How to Measure Digital Signage ROI

Digital signage is a proven communications medium, but the more critical question is whether it is working effectively toward your specific goals. It’s taken time and effort to craft compelling messages and even campaigns for your digital signs, but how do you even know if your visual communications are having the impact you want them to have? Do you know what you want your audience to do after seeing your messages? Do you have an effective method in place to determine how successful you have been? If you don’t have the answers to these questions, then you aren’t doing enough to measure ROI. This term, originally from the world of finance, means “return on investment”, and but in the world of digital signage, “return on involvement” might be a better term.

Why Measure Digital Signage Success

Imagine your CEO coming to you and asking about ROI for your digital signage. How bad would you feel if you have to answer “Well, I don’t really know if it’s worthwhile or not.” Imagine having to justify your budget to someone who holds the purse strings (because you’ll likely be asked to do just that at some point). What would convince them that they should continue funding the project? Whatever you answer that question with is what you should be measuring in order to determine your digital signage ROI.

You want concrete measurement of costs (which includes time) and benefits. Accurate measurement involves three essential components – a definable goal, an accurate view of ‘before’ and an accurate view of ‘after’. Before you start measuring results, see if you have enough data on past campaigns or processes. If you don’t, you may want to run a campaign first as you normally would, measuring results along the way so that you have a benchmark to contrast with communications after the system is in place. Fully understanding your starting point is a huge advantage. Without that, what are you measuring against?

Digital Signage is Different

Marketing is used to try to influence people to choose your products and services over those of your competitors. Much of retail digital signage is used in this way. But organizational digital signage is different – it’s used to inform and entertain internal audiences and visitors, so they engage with the organization, understand its values, and stay updated and motivated to internalize a message or take a desired action.

There are measurable costs to set up and maintain a digital signage system:

• Hardware (screens, media players, etc.)
• Software (content management software, design applications, OS updates)
• Infrastructure (network, power, cabling)
• System training
• Content subscriptions
• External design services
• Support and maintenance contracts
• Labor for consulting, installation, etc.

Then there are the additional operational costs of paying staff to create and schedule content and generally maintain the digital signage system.

That’s all easy enough to add up. But it’s very difficult to assign dollar values to the results of general communications that aren’t sales-focused. Many of the benefits are intangible (brand loyalty, guest experience, employee morale, etc.) and contribute to other larger business factors (employee retention, guest satisfaction, etc.). So then, what is the “profit” from digital signage?

Instead of just thinking about the money aspect of costs, focus on specific goals for individual communications or campaigns by looking at qualitative feedback, behavioral changes and business outcomes. Borrow ideas that come from measuring internal communications, where professionals use SMART objectives, KPIs and other tools.

What’s valuable here isn’t money, but information. So, to measure digital signage ROI, you need to have information that tells you:

• If people are “engaged”
• If they’re having a “good” experience
• If they’re “informed” or “entertained”
• If they’ll continue to use the digital signage system because they “feel” it’s valuable

Tasks Come from Objectives

It is essential that you have a clear idea of what exactly you want your digital signage system to achieve. Is it to improve productivity? Increase event participation? Improve the guest experience? Boost online interactions? Your goal needs to be relevant and measurable and shouldn’t be simply “to give people information”. Your objectives will determine both what you’re going to show on digital signs and how you’re going to judge success, so they need to be well thought out.

Even though it may seem counterintuitive, we care about what we measure, not the other way around. So, make sure you figure out what you want to know before you decide on methodology. It’s easy to publish statistics and graphs, but they are ineffectual without analysis that you can use to further your goals. Measure something that is useful and gives clear data, or you may find yourself going down a rabbit hole following unproductive lines of inquiry.

Planning is vital to accurate and meaningful measurement. Whether it’s a single message or an entire campaign, consider asking yourself the following questions before you create your content:

• What need or opportunity will your communication address?
  • What impact do you want it to have on performance, reputation, image, profits, participation, etc.?
  • Is there any research you have or can do to better inform your decision about how to design and execute your campaign?
• Who is your intended audience?
  • Consider demographics, traffic patterns and key characteristics.
  • What do you want them to do once they receive your communications?
• What is your goal: What do you want to accomplish?
  • Align your goals with your organization’s future, as well as immediate needs.
  • Choose two key objectives that you can define in detail.
  • Objectives should be realistic and measurable.
• What is your proposed solution?
  • Think of your communications in terms of problem solving.
  • Involve key stakeholders in developing your communications.
  • Determine a budget.
• How will you implement your solution?
  • Identify the tactics and different media that can be used to support your goals.
  • Assign tasks and responsibilities and ensure that everyone understands the plan.
  • Tackle any possible challenges in the plan versus waiting until they occur.

