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.
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…