4 Proven Approaches to Measure the True Performance of Your Out-of-Home Advertising Campaigns

If you are still of the mindset that out-of-home advertising can’t be measured, it’s time to revisit that (incorrect) assumption.

Many marketers mistakenly believe that outdoor advertising can’t be measured as a performance channel, and that out-of-home measurement options are limited to basic reporting on awareness-oriented metrics – like impressions, reach, and frequency aligned with specific demographics.  But, in 2021, nothing could be farther from the truth.

With the right partner, you can enjoy OOH measurement on par with digital media. AdQuick gives marketers the ability to track and isolate OOH, directly attribute online and offline conversions, measure true ROI through rigorous lift analysis, compare relative performance by unit, and optimize campaigns to improve outcomes over time – all for both digital and static OOH media.

Read on to learn about four approaches to measure the performance of your OOH media campaigns, regardless of your brand objective and campaign KPI.

1) Attribution Analysis

Attribution analysis is one of the most powerful tools in a performance marketer’s toolkit, because it uncovers insights that can be used for campaign optimization.  Attribution answers the question: “what units performed better than others, and what learnings can I use to improve outcomes on my next campaign?”.

The foundation of OOH attribution is OOH ad exposures, which are similar to impressions in the digital media space.  It’s now possible to track unit-level ad exposures for both static and digital OOH ad units using location data.

You can also use location data to track offline conversion events (like visits to a brick-and-mortar retail location), or you can drop a pixel on your website to track online conversion events (like ecommerce sales or new prospect leads).  

Attribution analysis allows you to connect these two dots – merging ad exposure data with conversion data to understand which conversions should be attributed to (or get credit for) which ad units.

AdQuick has the industry’s only in-flight, real-time performance dashboard powered by multiple integrations covering every online and offline KPI, including in-store foot traffic and sales, app events, and online visits and sales. This dashboard allows you to easily measure and track performance KPIs such as attributed conversions, exposure conversion rate, and frequency of exposure before conversion.

A note about data quality:  Your analysis is only as good as the data it's built upon.  Remember the old adage “garbage in, garbage out”, which reminds us that flawed input data produces flawed output – or "garbage".  At AdQuick, we only aggregate high-quality, anonymized, opt-in, app-sourced location data for measurement.  

2) Lift Analysis

Attribution reporting tells you what components of your media plan worked best, but to understand their true ROI, marketers must isolate the impact of their OOH ad campaigns. To do this, we use controlled experiments – lift studies with treatment and control groups to measure the OOH ROI on both upper funnel and lower funnel KPIs. AdQuick has some of the best geographic lift measurement solutions in the market.

One of our favorite approaches is causal impact analysis.  Causal impact analysis allows you to analyze the impact of a campaign from a bird’s eye view using time series data. We compare one or more control markets to an experimental market – i.e., the market in which you run OOH.  We then analyze the lift in your conversion metric in the experimental market relative to the control(s), and create a model that will tell us the portion of the lift that can be statistically attributed to the OOH campaign.

This kind of analysis answers the question, “did my OOH campaign work, and to what degree?”.

3) Halo Effect

Attribution and lift analysis can help you measure the direct impact of your OOH campaign on a variety of metrics, including ecommerce sales and brick-and-mortar store visitation. But what about the indirect impact of your OOH campaigns?  

It is well-known that OOH boosts the effectiveness of your other marketing channels.  This is often referred to as the “halo effect”.

At AdQuick, we’ve pioneered an approach to measure geo-located lift in clickthrough rate and conversion rate to determine if OOH ads improved the performance of your digital ads. We’ve even established integrations with Google, Facebook, and Segment to make this as easy as possible.

4) Social Mentions

Because OOH advertising can provide uniquely immersive and engaging brand experiences, pictures of creative outdoor ads are often shared through social media.  However, the tracking mechanisms used to measure consumer actions like website visits can’t be used on third-party websites, so OOH campaigns designed to spur social mentions require their own flavor of measurement tactics.

A common approach to measure social mentions is analyzing the lift in usage across pre-determined hashtags, but this approach only catches posts that have the correct hashtag – which is usually a very small subset of all relevant posts.  

In order to improve the accuracy of social mention measurement, AdQuick has developed the industry’s first image recognition solution to seamlessly analyze how often specific OOH creatives are shared on Instagram and other social media.

And many more…

The OOH measurement options described above are just the tip of the iceburg.  Other methods – such as brand surveys, SMS direct response, and vanity URLs – abound. The ideal measurement strategy often involves multiple approaches for a single campaign.

If you want to unlock the power of OOH advertising for your brand but still need the tools to do so effectively, our OOH experts can help.  Schedule a demo today!