When we talk about ROI, it can be return on investment, return on involvement or just how to know your digital signage is working. A lot of people don’t think about measurement when planning their messages and the fact is, if you’re going to involve yourself – your budget, time and creativity – you’ll want to measure ROI so you can justify those efforts. Instead of thinking of ROI in strictly financial terms, consider the effect on long-term goals, brand image, and culture in your organization.

The biggest factor in measuring ROI is including a call to action in your content. If you just put out a message without asking the audience to do something that says they saw the message, you have no way of knowing if it worked.

Measuring viewer attention is easy with some basic strategies and tracking.

• First, determine a clear, quantifiable goal
• Then, create your message with a simple, easy-to-track call to action
• Next, set up a response tracker like a webpage, web form or email address
• Publish your message and look at how many people responded
• And measure the results against objectives

Another idea is to see which displays in your facility get the best response by using interactive touchscreens or pairing displays with web kiosks to let viewers take immediate action.

There are also informal ways of measuring success, such as general conversation – a lunchroom chat, if you will – where you simply ask people if they’ve seen your messages and what they thought of them. However you choose to measure your ROI, make it a long-term, continuous process so you can fine-tune your messages to become better and better at reaching people and getting the results you want.