How to Measure Results With Truck Ads

The advertising options seem limitless because nowadays there are so many options. Whether we like it or not, we see advertisements everywhere we go, from billboards to mobile ads. 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 glean.

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? 

Well, the first method of measuring OOH is also the simplest. Known as the before and after method, you simply look at sales figures before and after running the ad. If sales increase, the likelihood is that the ad is working. Compare the cost of running the ad against how much additional profits were generated and you can calculate your return on investment (ROI). 

This, however, is a rather crude methodology for measuring the effectiveness of your campaign – and if conducted in isolation, it may not be producing accurate results. For example, it would be essential that you weren’t running any other campaigns on any other channel at the same time, as any of these, or a combination of factors – internal and external – could be responsible for the surge in sales. 

But 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. 

And of course, the easiest way to monitor your campaign. 

Trucks used for OOH advertising are commonly equipped with a GPS system, which gives you the facility to track the movements of the vehicle in real-time, 

Image Source

Using Movia’s patented beacon analytics and tracking technology you can measure results remotely in just a few steps. 

The first thing you’ll need to do is determine who your target audience is and keep in mind what demographics you’ll need to appeal to and when the trucks need to be on the road. Being as specific with these guidelines can be the difference of having a successful campaign or not. For example, if you are a school supplies retailer, you would be targeting families near the end of the summer, in time for the kids to go back to school. You’d also probably consider driving near residential areas and maybe avoid industrial and commercial spaces, where families might not be. 

Next you’ll need to stand out on the road with a creative truck display. Make something memorable for your potential customers to help it stand out by using the truck as a canvas. Help your campaign stand out even more by including more interactive features, which could include a hashtag, a site link or social media handles. Anything that can lead to an increase in others finding your brand is a strong plus.

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.

In gathering the data acquired from this preliminary rollout can in turn help see where your trucks are in real-time using geolocation services, and keeping track of your daily and monthly impression counts you can then re-target the routes the trucks will take. 

Through retargeting position services you can then further define your audience by age, gender and other criteria to help your brand connect with those most likely to engage with your company. 

As well, you can get to know how impactful it was or if it is going to your camping with the help of a “webcam”. These days technology allows us to quantify the number of people or even vehicles who cross by our ad, clarify them and extrapolate it to a total of impressions. 

In line with the point before, you can also track your truck ad with an urban satellite. These satellites are equipped with sensors that allow you to identify mobility or closeness in real-time, detecting phones anonymously but under certain norms with protecting customer privacy. 

Tracking with Social Media

One of the most innovative ways to measure results from your truck ads is to include a catchy hashtag, or social media promotion as a way of gauging the successfulness of your campaign.

By coming up with a nifty hashtag to put on the side of your truck, along with a creative graphic, will have users talking about your brand on their socials, which could have a much more lasting impact than you could imagine. 

On a site like Twitter, a hashtag trend generally lasts for about 10 minutes, but they also show trends based on location settings, which means that if your trend pops up in a certain city, it has a much higher chance of reaching other potential customers in the same area. 

Partnering with digital media campaigns could provide countless more brand impressions than just using a truck ad alone.  

In the case of CVS Pharmacy, their #BeautyUnaltered campaign which hung just above Times Square in New York City generated over 3.6 billion impressions. 

This ad ran as part of CVS’s Beauty Mark social media campaign, an interactive campaign that encouraged users to upload their unedited selfies to social media with the hashtag #BeautyUnaltered.

Within minutes of launching the campaign, users began uploading unaltered, unfiltered selfies using #BeautyUnaltered and @cvs_beauty. Every 10 seconds, a different consumer’s image showed on the Times Square digital signage, showing larger-than-life, unretouched images celebrating real beauty. The dynamic digital billboard was paired with a standard digital billboard featuring awareness messaging. 

Image Source

Tracking through social media could also drive more web traffic to your sites. By including all social media handles, as well as your main company website the chances of increasing organic social click through rates can skyrocket.

Movia partnered with Johnson and Starr, a company providing property tax loans for home and small business owners based out of Texas for a 12 week campaign. Their trucks were wrapped with a creative cowboy decal and promoted their website.

As a result of the campaign came with a 130% increase to Organic Search Click Through Rates on their website, and delivered over 14.6 million impressions for the brand as a result of driving through the streets of Houston.

Movia Johnson & Starr Campaign

Linked with social media, you can use a QR code to know the performance of the truck. A QR code is designed for smartphone users, with just the phone camera you can decode a QR, and automatically redirect your customer to a website or make him do another action. 

The QR codes are very dynamic since they don’t just help you redirect your users to some specific website, but also they collect information and make stats. This information is always in real-time, which means you can have an idea of what is going on with your ad since day one. 

Image Source

Another good way to know the impact an ad had, is with sources surveys. From where the truck route starts to the end of it, you can give support to the impressions of a display with a sample. 

Besides this could seem obvious, but you can ask for comments from your clients. Asking questions like how you find out about your product or services 

As well as the last one, another obvious is the store visits. If you are local advertising you can use the number of visitors to know more about your campaign results. Also,  to know more precisely if they come after sawing your ad, you can offer a brand attribute to identify new customers.  

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. 

Talk to a Mobile Billboard specialist today

x