By Q4, more than two-thirds of all action codes (1327 or 70%) were accompanied by information that described what happens after the scan. This is considered by many to be a best practice and follows the pattern of many other calls to action.

Beyond that, there is a clear trend moving away from embellishments. Few codes were customized or have an icon adjacent to it.

For example, in Q2, 48% of all action codes contained an instruction regarding how to download a code reader. That dropped to 23% in Q4. In Q2, 17% of action codes were accompanied with an icon showing a smartphone scanning the code. By Q4, that had dropped to 5%.
Hardly any codes were accompanied by an SMS campaign for people who did not have action code readers.

There was very little change in these statistics during the course of the year.

Action Code Page Location

More than 90% of action codes are placed on the bottom half of the page, the traditional location for a call to action. The diagram to the left divides the a magazine page into quadrants and shows by percentage where the action codes appeared. Numbers that overlap quadrants indicate that a code crossed quadrant boundaries.

Conclusion