Picture this:    You have ONE website.     ONE offer.      A LIMITED print budget for the year.

A need to maximize your advertising dollars.

Now…. From all your media planning research, you have decided to go ahead and purchase media ads on 5 different publications. Your main goal is to drive traffic to your pages or to your phones to be able to close people on a Risk Free Trial you are offering.

Thankfully, your company has already embraced the digital era and has taken the time to develop a mobile friendly version of your site so you can capture people coming from their mobile devices since after all, most of us browse the web and do most of our searches via our phones…

Now. For illustration purposes, let’s say that each publication had a cost of $1,000 and you want to track the performance of each placement so you can optimize your media placements for the next run.

For this, you have assigned the usual unique 800# to each publication and are wanting to find a way to optimize your URLs… let’s face it… you can easily create “unique” URLs by adding “/xyz” but how many people actually type that extension? What happens to all the default traffic that chose not to type it and only typed the main domain? How do you assign responses to that publication if a very small percentage is actually typing the “/xyz” extension?…   As you know, you cannot track via Analytics, cannot track it based on “time of response”, or any other method… your best bet would be to measure the overall responses you got from the publications, assign a percentage of response to each one of them and then assign those percentages to the default visits so you can get an idea on your Cost per Trial.

What do you think? Not very accurate, correct? You may be thinking that you assigned way too many responses (or too little) to a certain publication and are not really sure if your estimated Cost per Trial is accurate or if the data is strong enough to give you enough reasons to optimize your placements for the next run…

Now picture this. Instead of the URL, correctly execute and implement a QR Code strategy on your ads. By “correctly” I mean:

• Utilize a QR code solution/platform that will allow you to create unlimited number of codes.
• Use a platform that also provides you with scans reports and can also track performance (leads, sales, etc.)
• Develop a unique code for each publication (all redirecting to the same URL)
• Develop a unique, enticing and strong call to action to scan the code.
• Place the code in a visible place.
• Make sure the code is big enough to be easily scanned.
• Make sure is clear to the consumer where they will be redirected after they scan the code and what action you want them to take once there.

If all the above is done correctly, I can guarantee you that the number of scans you will get on your ads will be much higher than you have ever experienced in the past (if you have used QR Codes for anything else) – if you have not, trust me.

Now sit back and watch.

Since each code is unique to each placement, your QR code platform will yield performance reports for each of them. This way you will identify the ad responses per publication. No mixed data, no reallocation of default visits, etc.

By combining your phone and web responses (via QR Codes) you will now be able to identify the TRUE value of your advertising efforts and the TRUE Cost per Trial per publication! Now you are ready to optimize your ads accordingly and place your media dollars on the publications that yielded cost efficient trials.

This is just one of the many unique uses for QR Codes and how they can help us connect with today’s mobile consumers and drive quantifiable traffic.

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