A lettered van stands beside a road for hours every day, a flyer lands in a thousand letterboxes, an invoice gets read at leisure. All three reach people who are not sitting at a computer — and all three usually end in the same place: at an address someone would have to type out, or at a code that opens the home page. From there the visitor searches on alone, and nobody at the business knows whether they arrived. This article describes the other direction: one landing page per advertising medium, a code that leads exactly there, and figures that afterwards say which piece of paper brought in the enquiries.
Why the path from paper to page so often breaks
The two worlds have long sat side by side, just without a connector. Almost every trades business has its own website: 94 percent (Bitkom) said so in a survey of 504 companies.
At the same time, printed advertisements and noticeboards are still used by 23 percent (Bitkom) of people looking for a business. Printed advertising has not disappeared, it simply has no connection. In many businesses the path from paper to page consists of an address someone types by hand — and every character in it is a chance to give up. How a tradesperson website turns from a signboard into an enquiry path has its own article; this one is about the bridge in front of it.
The typing is avoidable, because scanning has arrived in everyday life. In a Bitkom survey on food shopping, 24 percent (Bitkom, 2020) had by 2020 scanned the code on a package to obtain product information; in 2019 it was 17 percent (Bitkom, 2019). In a 2025 survey 40 percent (Bitkom) said they already call up origin and ingredient details for food via a code, and a further 44 percent (Bitkom) can imagine doing so; 1,004 people aged 16 and over were surveyed. Those figures describe shopping rather than looking for a trades business, but they show that the gesture itself is typically no longer an obstacle: camera open, code in frame, page loaded.
What matters, therefore, is not the code but what comes after it. A code is a printed address, nothing more. If it opens the home page, the visitor begins exactly the search they wanted to avoid by scanning — on a phone, standing up, one-handed. If it opens a page that picks up the theme of the advertising medium, the way from the street to a submitted form is as a rule two taps long. The same difference decides whether the effect can be read off afterwards at all.
The rule behind it
What the figures say about the search
People looking for a trades business ask other people first. 83 percent (Bitkom) seek advice in personal conversation with friends, family or colleagues, and 41 percent (Bitkom) gather information on site.
The website is not at the top of that list, but it is on it: 26 percent (Bitkom) click through the websites of possible firms and 15 percent (Bitkom) consult online reviews. And it works as a knock-out criterion: for 40 percent (Bitkom) a business without a website drops out of the selection, and 55 percent (Bitkom) regard digital offerings as a reason to find a business more attractive. All figures come from a survey of 1,004 people aged 16 and over.
- The recommendation comes from people, the confirmation is fetched from the page — the code shortens the way between the two.
- Anyone standing outside already has the phone in hand: a code in the shop window saves the detour through a search engine.
- Printed advertising also reaches people who rarely search online in the first place — it just has to be able to hand them on.
- Without a landing page per medium, the question of effect stays a guess, and guesses decide badly about the next advertising budget.
- What happens on the page can be measured; what happens on paper cannot. The code moves the boundary between the two.
- Being found locally needs both: visibility for businesses in the area and a short path from printed advertising to it.
Inside the businesses themselves the online presence is widely spread. 56 percent (Bitkom) have their own presence or advertising on social media, three years earlier it was 40 percent (Bitkom, 2022). 37 percent (Bitkom) run advertisements online and 32 percent (Bitkom) use email or newsletters. The printed medium does not compete with any of this, it feeds it: a code on the van, the flyer and the invoice leads into the same structure that adverts and newsletters lead into — except that it costs nothing beyond what is printed anyway.
Medium Printed short address Landing page
----------------- --------------------------------- -------------------------
Vehicle examplebusiness.invalid/heat /en/emergency-heating/
Flyer bathroom examplebusiness.invalid/bath /en/bathroom-refit/
Invoice examplebusiness.invalid/plan /en/service-plan/
Shop window examplebusiness.invalid/book /en/appointment/Scroll table sideways
| Path from the medium | What the visitor does | What the business sees afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Address to type out | types it, mistypes it or gives up | nothing |
| Code to the home page | searches for the right page alone | one visit to the home page, origin unknown |
| Code to one shared campaign page | reads the right topic | visits, but all media in a single number |
| Code to one landing page per medium | reads exactly the topic of that medium | visits and enquiries separated by medium |
The test before printing
One landing page per medium
The cut does not follow the services the business offers, it follows the occasion someone is scanning from.
