Notes for owners · Digital marketing
How to track a hoarding campaign
One code or number per site turns a campaign you cannot judge into eleven sites you can rank. The useful question is which panel worked, not whether outdoor works.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
A hoarding campaign is bought site by site, so it has to be measured site by site. Give every panel its own phone number, its own QR code or its own short web address. The question then changes. Not "did outdoor work" but "which of these eleven sites worked, and which three should we drop". The whole difference is a morning of work before the artwork goes to print.
Why the medium-level question cannot be answered
Suppose you run eleven panels across Bengaluru for eight weeks with one phone number on all of them. At the end you have a pile of calls attributed to "hoardings". You cannot tell whether the Outer Ring Road site carried the campaign and the other ten wasted your money, or whether it was spread evenly. So next quarter you either rebook everything or drop everything, and both decisions are guesses.
Now put a different number on each. Same spend, same artwork, same eight weeks. You end with a ranked list. Two sites to rebook, four to renegotiate, five to drop, and a rule about which kind of road works for your business that holds for the next three years.
Site-level tracking does not make outdoor accountable in the way a search campaign is accountable. It makes your next media order smarter, which is worth more.
What goes on the panel, by position
The mechanism has to suit where the reader is standing or how fast they are moving.
Signal-side panels. The driver is stopped for forty seconds. A ten-digit number in large figures works, and so does a QR code on the lower half if the panel is low enough to aim a phone at. Give the number its own line, not a corner.
Flyover approaches and highway sites. The vehicle is moving and the reading distance is long. Nothing scannable, nothing to dial. Put the brand name and one word, and accept that this site will be measured through branded search and the catchment, not through a mechanism.
Bus shelters, barricades and lift panels. The best scanning positions in Indian outdoor. The reader is standing still, at eye level, bored, with both hands free. One code per shelter, not one per route.
Apartment and society boards. Also standing positions, and usually the highest scan rate in a plan. Code them per tower if the campaign is large enough to care.
If you are putting codes on any of these, the mechanics are on the QR code page. A code that fails on a cheap phone in evening light has cost you the site.
Read the catchment, not only the calls
Calls and scans are the direct signal, and they undercount badly. Most people who notice a hoarding search your name days later, so your own analytics will credit Google.
Three things to watch alongside the mechanism, weekly:
- Enquiries by pin code or locality. If you can capture where the caller lives or works, the panels show up here before they show up anywhere else. A cluster from Vijayanagar in weeks three to six of a campaign with a Vijayanagar panel is the strongest evidence outdoor produces.
- Branded search and direct traffic. Directional only. If you ran radio in the same weeks, it cannot be separated, and you should say so in the report rather than assign it.
- Walk-ins, asked properly. One person, one point in the visit, a written list of answers that names the road rather than offering "hoarding" as a category.
What a site-coded campaign still will not give you
Be clear about the ceiling, because the sales pitch for outdoor measurement usually is not.
You will not get a cost per enquiry per panel that holds up. The numbers and codes catch the responders who acted on the spot, and those are a minority of the people the panel worked on. A site that produced four calls may have produced thirty searches you cannot see.
You will also not be able to separate two panels that face the same traffic three hundred metres apart. And if the campaign ran in the same weeks as a radio burst or a festival offer, the branded search lift belongs to all of them together.
What you get instead is a ranking. Which sites produced traceable response, which produced none at all across eight weeks, and which catchments moved. That is enough to rebuild the plan, and it is more than most businesses buying outdoor have ever had.
Check that it ran before you judge what it did
Half the disputes about outdoor performance are actually delivery disputes. A site went up nine days late. The flex tore in the first week of rain and nobody looked. A flyover pier now covers the left third of the panel and the photograph in the deck is from 2019.
Ask for a dated photograph at mounting, another mid-cycle, and one before take-down, each shot from the approaching carriageway with a landmark in frame. Put that in the order with the cost. What proof should contain, medium by medium, is a page of its own.
A worked example
For example, a furniture showroom in Rajajinagar books six panels for ten weeks. Two sit on Outer Ring Road, one on Dr Rajkumar Road, one near the Yeshwanthpur signal, one on Magadi Road and one on the Tumkur Road approach. The details are illustrative.
Each panel carries its own number, printed large, all six routed to the showroom landline. The counter sheet asks every walk-in which road, by name. Digital spend is frozen for the ten weeks.
By week six the two local panels, Dr Rajkumar Road and Magadi Road, have produced steady calls and a run of walk-ins from the surrounding pin codes. Outer Ring Road has produced almost nothing, which surprises the owner and should not. The people in that traffic are going home to Whitefield, and they will not drive back across the city for a sofa. Tumkur Road produced two calls, both from dealers.
Next order: drop both Outer Ring Road panels, add two more residential arterials, and keep the Magadi Road site permanently. The Bengaluru hoarding cost guide explains why those local panels were also the cheapest three on the plan.
What to do next
Before the artwork goes to the printer, decide the mechanism for each site and write it into the file name of each artwork. Artwork with a site code in its name is artwork that cannot be mounted on the wrong panel, which is its own small saving.
If you would rather hand the whole thing over, book the free audit and send the site list. Our office is on Outer Ring Road in Nagarbhavi, so on a Bengaluru plan we will have driven most of them.