OOH advertising: Everything you need to know to get started

Once you’ve launched  your OOH campaign, you’re ready to assess its performance. Many teams struggle with measuring this brand marketing because they can’t track OOH impressions in real time like they can with digital campaigns.

If you’re handling OOH analytics on your own, you’ll need in-house OOH experts who know:

• How to pull accurate OOH impression data

• How to assess this data alongside target customer profiles

• Marketing measurement techniques that fit OOH data

Marketing professionals rarely have this expertise, so brands often turn to OOH advertising and analytics platforms that specialize in measuring these campaigns. Here are a few ways you can use these two solutions to evaluate your OOH ads’ topline impact.

Implement Attribution Models

Traditionally, marketers couldn’t track OOH ad impressions back to conversions. Modern OOH advertising platforms have found a workaround by monitoring users’ device IDs. 

AdQuick, for example, collects device ID data from ad vendors to determine the number of users exposed to an OOH and the number of users who converted. A conversion could be a web event, like an online purchase, or a consumer entering a pre-set location (such as the advertiser’s brick-and-mortar store). 

Here’s a glimpse at AdQuick’s attribution dashboard:

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Along with providing conversion data, AdQuick maps out the time frame between conversions and the exposure frequency to help users understand their customer journey. 

Measure incrementality with MMM

Attribution analysis is a powerful tool for estimating OOH campaigns’ impact on users with trackable device IDs, but it doesn’t capture your ad’s entire audience. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) empowers teams to see their OOH ads’ overall incremental impact on their target metric, whether that’s impressions or website traffic. 

MMM is a type of statistical analysis that finds the correlation between your OOH ad impressions and your target metric. 

While any data scientist can build this model, we don’t recommend the in-house route. Your scientist will need to spend the bulk of their time maintaining the model, and chances are their expertise isn’t in MMM.

Instead, let an analytics partner like Paramark fully handle your MMM. We’ll build the model and provide the following:

• Constant reporting on your OOH’s incremental impact (i.e., an estimate of how your target metric would perform with and without your OOH campaign)

• Marketing budget recommendations based on each channel’s performance, including OOH

• Forecasting for OOH ad performance

• Model checks to make sure the MMM has enough data and is generating accurate results

Conduct lift analysis with testing

Attribution analysis and MMM both provide estimates of your OOH campaigns’ impact. Run marketing experiments to confirm how these ads are impacting your target metric. 

This testing compares two regions that are nearly identical in terms of their target customer makeup, except that the OOH campaign will be in one of the regions. This setup isolates the OOH ad’s impact, so your marketing team knows it’s responsible for any lift in your target metric. Lattice’s marketing team, for example, measured the uplift in website traffic after launching billboards in different cities. 

It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of room for error. The most common marketing experiment mistakes we see are incorrectly setting up controls, solely focusing on short-term gains, and choosing target metrics that don’t fit the test design. 

Paramark fully handles incrementality testing for marketing teams so they know their experiment results are accurate and reliable. The platform correctly sets up testing, offers forecasting and budget recommendations based on experiments, and integrates this data with companies’ MMM.

Analyze engagement with OOH’s digital elements

Place digital elements—like QR codes, URLs, and SMS codes—in OOH ads to track individual interactions. 

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AdQuick automatically monitors engagement results with these elements in its dashboards, so users don’t have to track each interaction manually. 

Conduct market research 

Assess your OOH campaign’s impact on brand awareness and perception by running surveys with your target audience. You can conduct these questionnaires on your own, hire a research agency, or use your OOH advertising platform. AdQuick, for example, designs surveys for its users and measures the lift in brand awareness between consumers exposed to OOH ads and a control group. 

Along with surveying customers, check how your OOH campaign influences social mentions for your brand. Work with your advertising platform to track the lift in social mentions between consumers who saw your OOH campaign and those who didn’t. 

AdQuick can also analyze OOH-related social mentions with its one-of-a-kind image recognition software. This technology allows the platform to assess how frequently specific OOH designs are shared on social media. 

Refine and repeat

Using the insights pulled from these measurement techniques, adjust your OOH ad practices for future campaigns. For example, your team might learn that billboards don’t produce a significant traffic lift in the Midwest, but they do in East Coast cities. 

You don’t need to wait until your brand’s next nationwide billboard campaign to test your hypotheses. Smaller OOH mediums like bus benches and taxi cab advertising screens may be more feasible in the short term.