“How do I know if my truck wrap brings in work?” Online ads come with a report. A truck, a yard sign, a mailer and a door hanger do not. Somebody sees the truck at a stoplight, remembers the name, searches it that night and calls from your website. If you ask, she may say “Google.” The truck did the work and gets no credit.
You cannot fix that completely, but you can get close enough to make decisions. The method is simple: give every printed piece something only it carries, a web address or a phone number, then count what comes back once a month. Tracking Where Leads Come From covers the question by the phone and the monthly table for all your sources. This article is about the ones that never send a click report.
Way one: a web address only that piece carries
Google Analytics reads campaign tags added to the end of a web address; the lead-tracking article covers the three tags and Google’s naming rules (lowercase, one name per source, every time). Billboard is one of Google’s own examples of a source, so a printed piece fits right in, and its visits show up in the Traffic acquisition report under the names you chose.
The trouble is that nobody types a long tagged address off the side of a truck. Two ways around it:
Write the names down before you print anything, so the truck is never “truck” one month and “Truck” the next:
Google also offers utm_content “to differentiate creatives,” which is handy when you print two versions of the same mailer and want to know which one worked.
Way two: a phone number only that piece carries
Someone who sees the truck may simply call instead of visiting the website. A separate number for each piece, from a call tracking service or a second line that forwards to your main one, counts those calls directly: every ring on the truck number came from someone who saw the truck.
It costs something, and it has three traps worth knowing before you paint a number on a vehicle:
Keep the main number where Google looks
Tracking numbers belong on the printed piece, not on your Google Business Profile. Google’s guidelines say to “use a local phone number instead of a central call center helpline number whenever possible,” that “the phone number must be under the direct control of the business,” and not to “provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.” Your main number, the one you own and answer, is the safe choice for the profile, and it should match your website and every directory listing. Citations and NAP Consistency covers why the match matters.
You do not need a tracking number on the profile to count its calls anyway: the profile’s own Performance numbers count taps on its call button, as the lead-tracking article explains. Google’s help page says you can add up to two more numbers alongside the primary one if you need them. And if you run Google Ads tied to the profile, Google has a separate “Google Ads phone number” setting that “allows you to display a different phone number in the location asset from the number shown on your Business Profile,” so the ads can carry their own number while the profile keeps yours.
Mailers: the one piece you can measure properly
A mailer has a known number of pieces, which makes it the easiest offline channel to judge. The Postal Service’s Every Door Direct Mail sends pieces “addressed to ‘Postal Customer’” to “every address on your selected routes,” and its mapping tool lets you pick routes by “age, household size, and income.” The retail option takes “at least 200 and up to 5,000 pieces per day per ZIP Code,” and when we checked in October 2026, the USPS page listed EDDM Retail flats at $0.26 per piece. Check the current rate before you budget.
Say a gutter company mails 2,000 flats at that rate: $520 in postage, plus whatever the printing costs. The mailer carries its own number and a QR code tagged mailer and spring-2027. Over the next six weeks, the mailer number takes 14 calls and the QR code brings 9 visits, of which 3 fill in the form. That is 17 leads from 2,000 pieces, a 0.85% response. If 5 of them become jobs, the postage cost $104 per won job, before printing. Those numbers are made up for the example; your own will tell you whether the next drop is worth it.
You can go one step further. Split the drop into two sets of routes and give each half its own number or QR tag. Then the count tells you which neighborhoods answered, and the next mailer goes only there.
Trucks and signs: count, then compare months
A truck has no piece count. It drives past a different number of people every day, so the useful measure is a trend: calls on the truck number and visits to /truck, month by month. If you add a second wrapped truck in April and the truck count roughly doubles by June, the wrap is working. If you wrap a truck and the truck count stays near zero for a season, look at the design: stand a lane away and check whether you can read the name and the number.
Yard signs work the same way, with one more thing you can count: how many signs went up. Write it down each month. Calls per sign standing is a number you can compare from one season to the next.
The monthly count
On the first of every month, fill in one line per piece:
Then add those lines to the monthly table of all sources that the lead-tracking article sets up, and compare cost per won job. Still ask “how did you hear about us?” on every call, because the numbers and the answers catch different people: the number catches the woman who called straight from the curb; the question catches the one who searched you later and remembers the truck.
Neither is perfect, and that is fine. Read them the same way every month, judge on seasons rather than single months, and the next time someone offers you a wrap, a billboard or a mailing list, you will have numbers to set the price against.