Haus Launches Fixed Geo Tests to Measure Billboards, Regional, and OOH Activations

Imagine this: You have an opportunity to run a billboard media blitz across several cities. Your brand is going to be colorfully on display throughout several high-traffic areas – seemingly everyone is going to see it. But how will you measure its success? When it comes time to secure budget, how will you justify your ad spend?

Impressions? Estimated reach? Ad recall surveys? QR code scans? Vibes?

That’s just the thing: ”Vibes” aren’t good enough when you’re spending hundreds of thousands – if not millions of dollars – on a single campaign. What do impressions or QR code scans mean, anyway? What if those people know about your brand already? You need to know how this activation is directly impacting your business – and this is exactly where Haus Fixed Geo Tests come into play.

Fixed Geo Tests – or Fixed Geographic Tests, technically – are variations on traditional Haus GeoLift experiments. With Fixed Geo Tests, marketers note campaign exposure in a specific geographic area, rather than leveraging more typical randomized geo tests.

Wait a second. Hasn’t Haus already run these kinds of tests?

Our Measurement Strategy team has long partnered with our Science team to run these types of experiments for customers as custom, off-platform projects. When designing experiments, brands could come to the table with treatment geographies ready to go and we would manually create synthetic controls to match these groups. 

For instance, Pernod Ricard worked with Haus to measure a St. Patrick’s Day OOH activation at The Las Vegas Sphere. It was their largest OOH activation in brand history – and they were able to prove it drove a 4.71% increase in Jameson warehouse depletions. And Jones Road Beauty ran a Haus test to measure the impact of an OOH campaign in New York to the tune of a 9% lift in new orders.

We’ve seen the value these Fixed Geo Tests offer for businesses and growth marketers – so as of today, we’re officially rolling this capability into the Haus platform so you can run them on your own, totally self-serve.

In which situations are Fixed Geo Tests useful? 

Let’s say you’re running a regional linear TV (LTV) campaign, a billboard push, a direct mail campaign, an in-store opening, or a large-scale OOH activation. These types of marketing activities are tough to geo-test using traditional incrementality testing because the test and control groups cannot be assigned randomly.

That’s why Fixed Geo Tests use a Haus Holdout: A synthetic control built using advanced statistical modeling from similar, untreated regions. By comparing the actual outcomes in the treated geography (or geographies) to an estimated counterfactual (aka, a reality without the ad), marketers can isolate the impact of their marketing activities and measure the incremental lift of their campaign. 

What’s your next move after running a Fixed Geo Test?

After receiving results, brands can finally connect marketing activations to actual sales — then adjust their strategy moving forward. 

For instance, when Jones Road Beauty saw a 9% lift in new orders after running their OOH campaign in New York City, they felt good about continuing to run OOH campaigns. But to justify an increase in their OOH campaign investment, they would need to find a way to make these campaigns profitable.

What if your test shows no lift in revenue or conversions? That doesn’t mean the campaign failed — it means the campaign didn’t drive incremental business impact in the way you expected. That’s a critical insight. 

You now know that this specific tactic, in this market, under these conditions, didn’t move the needle. Your campaign might have improved brand awareness, favorability, or consideration, but not immediate conversions or revenue. This is especially common for upper-funnel activations like OOH, experiential, or sponsorships. You got eyes and attention — but not action. Now you know to either optimize the creative or combine it with lower-funnel levers.

Start testing today

With Fixed Geo Tests, the same experiments you’ve come to know and love for measuring incrementality across geo-segmentable channels (like Meta, brand search, and podcast campaigns, for example) are now right at your fingertips for in-person activations, billboards, direct mail, and other physical or regional campaigns.

Get started today. Existing Haus customers can contact their Measurement Strategist for more information. Interested brands can request a demo to learn more.