Verizon gets 150k app scans with Scanbuy mobile barcodes

Mobile barcoder Scanbuy has released results from a mobile barcode campaign with Verizon. The goal of the three-month deployment was to get people to download Android apps to their DROID smartphones… and the results are in.

What’s the story?

Verizon combined apps and barcodes in a single campaign here. It connected specific applications (including Layar and Aloqa) to mobile barcodes from Scanbuy. If a DROID owner scanned that barcode, the app was automatically downloaded to their device. Verizon then placed those barcodes, along with information on how to download them, into other media. They appeared in print ads, in-store displays, direct mail, websites, and iPad ads.

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How did the campaign work?

•    Once they scanned the code, the consumers phone would link directly to the download page for the app on the Android market.
•    If the customer didn’t have the ScanLife installed on their phone, the ad directed them to text “SCAN” to 43588, which would trigger an instant download and install.
•    Non-Android phones could scan these apps, as long as they had ScanLife installed. However, they were then directed to a page with pro-DROID propoganda on it.

What were the results:

Scanbuy and Verizon report that the campaign directly lead to over 150,000 scans of the barcodes. No specific details on how many apps were actually downloaded were released… but 13% of the devices that scanned the barcodes were not Androids. Which means that if they achieved a 100% conversion rate from scans to downloads, a maximum of 130,500 apps could have been downloaded.

What we think?

There are two parts of this campaign, and you need to examine them separately. The first part is mobile barcodes. In terms of a barcode campaign, this was a big success. Scanbuy reports that with a hit-rate of 50k per month, this was the most successful campaign it has run in Northern America. A lot of that can be attributed to the “instant gratification” model they used – even if you didn’t have ScanLife on your device, you could get it on-the-spot by texting a shortcode. Then the apps were only a scan away. Combining that with a hand-picked selection of the best apps around, and you’ve got a powerful offering to consumers.

But in terms of driving mobile app downloads, it’s hard to know how effective this campaign was. If you look at in terms of total Android app downloads, it is not very impressive. The Market has achieved in or around 1 billion downloads at this point, so if this deployment attracted 100k downloads, that’s .0001% of the total. Another way to measure this is to check what % of total downloads for those three months that the campaign achieved. Considering that the growth of Android app downloads has been explosive this year (according to Androlib), the % is probably even lower than that. I guess people prefer to just go to the store, rather than buying from someone on the street.