QR codes have been around for a while now but often people struggle to see any real value in them, or how to use them and obtain measurable results.

This blog article describes how the UK Cider manufacturer Bulmers have added a QR code onto their product labels and are effectively tracking QR scans through to a specific landing page within their site.

Bulmers is a popular UK based Cider producer. The image below shows the back of one of their bottles of 'original' Cider. They have added a QR code to the back along with the phrase, 'Join the experiment'.

When you scan this QR code with your mobile scanner your device detects that it contains a URL and opens a browser to take you there.

The URL that it opens is cleverly constructed for several different reasons. Firstly let's take a look at the full URL:

Working from left to right through the URL the first part is self explanatory, it is the Bulmers domain address.

The second part 'qr_codes' denotes that we are in a sub directory marked as having originated from a QR code. This is good practice from a development point of view, but more importantly it means that in an analytics tool such as Google Analytics I can now track individual hits from our QR code on the bottle.

The third part of the URL marks the user as being on a landing page. This is a specific page built for an individual purpose, in this case a customer survey. Bulmers can target this survey's content very specifically as they know exactly where you came from to get there, off the back of a bottle using a mobile device.

The last part of the URL tells our analytics reporting what produce the visitor came from. Bulmers have half a dozen different flavours of Cider. In our image above we have scanned the 'original' flavour, so our URL reflects this.

Conclusion

By using a well thought out, structured URL and by using a tool such as Google Analytics Bulmers can now gather statistics on several different criteria of this users visit.

The key here is that the URL will naturally form reporting segments in Google Analytics so that whatever reports are generated will clearly mark the origin and product type. By setting up the URL like this Google Analytics will do the hard work for you.

They can tell how many people scanned their QR code and what kind of product they were drinking. They can also gather data on mobile browsing such as device types and operating systems. This effectively gives them mobile audience figures.

This is all before anyone has actually taken the survey on their landing page.