Are Billboards Profitable?

While planning your marketing campaign, you may be asking yourself, are billboards profitable? Billboards are profitable and they are a powerful out-of-home (OOH) advertising tool! According to the OAAA, radio, print, and digital display advertising receive a greater share of campaign dollars in the average media mix, but OOH produces a higher return on investment. For every $1 spent, approximately $2.80 in sales result, compared to only $2.41 for print and $2.43 for TV. So how exactly do you measure the effectiveness of your billboard? Today we will discuss a few different methods to measure the return on investment (ROI) on your billboard!

Measure the Potential Audience

When measuring ROI, you need to be able to measure the potential size of the audience that will see your billboard. You also need to know how many people ended up seeing the advertisement and how many took action. Thereby answering, are billboards profitable? Now how do you find these numbers?

There are ways to measure the daily effective circulation (DEC) and the opportunity to contact (OTC).  These numbers will tell you how many vehicles passed the billboard in a day and how many people walk past and see your advertisement. The industry standard for audience measurement is Geopath ratings. The different ways these figures can be collected are:

• Using GPS tracking devices that are carried by survey participants
• Road traffic counts
• Travel diaries
• Recall surveys of the previous day’s movements in the area
• Transport planning data like commuting data
• Government surveys
• Census data
• Mobile data

Geo-Targeted Landing Pages

While you run your billboard in a specific location, you can create a custom landing page based on where your customer is visiting the website from. With the customized landing page, you can focus the advertisement on the local demographics. From here, you can look at the traffic and conversion data of your landing page and compare it to other geo-targeted landing pages that are not running a billboard. With these different landing pages, you can measure how well your billboard is performing!

Ask!

Ask people how they heard about you! Create a quick survey on your website or app to gauge how your marketing efforts are performing. Arguably the simplest way to track your promotional campaigns is to ask the consumer how they landed on your page while they are there. Collecting this data will help you compare the profitability of your billboards to other marketing media tools in your campaign.  

Now that we’ve answered the question, are billboards profitable, head over to BillboardsIn to get your OOH campaign started!