By putting some thought into your communications plan, you can make measurement much easier. Once you’ve executed against objectives, measure your success:

• What was the outcome of your campaign, as measured against your objectives?
  • Demonstrate the effectiveness of your solution by showing increases in participation, traffic, sales, or some other quantifiable outcome.
  • Link the results to specific objectives outlined in the plan.
  • Are these results valuable? Concentrate on outcomes versus outputs.

You need to know exactly what the point of your communications is. What are you trying to say, and what should people have or do once they receive your message? How are you affecting human behavior? Your goals will probably fall into one of several broad categories:

• To compel – charity drives, student organizations and activities, benefits enrollment
• To inform – new policies at work, classes and training dates, wayfinding and directions, weather and news
• To motivate – employee reward programs, stock price and profit-sharing schemes, internal contests
• To include – welcome messages, new hire and birthday announcements, community and social activities
• To recognize – organization and individual achievements, safety benchmarks, sports teams stats
• To warn – severe weather, fire and HAZMAT emergencies, security threats

Each reason for communicating will have its own method of measuring success. Communications that are intended to get the audience to do something will see an increase in participation and enrollment numbers, as well as a possible increase in traffic on your Intranet or website.

If the goal is to inform, casual lunchroom polls or water cooler chatter might measure how much information was taken in; you might also see higher attendance for advertised training courses or meetings. For motivational messages, you should see an increase in productivity. Messages designed to make your audience feel included or to recognize achievements ought to see an increase in morale and participation in programs. After alert communications, you should see people following your set procedures and policies that are designed to limit panic and injuries.

How to Measure Success

There are informal ways of measuring your success, such as gathering information through general conversation with peers and audiences, like a lunchroom chat where you simply ask people if they have seen your messages and what they thought of them.

You should already be assessing the overall system once or twice a year with walkthrough audits and by observing how people react to the digital signs. Do viewers stop and look at the screens? If you have a touchscreen, do people interact with it? For how long? Do they smile or seem interested or entertained when they look at your messages?

Another method is to use formal surveys to ask specific, targeted questions to ensure that you are communicating exactly what you want. A few things to keep in mind when crafting a formal survey:

• Keep it short – People are usually happy to spend five minutes or so of their time filling in questions but will look at it as an unwelcome if it takes much longer than that (and probably won’t do it). Remember, this is a quick survey, not a test or a focus group.
• Focus on one topic – Let the questions flow intuitively around the subject matter. If the survey is scattered or confusing, you’ll get fewer results and less participation.
• Consider demographics – Make sure you ask questions that segment your audience. People in different locations, positions, etc. have different exposure to technologies and different communication needs and expectations.
• Leave some wiggle room – Always include comment boxes so your audience can give you comments, not just on the survey topic as a whole, but also for individual questions.
• Put it online – Using an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey.com makes the whole process easier. Participants access the survey on a web page and click through for their answers. Responses are compiled into statistical data that’s easy for you to interpret.
• Repeat and repeat again – You can’t judge progress unless you have a baseline for comparison. Repeat your survey after adequate time has passed (usually a minimum of 90 days). Don’t alter the questions or answers, or you’ll distort the comparison.

A Call to Action is Vital

A call to action (CTA) is a statement designed to get an immediate response from the person reading it. Every digital signage message should have a call to action included that asks the viewer to do something, so you know if audiences are seeing, understanding and engaging with your visual communications. This can be something simple like a URL to visit for more information, a QR code to download something, or a coupon code to be redeemed on site. The CTA just needs to be unique and measurable, so you can track where participants come from.

With a well-crafted CTA, you can measure digital signage ROI immediately for any particular message or campaign to see how it performs. If people take the action the message prompts them to take, then it worked. And the number of people who take that action give you a measurable data set to work with.

As an example, Acme Corp. decides to measure how their digital signs are performing. They choose a work week (five days) as their measurement period, then figure out how many people are exposed to the digital signs in that period. Let’s say the estimated audience is 1,000 people that week (employees plus visitors).

During that week, they showed a total of 30 different messages in playlists, dayparted for various high traffic and low traffic times throughout the week. Each message had its own CTA, and those actions were taken a total of 100 times. So, 1000 people took 100 actions on messages in a week. That means that 10% of people actively engaged with the digital signs.

But each message can also be looked at individually – one message may have had 12 actions taken, while another might have had zero. What is it about the message that had 12 actions taken that made it so successful? The subject matter? The layout or images? The wording? The reward for taking the CTA (entry in a raffle, a discount at the cafeteria, etc.)? How easy is was to actually take the action? Some basic A/B testing with different message designs and CTAs can help clarify the data.

You could even parse the information further. For example, each message displayed for 15 seconds every time it came up in the playlist and repeated every 12 minutes over an eight-hour period on days it was scheduled. This means that a specific message was shown 40 times in a day (for 15 seconds each time – a total of 600 seconds or 10 minutes). The message was shown on three days in the five-day week, so it was displayed 120 times (for a total of 30 minutes). In that time, let’s say 10 people followed the CTA. So, the CTA was followed every 12 times is was displayed, and dividing the number of actions taken (10) by the total number of times it was displayed (120) gives you an ROI on that message of 8.33% overall.

