QR codes for marketing campaigns

Because a dynamic code's destination lives on a redirect rather than inside the printed pattern, print starts behaving like digital: you can change the offer without reprinting, and you can see which placements earned attention.

A static code encodes the URL itself, so editing it means producing new artwork and scraping the old. That single difference is what makes a print campaign testable.

The unit that tells you something is the placement, not the file. Print the same code on every poster in a city and the scan count is a city number; print one code per site and you can rank sites.

In practice, use one code per location or channel — poster, table tent, receipt, packaging, van — and keep the artwork otherwise identical. Costs stay flat because a flat plan does not price per code.

The cheapest win in a print campaign is a rule that sends people to the right place, because you cannot reprint a poster per country. Country rules cover the common case: one print run, local pricing and local language behind it.

Language and device rules handle the rest. A phone arriving from a QR scan is always mobile, but pointing tablets and desktops at a fuller page avoids a cramped layout, and a language rule stops sending a German-speaking reader to an English offer.

Scans are a count of intent, not of sales. Someone who scans a poster has stood up, taken out a phone and held it to the code — a stronger signal than an impression, and still only the top of the funnel.

Compare scans between placements and over time rather than chasing an absolute number. A wave that scanned three times as much as the last wave is a real result even when the raw count looks small next to a digital channel.

Decide the boring things up front, because they are hard to fix after the run. Who owns the redirect, who can edit it, and what happens to the codes when the campaign ends are all one-line answers that save a reprint.

Also settle placement in the artwork. A code needs contrast, a clear margin and enough size: the working rule is one unit of code width for every ten units of scanning distance, so a poster read from three metres wants a code around 30 cm across.