad, do not hesitate and try one or mix some of them and get to know your ad the best way.
