Getting More Cars to Stop
Posted in Advertising, Measurement
How nice would it be to take benefits of online advertising to offline?
I’ve just come back from Napier for Easter weekend. As well as enjoying wine and Jack Johnson, I got thinking about the ton of roadside signs attempting to get you to stop for their cafe (Coffee Addicts Ltd) or second rate tourist attraction (Puzzle World). They get a ton of traffic driving past and seeing their signs, what if their message is completely missing people? What if it’s attracting people who want to buy a single drink instead of a family buying a meal? Same principal applies to more than just roadside signs, they’d never know without testing and measurement. The kind of things I guess online marketers take for granted.
Most of these places have no evidence of a brand or reputation so they rely on their signs being seen at the right time and giving people the push they need to pull over. But surely an optimised message could show huge improvements on their revenue.
If only they could setup something to measure the number of cars driving past – something similar to what I’m sure Transit use. Then they could compare this to either the number of cars actually stopping and the sales figures. They could then calculate metrics like Pull over Rate (e.g. 0.1% of traffic visited the shop) and Sales per Vehicle (e.g. the store made $3.25 per 100 cars driving on SH1).
Once they’ve got a benchmark they could begin testing different signs. Maybe in a few years it could be done digitally when a giant LCD is cost effective for a tiny roadside cafe, but for now they could try 3 different signs up on core flute and see how the figures are impacted. I’m certain they would see obvious results, with the traffic numbers being so large especially over holiday periods they’re going to get statistically significant figures in a short amount of time.