A van seen on the way to an emergency call needs a different first line than a flyer about a bathroom refit read at the kitchen table. Anyone who already runs one page per service has done most of this work and only needs to connect those pages to the right codes.
The second reason for the cut is measurement. As long as every code leads to the same address, van, flyer and invoice are stirred into a single number and cannot be separated again. As soon as each medium has its own address, the answer about effect sits in the traffic figures without any extra tool. The effort is a one-off: create a page, assign a short address, generate the code.
- Vehicle lettering: a page for the most common service, still recognisable as the van drives past.
- Flyer or mailshot: a page for the advertised project, with the same picture and the same headline as on paper.
- Invoice and quote: a page for existing customers, for a service plan, a repeat order or feedback.
- Shop window and front door: a page with opening hours, appointments and directions and location.
- Trade fair, market or open day: one page per event, collecting sign-ups through the website.
- Sticker on installed equipment: a page with operating notes, service intervals and the number to call when something fails.
What has to be on the landing page
The landing page is as a rule opened on a phone, often standing up and rarely with full attention. The first screen height therefore has to answer three questions: am I in the right place, what do I get, how do I get in touch.
Everything else can sit below. How to build a page so that it stays readable and usable on a phone is a topic of its own — for a landing page the stricter version applies, because every visitor arrives from a printed promise.
The second point is recognition. Someone holding a flyer with a particular headline who then sees a completely different page first checks whether they are in the right place instead of reading. The same headline, the same picture and the same price framing as on paper removes that break. At the end there is a single next step: a contact form that actually collects the enquiry, or a phone number set up as a link that dials with one tap.
The same headline
The line from the printed medium appears again at the top of the page. The visitor sees in a second that they are in the right place.
One screen to the action
Form or phone number are reachable without scrolling. Everything explanatory sits below, not above.
A dialable number
The number is a link, not an image. One tap starts the call.
A short form
Name, how to reach them, what they need. Every additional field costs completions and has to justify itself.
Place and hours
Someone standing outside wants opening hours and directions, not company history.
Legal pages reachable
Imprint and privacy policy are one step away from the landing page.
Printing: size, quiet zone, placement
A code has a minimum size, and it depends on the reading distance. On a business card held in the hand a few square centimetres are enough; on a van door seen from several metres away the same area has to grow many times over.
If in doubt, print a test sheet at final size, put it in the place it will live and scan it from the distance it will really be scanned from — that says more than a rule of thumb.
The clear margin around it matters just as much. A code needs a quiet zone free of type, lines and image edges, otherwise the camera cannot find its corners. Contrast beats decoration: a dark code on a light, quiet background usually reads reliably, a light code over a photograph often does not read at all. On vehicles, curvature, reflections and dirt are added; in a shop window, the glass and the sun. And a code running across door handles, panel gaps or fold lines is unreadable when it matters.
Scroll table sideways
| Place | What makes scanning harder | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Van door | curvature, reflection, distance, movement | large area, matt film, quiet background, eye level |
| Shop window | glass, sun, reflections of the street | inside, centred at eye level, matt background behind it |
| Flyer and mailshot | little space, busy surroundings | clear margin, its own white box, code away from the fold |
| Invoice and quote | black and white printing, crease from the envelope | placement away from the fold line, generous margin |
| Sticker on equipment | dust, grease, curved surface | laminated surface, a flat spot, an annual visual check |
Next to the code belongs a line that says what lies behind it. A bare code on a van does not answer why anyone should take their phone out. "Request a heating service appointment" does answer it. That line is also the headline of the landing page and therefore the piece of recognition that closes the gap between paper and screen. And because some people do not scan, the short address stands beside it in readable type.
Two mistakes that get expensive
Measuring without building a banner
Separation is the real gain. As soon as every medium has its own address, the site's own traffic figures answer the question about effect by themselves, with no extra tool.
