Billboard advertising uses large-format displays—static vinyl or digital LED screens—to deliver short, high-impact messages to people in public spaces like highways, transit stations, and city centers. These displays range from standard roadside bulletins to spectacular digital takeovers like the Las Vegas Sphere, all designed to be seen and understood within seconds of viewing.

Brands encounter billboards everywhere: highway bulletins reaching commuters, digital screens in Times Square, transit shelter ads at bus stops, and wallscape murals on building facades. The format works by capturing attention during routine travel patterns, creating repeated exposure as people follow predictable routes.

Companies typically use billboard campaigns for brand awareness, event promotion, and driving traffic to nearby locations. A restaurant chain might use highway bulletins to build brand recognition across a metro area, while a retailer could deploy transit shelter ads to drive foot traffic to specific store locations. Unlike digital advertising, billboards cannot target individual users—they reach everyone who passes by, making them better suited for broad awareness goals than precise audience targeting.

How brands measure its impact

Measuring billboard effectiveness presents unique challenges because the medium operates in the physical world without built-in tracking mechanisms. Unlike digital ads that generate immediate click-through data, billboards influence behavior through exposure that happens away from purchase decisions. People see a billboard on Monday and might buy the product on Friday, making direct attribution difficult.

Marketers rely on several types of signals to gauge billboard performance. They track modeled impression counts based on traffic patterns, monitor store visit increases in billboard markets, survey consumers about brand recall, and measure sales changes in areas where billboards run versus areas where they don't.

The biggest challenge lies in proving causation rather than correlation. Sales might increase in a market with billboards for reasons unrelated to the campaign—seasonal patterns, competitor actions, or economic factors. Additionally, spillover effects complicate measurement when people see billboards in one area but make purchases elsewhere, or when other marketing activities run simultaneously.

Common measurement methods

Geo incrementality testing

This method compares sales performance between geographic areas that receive billboard campaigns and similar areas that don't. Researchers select treatment markets where billboards will run and control markets without billboard exposure, then measure the difference in business outcomes between the two groups.

Geo testing measures actual business impact by establishing causal relationships between billboard exposure and sales changes. It works well for brands with sales data across multiple markets and can provide clear return-on-investment calculations for billboard campaigns.

The method requires geographic isolation to prevent spillover—people shouldn't easily travel between test and control markets. It also needs sufficient scale to detect meaningful differences above normal business fluctuations, making it less suitable for very local campaigns or businesses without multi-market presence.

Modeled impression tracking

This approach uses traffic counts, mobile movement data, and visibility models to estimate how many people had the "opportunity to see" each billboard. Industry organizations like Geopath provide standardized impression calculations that account for factors like approach speed, viewing angle, and billboard size.

Modeled impressions excel at planning and buying billboard campaigns. They provide consistent metrics for comparing different billboard locations and formats, helping media buyers estimate reach and frequency across markets.

These models measure potential exposure rather than actual attention or behavior change. A billboard might generate impressive impression counts while failing to influence purchase decisions. The method also cannot distinguish between glancing at a billboard and truly engaging with its message.

Mobile location analysis

This method uses anonymized smartphone location data to identify people who passed near billboards, then tracks whether those individuals visit stores or competitor locations at higher rates than people who weren't exposed to the campaign.

Mobile analysis measures real-world behavioral changes by connecting billboard exposure to physical actions like store visits. It excels at measuring location-based outcomes and can provide relatively quick feedback on campaign performance.

The approach relies on smartphone tracking panels that may not represent the full population, particularly older demographics or privacy-conscious consumers. Exposure definitions can significantly impact results—small changes in how researchers define "exposed" versus "unexposed" groups can alter findings.

Brand lift surveys

This method surveys consumers in markets with billboard campaigns and compares their brand awareness, recall, and purchase intent to consumers in markets without billboard exposure. Surveys can run before, during, and after campaigns to track changes over time.

Brand lift surveys directly measure the mental impact of billboard campaigns by capturing changes in brand perception and purchase consideration. They work particularly well for awareness-focused campaigns where immediate sales impact may not be the primary goal.

