How to Use Print Advertising KPIs to Your Advantage
- Content Marketing
- Marketing Strategy

One of the phrases most often heard in advertising is “print is dead.” However, that’s not the case. Print ads are a valuable way to catch your audience’s eye by creating eye-catching artwork combined with strong copy.
But in this digital age with everything web-based, can you still use print advertising to your advantage?
To help answer this question, we’ll explain how you can use print advertising KPIs to measure your campaign’s success and gain valuable insights into your audience.
KPIs You Can Use For Your Print Marketing Campaign
First, before you decide what KPIs to track, you need to determine what the goal of your campaign is. Your KPIs provide the measurable data you need to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. You can’t know what to track if you don’t figure out what outcome you want to achieve. Some different goals you can have are:
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Generation
- Sales
- Brand Consideration
- Website Traffic
Once you’ve determined your goals, then it’s time to assess which KPIs support them. Below we’ll explore common ones that are useful for measuring print campaigns.
Reach
When you decide to publish your print ad, you want to make sure the publication you’re using has a large enough circulation so you can reach as many people as possible. Another tip is to see where your ad is placed.
Front, back, and inside covers are ideal placements as well as being located on a right-hand page. Or if you’re using brochures or rack cards as your advertising methods, you want to leave brochures in a high-traffic area where people are more likely to find and pick them up.
Frequency
Frequency is the number of times a person is exposed to an ad or how many times the ad is repeated in a specific medium over a period of time. It’s often paired with reach since they are complementary. When you place a print ad, you want to know how many people (reach) are going to see your ad and how many times (frequency) they’ll see it.
Cost Per Result
A print ad is a good investment when it works. Once you know what your reach and frequency are, you can do some basic math to find a rough cost per result. To do this, you take the cost of the campaign divided by the result, whether that is views, leads, or site visits. Your result depends on your campaign goal. This will give you an idea of whether the ad will be profitable or if it will just cost you money in the long run.
Brand Recall
As a business, you want people to remember your brand when prompted. For example, if you own an Italian restaurant, you want someone to remember you when asked “Who has the best meatballs in the area?”.
Engagement
Tracking engagement shows how many people interacted with your ad. By using tactics like QR codes or specific coupon codes, more on that below, you can see how many people were directed to your site from your print ad.
Response & Conversion Rate
Another figure to track along with your engagement rate, is your conversion rate. This shows how many people completed their journey through the funnel and became customers based on your ad. You can track this figure using tactics like special forms for landing pages or specific phone numbers with call tracking on them.

Ways To Track Your Print Advertising
Once you’ve decided on your goal and what KPIs to track, it’s time to select the correct tactic for your campaign. You need to think about what works best for your business. If it’s more call-based, a QR code might not work as well as phone calls.
Special Phone Numbers
Another method to track where your leads are coming from is using a special phone number or vanity phone number in your print marketing. Everyone has heard the J.J. Wentworth commercials telling people to call “877-Cash-Now!” (Bonus points if you just sang that). That’s a vanity phone number—it contains a phrase that’s specific to your business and catches people’s attention.
Now if that doesn’t fit with your business style, you can create occasion-specific phone numbers through services like:
These companies allow you to create several temporary numbers you can use in your advertising. In particular, CallRail has phone call tracking, so you know where your leads are coming from and if your advert was successful.
QR Codes
Quick response (QR) codes are an easy way to access a website without typing a URL. They’ve become popular again in recent years since more public places have gone touch-free.
Customers can scan a QR code in print ads using their phone’s camera to reach a specific landing page. When you create this page you’ll want to add a “noindex” tag, meaning that it won’t appear in search engine results. So the only way you can access the page is by the QR code. This gives you an accurate way to measure the effectiveness of your campaign material.
Another way to attribute traffic from your campaign’s QR code is to direct traffic to a specific page via a URL that has UTM parameters applied to it. The five UTM parameters are source, medium, campaign, term, and content. The first three are required for tracking in Google Analytics and the last two are optional.
Here’s an example of a URL from a campaign Strasburg Rail Road ran in June 2024 for their event “A Great Train Robbery: The Bonnie & Clyde Experience”

You can see the source (where they are running their campaign) is Penn Live, the medium is referral, which indicates what type of channel it is (referral from an ad, paid social, organic social, or cost-per-click ads). Finally, the campaign name is bonnie_clyde_june_2024.
Another benefit of using QR codes in print ads is that they generally do not expire. Once created, they can be used indefinitely unless the linked information is changed or removed.
Custom Landing Page Links
Custom landing pages are another tactic you can use in your print ads. For example, if you’re offering a free quote for work you offer, you can set up a landing page with a contact form.
Then you’ll want to add a “noindex” tag so this special landing page isn’t visible in search engines. You’ll also want to make sure it’s not added to your site navigation. That way no one can see the page unless they have the link you shared in your print ad. Doing this makes it easier to isolate traffic and only track activity from your print ad.
When it comes to creating a URL for this custom landing page, make sure you don’t create something that’s too long. You want to keep it short and easy so it looks good in the ad and is easy for users to input into their browser.
If you use Google Analytics for tracking, make sure to set up the custom landing page with a tag for the ad source (like a magazine name or brochure) so you can track your print campaign easily. This will also allow you to analyze it in GA4 alongside your other traffic sources.
Branded Hastags
A tactic that can increase your brand awareness is hashtags. Creating a branded hashtag can be an effective way to promote your business and drive conversations and can be as simple as using your company name or tagline in the hashtag.
Hashtags can help you categorize your content so it becomes easily searchable. Including them in your ads allows you to join ongoing conversations on social media and allows your ads to be visible in those conversations.
This can lead to greater engagement, boosting your brand’s social media engagement through likes, shares, comments, and new followers.
A great example of a hashtag is Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke. Launched in Australia first, Coke removed the traditional Coke logo, replacing “Coca-Cola” from one side of a bottle with the phrase “Share a Coke with” followed by a person’s name. The goal was to find the personalized bottles and share them with friends. The hashtag was found on billboards and print ads as well.
Specific Coupon Codes
Another method is to create specific codes for ads to entice people to visit your website and become customers. These codes can include the publication or ad name so you can easily track sales that result from them.
An example of this could be if you owned a company and printed an ad in Clipper Magazine you could tell people to use code “CLIPPERMay2024” to get free shipping on your order or for a half price on a specific item. Or if you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can have someone bring in the ad, which acts as a valid in-store-only coupon.
These codes can be customized to whatever objective you have for your campaign and you can run several at the same time. Just make sure you create custom coupons that don’t overlap with similar ones.

Marketing Software
You can set up all the landing pages and coupons but if you don’t have a system in place, you’re spending money without getting your ROI. There are several programs that can help you with this task.
One of the more popular tools is Google Analytics, which helps you build a complete picture of your audience while connecting key insights and traffic results. It also works with other Google products like Google Optimize. Plus, it’s a free tool, which is good from a cost standpoint. Also if you already have Google Analytics, make sure you’ve updated from Universal Analytics to GA4.
Another popular tool is Semrush, which offers website traffic analysis for not only your website but for your competitor’s site as well. This can help you adjust your marketing strategy by seeing what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for the competition.
Hotjar is a similar tool to Google Analytics and Semrush in that it tracks who visits your site. However, Hotjar tries to give you the “why” behind their behavior. It allows you to visualize and map your audience’s actions while looking at recordings of their sessions.
There are other tools on the market so do your research and see which one will work best for your business.
Looking to improve your print advertising KPIs? Our content specialists can create authentic content that resonates with your audience.