The number is not entirely clean: search engines send visitors to the same landing page too. For a sharper split, give the printed code its own short address that is advertised nowhere else and internally redirects to the landing page. Counting page views as a rule needs no consent as long as nothing is stored on or read from the visitor's device — and that is exactly where the law starts.
- Views per landing page, separated by address: the base figure everything else follows from.
- Enquiries per landing page, not just views. Only the ratio of the two says anything about the medium.
- Record the period: one print run, one window, one comparison value from last year or last week.
- Print the short address on one single medium, otherwise the numbers mix again.
- Make phone calls separately measurable, otherwise the very channel most printed advertising arrives through is missing.
- Keep only the metrics that matter for small businesses and keep the measurement data-minimal.
The storage of information in the end user's terminal equipment or the access to information already stored in the terminal equipment shall be permitted only if the end user has consented on the basis of clear and comprehensive information.
Addresses that survive a move
Print is final. A flyer sitting in ten thousand letterboxes cannot be recalled, and a lettered van runs for years. The address behind a code therefore has to survive the next rebuild of the website.
In practice that means short, speaking addresses without a date and without campaign codes, and with every rename a permanent redirect from the old address to the new one — in the same work step, not later. Anyone running a short address as a domain of its own should check first that the name is free; the pitfalls are in the article on business name, domain and name rights.
The second rule concerns content. A landing page belonging to an expired campaign is not deleted but rewritten: same address, new content, one sentence about the expired offer and a way to the current one. That way an old code does not run into a dead end but into a conversation. If a campaign repeats regularly, keep the same address across the years and swap only the content — then every printed code from the past keeps working.
Short address Target
--------------------------------- -----------------------------
examplebusiness.invalid/heat /en/emergency-heating/
examplebusiness.invalid/bath /en/bathroom-refit/
Old address Target Type
--------------------------------- ---------------------------- ----------
/en/heating/ /en/emergency-heating/ permanent
/en/autumn-offer-2025/ /en/bathroom-refit/ permanentLegal details a landing page needs too
A landing page is no exception to the rest of the website.
Under Section 5 DDG (DDG), the name and address, a means of fast electronic contact and, depending on the business, register and supervisory details have to be permanently available, and to be "easily recognisable and directly accessible". A page reached only through a printed code is covered just as the home page is. What belongs in an imprint and a privacy policy is set out in the article on imprint and privacy pages; here all that counts is that both stay one step away from the landing page.
- Imprint and privacy policy are linked from every landing page, even when the page has no other navigation.
- If a price appears on the page, the condition appears beside it — scope, term, what is not included.
- Statements on the printed medium and on the page match; differing versions are an avoidable risk.
- A form collects only what is needed for the answer and says what the details will be used for.
- Expired campaigns stay online as pages but are marked as expired.
- Anyone advertising with photographs of completed work obtains the client's permission first.
Done in four weeks
The change is smaller than it sounds, because it works along things that already exist: there are already advertising media, and there is already a website. What is missing is the connection between them.
That there is still room there is shown by another Bitkom survey: only 9 percent (Bitkom) have ever booked an appointment with a trades business online, while 27 percent (Bitkom) can imagine doing so. If appointment requests through the website are on the list anyway, put both into the same pass.
- Week 1: list every advertising medium in circulation or due to be printed in the coming months — vehicles, flyers, the invoice template, the shop window, stickers, events.
- Week 1: for each medium, name the occasion someone scans from and derive the headline of the landing page from it.
- Week 2: create the landing pages, each with its own address, its own headline and one single next step.
- Week 2: assign short addresses and set them up as permanent redirects to the landing pages.
- Week 3: generate the codes, print them at final size, scan them in place from a realistic distance and only then release the file.
- Week 4: after the first run, put the views per landing page next to the enquiries and decide which medium gets the next print run.
After that the sequence repeats per medium rather than per campaign — which is what makes it durable. To see how such a landing page comes about, look at how a site is built and at the finished examples in the demos. If the aim is to show products without running a shop, the structure is described in the article on the digital showcase.
Sources and studies