Measurement
Part of What is Route's OOH audience measurement in the UK?
What is Route's OOH audience measurement in the UK?
Route is the UK's joint industry currency for out-of-home audiences. What its ratings cover, how impacts and coverage differ, and where the data stops.
What to take away
- Route is the UK's joint industry currency for out-of-home audiences, covering billboards, roadside panels, transport sites and digital screens.
- It estimates how many people see a site and how often, so different formats can be compared on the same basis.
- Planners use Route figures to set coverage and frequency targets before booking, instead of relying on media owners' own claims.
- Route measures audiences only. Planning consent, creative quality and price sit with other processes.
What Route is and why the industry needs a currency
Route is the audience measurement system for out-of-home (OOH) advertising in the UK.
It measures out-of-home advertising in all its forms, from roadside billboards to bus sides and screens in gyms.
The aim is a single agreed set of numbers, much as BARB does for television and RAJAR for radio.
Without a common figure, each media owner's claimed audience would be measured on different terms and could not be compared like for like.
Route replaced the earlier POSTAR system and is owned by the industry it measures, with the IPA, ISBA and Outsmart taking governance roles.
That structure matters, because research funded by sellers alone tends to favour the sites those sellers own.
How Route builds its audience estimates
Route's method combines a research panel, movement data and visibility research, then models the result across every measured site.
- A panel of respondents shares location information that records journeys through towns and cities.
- Mobile location data from a wider sample expands those journeys into a national picture.
- Eye-tracking research estimates how many passers-by actually look at a poster, and for how long.
- The model produces audience figures for each site, and those figures feed the planning tools agencies use.
The numbers planners pull from Route
Route output is built for planning rather than for the sales story. The main figures are impacts, coverage, frequency and the demographic profile behind them.
| Route metric | What it tells a planner |
|---|---|
| Impacts | Estimated visual contacts across the booked sites, the headline volume figure |
| Coverage | The share of the target audience reached at least once |
| Frequency | The average number of times a reached person sees the campaign |
| Audience profile | Age, gender and social grade breakdowns for a site or a full campaign |
Planners trade coverage against frequency constantly. One large-format site may deliver heavy frequency among a narrow group, while a spread of smaller sites across a city pushes coverage up. Route figures let a buyer test that trade-off before money is committed.
Route data can be filtered by environment, format and location, so a planner can isolate roadside or transport audiences.
The same data underpins post-campaign reporting, so the audience promised at booking can be compared with the audience delivered.
Route data alongside digital out-of-home
Digital screens add a second layer of evidence. Play-out systems record which creative ran on which screen and when, while programmatic platforms report impressions and device-level responses.
Route remains the audience currency underneath those numbers, because a screen impression is not the same thing as a person seeing an advert.
If you are buying screens rather than static sites, our guide to programmatic digital out-of-home walks through the trading process step by step.
That matters most when a campaign mixes classic and digital formats, because both need an audience case on the same currency.
What Route does not tell you
Route is an audience measure, not an approval.
Whether a large hoarding can stand on a given wall is a planning matter, decided by the local planning authority under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.
Cost sits outside the currency as well. Rate cards, production and installation are commercial matters, and our explainer on what a digital billboard costs covers the figures buyers actually face.
Creative quality is another gap: an audience figure tells you how many people could see the work, not whether they remembered it.
The movement data behind the model also brings data protection duties into scope, so the ICO's guidance for organisations is worth reading before handling location information.
Common questions
What is the difference between impacts and coverage?
Impacts count total visual contacts, so one person seeing a site five times adds five impacts. Coverage counts people reached at least once, so it answers a different question: how much of the target audience saw the campaign.
Does Route cover digital screens as well as static sites?
Yes. Route measures digital and classic formats in roadside, transport and other measured environments, and the figures are built on the same basis.
Can Route figures be compared directly with television or online impressions?
No, not directly. Each currency uses its own method and definitions, so a Route impact and a video impression are not the same unit. Any cross-media comparison needs a shared reach measure against the same audience definition.