How Is Out-of-Home Advertising Measured?

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When it comes to OOH advertising, it may not be clear as to how an ad’s performance is measured compared to other forms like the Internet. With Internet advertising, it seems obvious how they’re measured through metrics like how many people clicked on a promoted link. With this confusion, it’s common for people to ask, “How is OOH advertising measured?”
In short, OOH advertising often uses demographics and psychographics to measure an ad’s performance. However, with metrics powered by Geopath, OOH advertising metrics certainly have enhanced over the years. In fact, these metrics are now comparable to the metrics of TV and Internet advertising. Here are some of the key components that are used to create impactful insights for the OOH industry.

  • Impressions – Impressions for outdoor advertising are usually provided in weekly figures to gauge whom your ad is reaching. These figures can take into account elements like circulation which is used to estimate the total volume of traffic that has passed a display. Other impression figures include census data, travel surveys, and data modeling.
  • Digital Trails – By creating digital trails, you can track the performance of your OOH campaign. Promo codes, links, social media accounts, and other online information featured on your ad’s message can be tracked to see how frequently people are visiting these since your OOH advertisement has promoted them.
  • Visibility Research – Visibility research has changed the game with OOH advertising. This research includes calculated “contact zones” to determine the distance that an ad can be first seen and “speed data” to see how fast traffic is moving past the ad per hour. It also implements “dwell time” which tracks how long people are within the ad’s contact zone. All this research is done to accurately calculate the probability of an individual actually noticing an ad given their opportunity to see it.
  • Demographics – As mentioned before, demographics and psychographics are heavily used to measure OOH advertising. This information comes from the latest censuses and surveys that are modeled into millions of trip paths to understand whom your ad is reaching.

Provided all this data, it’s clear how OOH advertising effectively measures an ad’s performance. Moreover, through digital trails, circulation, visibility research, demographics and so on, OOH media is able to provide credible reach and frequency metrics to compete with other media forms.

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