For businesses · 6 min read · Updated October 2026

How to Tell If Local Advertising Is Working: Simple Attribution

You can read local ads without clicks: ask new customers, give each channel its own door, count QR scans and compare against a baseline. A practical guide.

The honest answer: you can tell, but not with the precision of a click on a search ad. Local advertising works in the background of people's decisions, so the best read comes from stacking a few simple signals before, during and after a campaign: a new-customer question at the counter, a tracked phone number or web address, a count of QR scans, and a before-and-after look at your own sales. None of them is perfect alone. Together they are usually enough for a small business to decide whether to keep going.

Why local ads are hard to measure, and why that's okay

Digital ads feel measurable because every click is logged. But a click is not a customer, and plenty of the people who see a digital ad never click it. Local, out-of-home style advertising works the other way: a lot of people see your name, a smaller number remember it, and some of those walk in or call weeks later with no trail behind them. Billboards, bus shelters and transit ads have always worked like this, which is why they are sold on estimated impressions rather than clicks.

A Lunar campaign is in the same family. Your business's circle sticker rides on local drivers' cars, so the reach is estimated. For context, Lunar's own estimate is 70,000 impressions per car per day, which is the top of the industry estimate for a wrapped vehicle (OAAA, published by AdQuick and 4OVER4). That is an estimate of how many people could see the car, not a count of people who noticed it and not a promise of sales. Treat it as the top of the funnel and measure what happens further down.

Before you start: write down your baseline

The cheapest attribution tool is a notebook. Before the sticker goes on a car, record a few numbers so you have something to compare against later.

• Calls, walk-ins, bookings or quotes in a typical month, for the last three months if you have them.
• How many of those were brand-new customers, rather than regulars.
• Visits to your website and searches for your business name, if you can see them in your site stats or Google Business Profile.
• Anything else that swings your numbers, such as the season, a holiday or a competitor's sale, so you don't credit the sticker with a busy month.

Ask every new customer one question

"How did you hear about us?" is old-fashioned and still the best local attribution method there is. Put it on the booking form, the intake sheet or the lip of the till, and make it a quick tap rather than an essay. Offer a short list (referral, Google, social media, saw a car, drove past, other) and a free-text line.

Two cautions. First, people are loose with memory: someone who saw your name on a car and then searched for you will often say "Google". So read the answers as a floor, not a ceiling. Second, watch the combination: a rise in "Google" and "I searched your name" after a campaign starts is often the sticker doing its job indirectly.

Give the sticker its own door

Where you can, give each channel a separate way in, so the traffic sorts itself.

• A dedicated phone number or a different extension for the line you show on the design.
• A short web address that exists only for this campaign, such as yourshop.com/car, redirecting to your real page.
• A simple code word at the counter, such as "mention the moon" for a small perk. Keep any offer small and honest.
• A QR code. Each Lunar sticker carries a small QR code, and you choose where it sends people (your website, a phone number or an email address). Lunar counts the scans, and only the scans: it doesn't follow what a person does afterwards. You can see the count in your campaign view.

A QR scan from a moving car is a small number by nature, because most people see the sticker at a distance or at a red light and can't scan it. Don't judge the campaign on scans alone. Think of it as proof that real people are looking closely enough to act, and a way to learn which neighbourhoods and days are noticed.

Read your own numbers, in the right order

After the first charge-cycle of driving, compare against your baseline. Look at the signals in roughly this order, because the early ones move first.

• Brand searches: more people typing your business name into Google is the most common early sign that recall is building.
• Direct and word-of-mouth contacts: calls and walk-ins that say "I keep seeing your car" or "my neighbour has your sticker".
• New-customer share: a higher fraction of new faces in the same month-over-month period.
• Revenue or bookings: the slowest and noisiest of the four, so give it a few months before drawing conclusions.

Lunar's dashboard shows you the active cars on your campaign, approved mileage and estimated impressions. It never shows a driver's address or payment details. Use that as the supply side of your chart (how much exposure was in the field) and your own books as the demand side (what happened at your door).

Give it enough time and keep the test fair

Plans run on 3- or 6-month terms, billed monthly, which fits how local recall builds: a name you see once is forgotten, and a name you see for months feels familiar. One month of data is usually too thin to judge, and the sticker needs time to go from match to print to a driver's car before it's working at all. Lunar doesn't set a fixed number of weeks for that, so don't set your review date from the signup day. Set it from the day your first sticker is confirmed on a car.

Keep the rest of your marketing steady while you test. If you launch a sticker, a new website and a discount in the same month, you will never know which one did it. Change one thing at a time where you can.

What good looks like for a small business

Plans start at $500 a month for Half Moon with 2 cars, which at the 70,000-per-car estimate works out to about 4,200,000 estimated impressions a month and a CPM of roughly $0.12. Full Moon is $1,500 for 7 cars, about 14,700,000 estimated impressions and a CPM near $0.10. Those cost-per-thousand figures are low next to most paid media, but the real test is simpler: did the number of new customers go up by more than the cost of the campaign is worth to you?

Work it backwards. If you know what an average new customer is worth to you over a year, divide the monthly price by that number: that is roughly how many new customers a month the campaign needs to cover itself. Whether that is realistic depends on your trade, but it turns a fuzzy feeling into a number you can check. For more on this way of thinking, see car advertising ROI, and for how the plans compare, see pricing.

A simple monthly check-in

• Count new customers and where they said they came from.
• Note brand searches and any calls on the campaign number.
• Check the QR scan count and the dashboard's active cars.
• Write one line on what else changed that month.
• After three months, compare against your baseline and decide: keep, change the design or area, or stop at the end of the term.

You will never get courtroom-grade attribution from any local channel, and anyone who promises it is overselling. What you can get is a clear enough picture to spend the next dollar sensibly. If you'd like to see how a campaign starts, how it works walks through the steps.