A use case · print and events
Ink dries. Campaigns don't.
A QR code is the only part of a campaign that cannot be edited after it ships. Print a short link behind it and the code stops being a destination and starts being a question you can answer differently later.
One poster, six months
The poster never changes. Everything else does.
Ten thousand copies went out in March. Follow what happens to a scan as the campaign it advertises is planned, run and finished.
The poster goes to the printer with a short link on it. Ten thousand copies, a hundred venues, and nothing about it can be changed again.
- A scan today lands on
- northwind.co/spring-sessions
- Because of
- Nothing yet. The link's own destination is doing the work.
Scans, cumulative
0
Illustrative figures.
Without the indirection
The code would have encoded northwind.co/spring-sessions directly. That page is gone, so every scan from August onward — 1,289 of them — would have been a 404 on a poster nobody can take down.
Why it comes up
Four ways a printed link goes wrong.
The venue changed
Three weeks out, the room moves. Every poster, badge and programme still says the old page — and the old page can now say so, because it is a redirect rather than a printed address.
The campaign ended
A promotion runs to a date, and the page dies on that date. A rule with a date window sends everything after it to whatever should exist instead, without anyone remembering to do it.
The market got its own site
The same packaging ships to six countries. A country rule sends each scan to the site licensed to serve it, decided at the edge nearest the person scanning.
Nobody knows what worked
Print is the least measurable thing marketing does. A short link makes it a link: scans over time, by country, by device, per poster if you make one link per placement.
How it is set up
Three fields and a date.
- 01Make the link on your own domain, with a slug short enough to type off a wall.
- 02Download the QR as SVG and hand it to whoever is doing the artwork. It encodes the short link, never the destination.
- 03Add a rule: after the event date, send everyone to the recap. Test it with the visitor simulator before you save it.
- 04Change your mind as often as you like. The poster is already in the post.
Worth knowing
- SVG, for the printer
- Sharp at poster size and at business-card size, and it is what a print vendor will ask for.
- Rules are checked in order
- First match wins, and a scan matching nothing gets the link's own destination — so adding a rule can never make a printed code stop working.
- One link per placement
- Same destination, different slugs, and the analytics tell you which venue, which insert or which city actually pulled.