Measuring, evaluating, and analyzing the performance of your Digital Signage: 5 best practices

A digital signage system is a significant investment. For this reason, ensuring that your planned and designed communication activities are delivering the desired results is essential to moving in the right direction and maximizing your spending. How can you achieve this? In this article, we’ll explore how to measure performance, identify key KPIs, and calculate the ROI of a Digital Signage system.

Digital signage is a way to communicate, inform, and share, but above all, it is a form of marketing that has replaced traditional printed communication tools like posters and flyers. This makes it clear that simply installing a system and leaving it unattended, hoping for results, is not an effective approach.

Like any effective marketing channel, the design, planning, and creation phases must be followed by performance monitoring and results analysis. Only by doing so can you ensure you’re on the right track and that your investment is yielding the expected results.

However, unlike other online marketing tools, tracking goals and performance for digital signage can be more challenging. Screens and totems displayed in public spaces don’t allow for direct and constant control over what’s happening and how users are interacting with the content. Often, users only glance briefly, with no traceable interaction between the device and the individual.

This issue can be effectively addressed by following a few best practices and guidelines, which we’ll delve into below.

5 best practices to ensure your Digital Signage system is effective

Before diving into the details, let’s clarify an essential point: monitoring and analysing the effectiveness of a digital signage network is only possible if meticulous preparation has been done before installation. What does this mean? Before the screens and totems are even set up, you must clearly define your target audience, goals, and strategies to ensure you move in a precise direction. Operating day by day without a long-term vision wastes time and money and makes it difficult to establish benchmarks for evaluating progress.

If these elements are in place, let’s proceed with the best practices outlined in the title:

1. Define Clear Objectives
2. Identify the Right KPIs
3. Leverage Tracking Technologies
4. Assess the User Experience
5. Calculate ROI

Define Clear Objectives

Setting clear objectives is the fundamental starting point for any digital signage strategy. These objectives should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might set a SMART goal like: “Boost brand awareness by 20% within the next quarter through digital signage campaigns.”

Other examples of SMART objectives include:

1. Increasing sales of specific products/services
2. Boosting interactions with content
3. Enhancing internal communication

Each objective should include a quantifiable metric to determine whether it has been achieved.

For internal communication, employee feedback will indicate whether the digital signage strategy is effective.

For product and service sales, measurable data includes the percentage increase in sales, which is straightforward to track.

For content interactions, an analytics system or proximity tracking sensors are essential to capture a realistic count of increases or decreases.

Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are essential metrics for evaluating the success of your digital signage initiatives. These metrics are closely tied to your objectives and should be established during the strategy definition phase.

Common KPIs for measuring digital signage performance include:

• Views: this refers to the number of people who have seen your digital signage content. In-store screens can measure this through visitor counts, while outdoor displays (DOOH) rely on estimates based on pedestrian or vehicle traffic data, factoring in time of day and weather conditions.
• Engagement: this abstract metric reflects user involvement with the screen. While not directly measurable, practical methods (detailed below) can help quantify it.
• Conversions: A sales-oriented KPI, particularly relevant if your primary goal is selling. Tracking this involves identifying the stages of the sales process where digital signage plays a critical role and using tools like QR codes, feedback forms, or analytics systems to measure conversions.

For example, if your goal is to raise brand awareness, impressions (number of content views) and increased interactions could be key KPIs.

Leverage Tracking Technologies

Tracking all interactions and views with your digital signage can be challenging without the right tools. Fortunately, technologies like motion sensors, cameras, and beacons provide invaluable insights into audience behavior, enabling realistic and continuous performance monitoring.

• Motion Sensors: detect the presence and movements of people near the display, tracking metrics such as proximity, viewing duration, and even gaze direction to adapt content in real-time.
• Cameras: capture images or video of viewers to analyze expressions, gestures, and demographic data like age. Facial analysis helps evaluate emotional responses to content, facilitating targeted adjustments.
• Beacons: bluetooth devices that emit short-range signals detected by mobile devices. They track user presence and location, allowing personalized content delivery or notifications.

Assess the user experience

While numerical data provides insights into metrics like dwell time, completed sales, and captured interactions, qualitative data is equally crucial for a comprehensive understanding.

Ask questions like: Were users genuinely interested in the content, or did they struggle with navigation?

Tools such as surveys, interviews, and feedback forms remain the best way to gather qualitative insights that no statistical analysis can uncover.

Calculate Return on Investment (ROI)

Calculating ROI is critical for determining the economic viability of your digital signage network. Include costs such as hardware, software, content creation and management, maintenance, and operational expenses.

Estimate potential earnings generated by the system, such as revenue from promotions or advertisements displayed on your screens. Divide this projected ROI by the total project cost to calculate an approximate ROI percentage.

ROI also allows for long-term assessments of revenue and savings, such as reduced printing costs or streamlined customer care processes.

How to measure Digital Signage engagement

As mentioned earlier, engagement is an abstract metric, but several tactics can help you gauge how compelling your content is and make adjustments as needed:

• QR Codes: use these to track traffic sources, revealing whether users accessed links via your screens.
• Dedicated URLs: incorporate exclusive URLs in your digital signage content to identify direct interactions with your displays.
• Feedback: surveys and questionnaires are timeless tools for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Encourage customers or visitors to share their opinions via your displays.

Performance measurement in digital signage is a continuous process. Combining quantitative and qualitative data with ongoing reviews of objectives and KPIs allows you to refine your strategy and maximize impact. By taking a data-driven approach, you can significantly enhance audience engagement and the overall effectiveness of your digital signage campaigns.

Now you have all the tools you need to make it happen!

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