Survey results may not translate to actual purchase behavior—people often express purchase intent that doesn't materialize into sales. Sample sizes need to be large enough to detect meaningful differences, which increases costs and complexity for smaller campaigns.

Each measurement method captures different aspects of billboard performance, and combining multiple approaches provides the most complete picture of campaign effectiveness. The choice depends on campaign objectives, available data, and budget constraints for measurement activities.

Why measurement matters

Billboard campaigns represent significant marketing investments, often requiring five-figure commitments for local markets or six-figure spends for major metropolitan areas. Without proper measurement, you're essentially buying reach estimates and hoping they translate to business outcomes.

Traditional billboard measurement relied on modeled impressions - estimates of how many people had the "opportunity to see" your ad. These metrics tell you about potential exposure but reveal nothing about actual business impact. Modern measurement changes this by connecting billboard spend directly to sales lift, store visits, and brand awareness gains.

The insights from rigorous measurement reshape how you plan future campaigns. When Jones Road Beauty tested billboards in NYC, they discovered a 9% lift in new orders - but the cost per incremental acquisition made the campaign unprofitable at their target margins. This precise measurement prevented them from scaling an ineffective approach. Conversely, Jameson's Las Vegas Sphere activation delivered a 4.71% increase in warehouse depletions, proving the ROI of their premium placement investment.

Budget allocation decisions become data-driven when you measure incrementality. You can compare the cost per incremental sale from billboards against your digital channels, outdoor formats against each other, and different geographic markets for efficiency. Teams that measure can justify increased OOH budgets with hard ROI numbers rather than vague reach claims.

Practical considerations for marketers

Billboards work best for campaigns that need broad reach and local relevance. Consider this activation type when launching new products that benefit from mass awareness, driving traffic to physical locations, or creating cultural moments around events. Retail brands opening new stores, restaurants expanding to new markets, and consumer brands building awareness all find billboards effective.

The format excels when you need repeated exposure over time. Unlike digital ads that get skipped or blocked, billboards deliver unavoidable frequency to daily commuters. This makes them valuable for brand-building campaigns where message repetition drives recall and consideration.

Billboards make less sense when you need precise targeting or complex product explanations. The format's creative constraints limit you to simple messages readable at highway speeds. Performance marketing campaigns focused on immediate online conversions often struggle with billboard attribution, though geo-testing can reveal their true impact.

Start small with local poster campaigns before committing to premium bulletins. A basic test might involve placing posters in 2-3 similar markets while keeping comparable areas as controls. Run the flight for 4-6 weeks and measure the difference in sales, app downloads, or store visits between treated and control areas.

Common pitfalls include inadequate flight duration (billboards need time to build awareness), poor creative that's unreadable at speed, and choosing locations based on cost rather than audience quality. Many marketers also fail to account for spillover effects - people who see billboards in test markets but make purchases in control markets, which dilutes apparent results.

How to get started

Begin by defining your measurement approach before buying media. Identify whether you want to measure sales lift, store visits, brand awareness, or website traffic. This determines which measurement tools you'll need and influences your media strategy.

Map your target geography carefully. For geo-testing, you need markets that don't heavily overlap in commuting or shopping patterns. Look for cities or regions where you can run billboard flights in some areas while keeping similar areas as clean controls.

Prepare creative that follows billboard best practices: large fonts, high contrast colors, minimal text, and single clear calls to action. Test readability by viewing your design from across a parking lot. If the message isn't instantly clear at that distance, simplify further.

For measurement, consider using Haus Fixed Geo Tests to establish causal lift from your billboard campaigns. This approach builds synthetic controls from your historical sales data and measures the incremental impact of OOH spend. Supplement geo-testing with mobile location analytics to track store visit uplift and brand lift surveys to measure awareness and consideration changes.

Start your measurement planning during media planning, not after campaigns launch. Geo-tests require baseline periods to establish normal sales patterns before flights begin. Set up data feeds and measurement frameworks at least 2-4 weeks before your billboard campaign goes live.

Contact measurement providers early in your planning process to discuss data requirements and test design. For Haus specifically, they'll need access to your sales data and help defining appropriate treatment geographies to minimize spillover effects between test and control areas.