When people are following a message’s CTA, you can be pretty certain they are engaged. You might experiment with increasing the number of times a message is displayed in a week to see if that improves the ROI numbers. You can also continue A/B testing with different designs – but make sure you don’t overlap the two campaigns and that they are shown in the exact same circumstances (same days, times and viewers) so you are comparing apples to apples.

There are probably dozens of ways to slice up the information you get simply from people following your calls to action. What you don’t want is to overanalyze things and get bogged down in lots and lots of numbers. But by using CTAs to help you measure your digital signage ROI, you can craft and assess against a very simple goal – to increase the number of actions taken on each message.

By looking at what makes some messages “successful” (ones that have higher than average actions taken), see what they have in common, and try to introduce those same elements into less successful messages. Then measure again to see if the less successful message see increases in actions.

This is a continuous process of assessment and adjustment, trying to isolate the elements of messages that get people to follow the CTAs, and increase actions taken for all messages. This cycle never stops – it’s part of managing and improving your digital signage system’s effectiveness.

Concrete Call to Action Examples

In order to generate measurable data, you have to engage your audience and get them to participate. The only way to do that is to include a call to action in your digital signage messages – a prompt in each communication that asks the viewer to take the next step. Use any or all of the following items to generate both interest and valuable stats:

QR Tags

• A Quick Response (QR) tag is a two-dimensional bar code that embeds data to be read by smartphone cameras.
• Creating a QR tag is easy using one of the many free online generators. Simply input a dedicated URL you want the QR tag to point to, and it will generate an image file with the embedded data.
• Embed QR tags in digital signage messages to send viewers to a website, have them vote in a poll, or offer a downloadable coupon.
• Track the number of hits to the QR tag’s URL and you have your ROI.

SMS Response

• Use SMS response (text messaging) to poll your audience on a number of topics:
  • General surveys
  • Audience choice polls
  • Training comprehension checks
  • Town Hall responses
  • Fundraising pledges
  • Secure a polling plan with one of the many online providers. Then, design your message with the question(s), the phone number where people send their votes, and a list of options with the corresponding SMS codes.
• Viewers see your message and send an SMS. It’s that easy.

Coupons/Codes

• One of the simplest ways to measure ROI is to offer discount codes or coupons in visual communications.
• Just include a unique code in your message and direct viewers to take action.
• Why not create a digital signage message that IS a coupon? Viewers can simply take a smartphone snap to claim their discount.
• Simply count the number of people who redeem the coupon/code for easy ROI measurement.

Smartphone Snaps

• Smartphone snaps are a fast, easy way to drive traffic. The destination can be a physical location, social media site or photo sharing portal.
• Simply ask viewers to take a snapshot of your message with their phone, and tell them where and how to deliver it.
• One creative idea is to have an animation or video running and ask people to “snap” an image of something that floats by – like your logo or mascot – to get a discount or win a prize.
• Simply count the number of people who deliver the photo to calculate ROI.

Interactive Surveys & Polls

• If you have touchscreen displays, exploit the opportunity to get fast feedback from viewers on the go.
• Surveys can be created as interactive media files or on the web for delivery to digital signs.
• If you don’t have touchscreens, consider using QR tags to direct smartphone users to a poll, or set up an SMS response system.
• Providing voters with instant feedback in the form of a pie-chart or graph will have greater impact on future votes
• Get great feedback and easy-to-measure ROI for your digital signage at the same time.

Social Media

• Drive viewers to your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages by integrating them into your digital signage.
• Post your social media URLs as often as possible to gain followers and reinforce communications.
• Integrating feeds from your social media pages into digital signage content is a great way to add followers and inspire them to participate so they can see their posts “on the big board.”
• Drive traffic from social media to digital signage and back again.

Designated URLs

Driving viewers to your Internet or Intranet sites is an easy way to track interest in a topic. Though most people use QR codes today, you can also use a dedicated URL to drive traffic to a specific webpage. Just make sure it’s short and easy to remember.

• Make sure to designate a unique, trackable URL in your message so you can measure traffic that is a direct result of your digital signage efforts.
• If you want to send viewers to an existing webpage, set up your unique URL to redirect to your chosen page so you can measure success.
• Track your webpage hits to see real-time ROI.

Experiment to see which of these methods work best in your environment and with your audience. The idea is to make this a long-term, continuing process. With constant feedback from your target audience, you can fine-tune your messages and campaigns to become better and better at reaching the specific people you are targeting and getting the results you want.

If you’re not taking steps to accurately measure if your digital signage messaging is achieving your communications goals, then you’re really just throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something will stick. And you’ll constantly be working in the dark.

Providing your organization with greater communication tools has multiple, interrelated effects, and the more effectively they’re used, the greater the benefits to everyone.