Glossary
Scan rate
Scan rate is the share of people who see a QR code and scan it. There is no universal benchmark worth quoting: placement, context and the reason to scan swamp every other variable, including the design of the code itself.
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Why published benchmarks are close to useless
Vendor-published scan rates are drawn from their own customers' campaigns, with no control for placement or offer, and are usually reported as a ratio to impressions that nobody measured. A "3% average scan rate" is a marketing artefact, not a statistic.
What actually moves it
- Distance and dwell time. A code someone stands next to for thirty seconds outperforms one across a room by an order of magnitude.
- A stated reason. "Scan for the wine list" beats "Scan me" by a wide margin.
- Physical accessibility. Eye level, unobstructed, matt.
- Size for the distance. Under the ten-to-one rule, most codes are too small.
- What happens next. A slow or irrelevant landing page kills repeat scanning of every code you print thereafter.
Measuring your own
Use UTM parameters and read your own analytics. Compare like for like (same offer, different placement), and you will learn more in a fortnight than any industry benchmark will tell you.
Related
- UTM parameter, UTM parameters are query-string tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that let your analytics attribute a visit to a specific campaign. In QR…
- Contrast ratio, Contrast ratio is the luminance difference between a QR code's dark and light modules. Decoders need a clear threshold; the practical floor is about 40%…
- DPI (dots per inch), DPI is printing resolution. For QR codes it matters because each module must be rendered from a whole number of printer dots: 300 dpi is the practical…