How to Track QR Code Scans

Can you track a QR code at all?

A QR code is only a pattern of squares. The phone camera reads it and opens whatever is written inside, and nothing is reported back to anyone. So a code that holds your website address directly cannot tell you whether it was scanned. Your website analytics may see the visit, but it cannot separate visitors who came from the code from everyone else.

Tracking works when the code holds a short link instead of your final address. The phone opens the short link first, the service counts the visit, and the visitor is sent on to your page a fraction of a second later. This kind of code is called a dynamic QR code. If you want the full comparison, read Dynamic vs static QR codes.

In short: to track scans, you need a dynamic QR code. Every type on this site is dynamic except Wi-Fi, which has to hold the network details in the code itself.

How to create a QR code you can track

1. Open the generator and choose what the code should open: a website link, a PDF, a digital menu, a contact card or one of more than 50 other types.
2. Fill in the details and give the code a name you will recognise later, such as "Spring poster, Main Street". Your draft is saved as you type.
3. Pick colors, a frame and your logo if you like. We check that the design still scans before you download it.
4. Sign in with Google or your email and download the code as PNG, SVG or JPG.
5. Print it or put it online. Every scan now appears in My QR Codes, with its own statistics page.

What you can see for every code

Open My QR Codes and choose Analytics next to a code. You get:

• Scans and unique visitors for each day, as a chart
• The change against the previous period of the same length
• Devices (phone, tablet, desktop), operating systems and browsers
• Countries the scans came from
• When the code was last scanned
• Taps on the main button of the page, for codes such as Email, Call or SMS
• Any date range up to two years, shown in your own time zone
• A CSV export to open in Excel or Google Sheets

Scans vs unique visitors

A scan is counted each time someone opens the code. If one person scans the same poster three times, that is three scans. Unique visitors count the same phone once per day, however many times it scans. When the two numbers are close, most people scan once. When scans are much higher, people come back to the code, which is typical for menus, price lists and Wi-Fi signs.

To count unique visitors we combine the network address and browser into a code that changes every day. We do not store the address itself, and you never see who scanned: statistics are counts, not people.

What is not counted

Some visits are not people scanning your code. Messengers and social networks open links to build a preview, search engines follow links, and some browsers load pages in advance. We recognise these and leave them out of your statistics, so the numbers reflect real scans.

Showing the code image is not a scan either. If you embed your code on a website, displaying the image counts nothing. Only opening the link does.

Get told when your code starts working

Waiting to see whether a new poster works is the hard part. When a code is scanned for the first time, we send you an email with when it happened, the country and the type of device, and a button to its statistics. You get it once per code, and you can turn these emails off with one click.

If you prefer a regular summary, switch on the weekly email in Settings. Every Monday morning in your time zone it lists how many scans your codes got in the past week and which codes were scanned most. It is off until you turn it on.

Compare placements with one code each

The most useful thing tracking can tell you is which placement works. Use a separate code for each place: one for the shop window, one for the counter, one for the flyer. Give each a clear name. After a week or two you will see which one people actually scan, and you can stop printing the ones they ignore.

The same works for campaigns. Put a different code on each version of a leaflet or each magazine ad, and compare them on the same date range.

A worked example: a café flyer campaign

Say a café prints 500 flyers with a discount and hands them out in two places: at the train station and at a nearby office building. It creates two Website URL codes that open the same offer page, names them "Flyer, station" and "Flyer, offices", and puts one on each half of the print run.

On day one the first-scan email for the station code arrives within an hour. After a week the statistics show 64 scans from the station and 11 from the offices, most of them on phones between Monday and Friday. The next print run goes to the station only, and the offer page gets a new headline without reprinting a single flyer, because the codes are dynamic.

Tracking with Google Analytics and UTM tags

If your code opens your own website, you can also see those visits in Google Analytics or a similar tool. Add UTM tags to the link you put in the code, for example ?utm_source=qr&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=spring. Your site analytics then shows how many visitors came from the code and what they did on your site.

The two work well together: the QR statistics count every scan, including people who leave before your page loads, while your site analytics shows what happened after they arrived. Because the code is dynamic, you can add or change the tags later without reprinting.

Why your numbers may look different

• Your site analytics shows fewer visits than scans: some people close the page before it loads, and some block analytics.
• A code shows no scans: check that the printed code is large enough and has good contrast, and scan it yourself with two different phones.
• The daily chart looks shifted: statistics use your time zone, so a scan late in the evening may fall on a different day than in another tool.
• Wi-Fi codes show nothing: they are static and cannot be tracked.

Questions