Quick Response code

QR CODES

         QR codes have started to pop-up in lot of places such as store display, business cards, online ads, postcards etc. Whether QR codes are here to stay or not but from the measurement perspective they do present a huge opportunity in measuring advertising's (particularly offline) effectiveness.

If you are one of those marketers who have embraced QR code or are thinking about it or just curious to know how QR code measurement works then this post is for you.

Measuring URLs in QR Codes

   We won’t be able to measure the number of impressions of the QR codes if they are distributed offline. What you can measure is how much traffic those QR codes are driving to your site or to your pages on 3rd party sites like facebook page, twitter account etc.

• Measuring QR code links to your site
  
           Measuring QR codes that sends user to your site is as simple as campaign tracking. Just add the campaign tracking variable to the URLs that you have in your QR Codes and treat it like any other campaign. Then you can use your campaign reports to see how much traffic QR codes are bringing and how valuable that traffic is.
  
  (Note: The tracking code, that you should append, depends on your Web Analytics tool.
  
           For Google Analytics, you need to append add at least 3 variables, Source, Medium and Campaign Name. to the URL for it to be tracked in the Google Analytics (Check out URL Shortner, http://clop.in as it’s URL builder let’s you append the variables for tracking in Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrend and Unica NetInsights )
• Tracking Phone Numbers in QR Code
  
           To Track phone numbers, that get dialed when someone scans a QR code, use a unique phone number that you have tracking for. If you don't have unique phone number then you can use 3rd party services likes Marchex to get a unique phone number for each QR code that you publish.
  Review:
         We  think QR codes are cool, but they actually have a few important limitations compared to text-based codes, like O-Codes (disclaimer: I am the CEO of O-Codes). We have been enamored by the technology behind QR codes, but created something we think is simpler for our clients to use, and allow them to follow up with interested customers via SMS. So they not only get the analytics but they get captive leads for people who are specifically interested in particular products. O-Codes also work well in settings that are trickier to use QR codes (TV, radio, billboards, magazines in the context of product mentions inline in text, catalogs where there is not enough to room to use a QR code with every product). In the end, we love the fact that marketers and smart bloggers are educating the public about ways to connect the offline and online worlds together, and extend analytics to traditional media