Explore the diverse applications of QR codes with these key rules, from creation to effective placement in UI and tracking data with Google Analytics.
You can create and share the best media, but if people cannot easily interact with your site, the hard work is wasted. Imagine you've set up a great campaign, but to get to your website users must manually type in the URL. This will handicap engagement for even the most exceptional marketing. The last thing you want is for a user's experience to be cumbersome.
Just as barcodes allow machines to read data from items in stores, QR codes are a barcode-like vector between online and offline information. QR codes can be easily accessed by any phone in the world that has a camera. They enable everything from online to offline (O2O) marketplaces, the latter being huge in China.
Have you ever watched an awesome presentation? The presenter promises to share some resources. You’re excited to see what they recommend. But then they start racing through their slides. The URLs flash past before you can even write them down. Frustrating, right? Don’t do that to your audience.
To ensure you are tracking the traffic taken to your website from a QR code, it's important to add UTM parameters to the URLs you are using to create your QR codes.
This will allow you to see users, bounce rate, sessions, events, conversions and more in Google Analytics.
> The UTM parameters in a URL identify the campaign that refers traffic to a specific website, and attributes the browser's website session and the sessions after that until the campaign attribution window expires to it. The parameters can be parsed by analytics tools and used to populate reports. > > Source: Wikipedia
Important: this only works for your own domain or domains that you have access to in your Google Analytics account.
The best place for a QR code scanner is to put it on top of the home page with a “Scanner” icon and labeled “Scan”?