Flyers are the format QR codes suit best: held in the hand, read at leisure, kept on a fridge. And they are the format where the code most often gets no thought at all.
Make a QR code freeA flyer is read at about 30cm, so a 3cm code is comfortable and 2cm is the floor. Place it in the lower right of the front face where a right-handed reader's thumb naturally sits, or beside the call to action it belongs to. Keep it away from the fold on a folded leaflet — a code across a crease loses contrast along the fold line and fails intermittently, which is the worst kind of failure because it passes a desk test.
Scan rates on flyers vary enormously with the label, far more than with the design of the code itself. 'Scan me' is nearly meaningless. 'Scan for 20% off your first order', 'Scan to book a free survey', 'Scan for this week's menu' all state a benefit and a reason to act now. Adding a time cost helps too — 'takes 30 seconds' removes the main unspoken objection. Write that line before you place the code, not after.
The most common waste in flyer campaigns is a code pointing at a homepage. The person scanning has an offer in their hand and no patience for navigation. Build a landing page that repeats the offer in the same words as the flyer, loads fast on mobile data, and has one action on it. Continuity between the printed piece and the page is what stops people bouncing — if the page does not visibly match the flyer, they assume they are in the wrong place.
Use a distinct tracked code per area, per drop date and per design. That turns leafleting from folklore into a comparison: which postcodes respond, whether the Tuesday drop beats the Saturday one, whether the discount or the free-survey creative wins. Scans arrive over days rather than hours because flyers get kept, so read results after a fortnight and expect a long tail from the fridge door.
Ten types, twelve designs, PNG, SVG, and PDF download. No account, no expiry, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Six rules that decide whether a QR code gets scanned: print size, contrast, quiet zone, error correction, a call to action, and testing on real phones.
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