How do I measure the ROI of my digital signage?

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Simple answer: Depending on what you’re looking to achieve with your digital signage, you may be looking at your returns differently. The most important thing is finding a metric that suits your digital signage goals and being able to view this in a way that is measurable, traceable and tangible.

Full answer:

In a world where metrics, dashboards and KPIs rule, knowing how to measure ROI (Return on Investment) of your digital signage can at first seem a little confusing.

“How can I measure the value of my digital signage?”

If you’re using your digital signage to promote product availability, your measurements can be relatively simple. As you add a new item to your digital signage rotation, you can review the number of products purchased. If the numbers go up, you know your digital signage had something to do with it.

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The above example is the most straightforward answer, however there’s a lot more to understanding the return on investment that digital signage can bring. Below are some of these less measurable (but no less important) returns.

Staff time: Being able to utilise your digital signage for wayfinding or viewer guidance can reduce your staff’s time dealing with these questions. This gives staff added resources for other responsibilities. Being able to direct your customers around a store or your corporate office can help make a more inviting experience.

Training: An often underutilised feature that digital signage can offer is training. While most digital signage platforms allow you to schedule content, some also allow you to integrate a remote control to trigger and display content as and when you require it. This can be done simply through a remote control (on a system on chip screen). Training videos and material can be activated as and when required during out-of-store hours or within a boardroom/classroom.

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Download our handy Proof of Play one-pager to take away and review later.

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Communication improvements: If you’re in retail then communication is all about promotion and branding. You may also be looking at utilising your digital signage for corporate communication, in which case, you’re most likely going to get the most ROI from being able to cross communicate with multiple departments. Being able to deliver key information such as brand guidelines, best practices and latest internal developments will reduce the need for repeated emails, calls and meetings. Allowing your staff to regain some of the valuable work time.

Health and safety: An unsafe environment is an expensive one. Making sure proper health and safety procedures are always at the forefront of your staff’s mind will reduce accidents in the workplace and assist with compliance guidelines.

KPIs and Dashboards: Any sales representative or customer support agent is measured on their success, whether it’s focused on revenue growing exercises or customer satisfaction, these metrics and KPI’s are what your teams should be focused on at all times. Being able to display this data to the correct teams via applications like PowerBI or Grow means that your team can be more informed and waste less time hunting out the information individually. Thus leaving them with more time to focus on their key objectives.

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Incentivising: Some of the best digital signage usage can be found in incentivising your staff. Being able to shout about employee of the month or show thanks to those that have gone above and beyond to their peers, digital signage gives you an excellent platform to deliver moral-boosting content that drives your team to do more.

Building out Better ROI with existing metrics

The most accurate way to measure your ROI is to integrate your data with existing metrics you already have in your company. That’s why Signagelive comes with the option to enable Proof of Play. Proof of Play records the number of plays each individual asset runs over a set duration of time, allowing you to generate reports on the total number of plays each asset has had. By using this information in conjunction with your existing data, you can validate the return.

Here’s a great example of this in action

Steven wants to increase sales of a shoe design at his 12 apparel retail stores. Most stores have surplus stock of this design and the new season is coming. Having this stock on the shelf too much longer will see a reduction of revenue as they will have to go on sale. Steven added several promotional videos and images on November 1st and ran a Proof of Play campaign for the entire month on 50% of the stores. At the end of the month he took his sales metrics from October and found that they had sold an average of 30 pairs per store during that time.

During the month of November, they saw double the sales on those locations that ran the Proof of Play content and were able to see that a total of 10,000 impressions of their promotional images and videos has been the cause of this, which equated to 20% of their digital signage screen time.

With these new numbers in hand, Steven was able to build December campaigns to promote items in the stores based on stock availability, product expiry dates and screen time availability. This gave Steven an increase in revenue and reduction of surplus stock.

The same example could be used for any retailer or even food services.

Building a smarter ROI

As your company grows, you’ll eventually come to a point where managing this process for product availability becomes harder to manage. That’s why, with API’s, you can integrate your existing platforms to automate some of this management.

For example, If you’re already tracking your stock levels via a POS system, you could look to integrate this data into your digital signage. This would require additional bespoke development. The end result would be a digital signage architecture that reads your store’s current stock levels and prioritizes items with surplus stock, while removing products that are not currently available on site.

In summary

Understanding your return on investment for digital signage will look slightly different depending on the industry that you are in. While being able to track sales and other clearly defined metrics may be easier, it’s also beneficial to review the resources you can save with clear communication, training and safety. A well managed digital signage environment can help improve your workflow while drastically reducing your time wasted. For a more complex digital signage environment, Proof of play can be utilised to compare and contrast metrics from a previous period.

To learn more about Signagelive solutions and to discuss your digital signage requirements, please get in contact with us.