How to Evaluate Yard Signs as a Marketing Investment

Professional marketers evaluate advertising by looking at its cost, the audience it reaches, how often people encounter it, and what they want that audience to do. They also compare different advertising methods to determine which ones make the best use of their budget.

Political campaigns can use the same approach when deciding how much to spend on yard signs. A sign might cost only $5, but that price tells us little about its value. Where the sign is placed, who passes it, and how long it remains visible all influence what the campaign receives for its money.

The communications funnel discussed earlier provides a starting point. If the campaign needs to increase name recognition, it should evaluate signs alongside other forms of awareness advertising. If the campaign needs volunteers or donations, it should compare activities that encourage those actions.

Understanding Cost Per Thousand Impressions

One measurement advertisers use to compare costs is cost per thousand impressions, or CPM. An impression is an opportunity for someone to see an advertisement, and CPM measures how much it costs to deliver one thousand of those opportunities.

The formula is:
CPM = Total advertising cost ÷ Impressions × 1,000

For example, an advertisement that costs $100 and receives 10,000 impressions has a CPM of $10. Advertisers use this measurement to compare the cost of exposure across different platforms, including social media, websites, television, and outdoor advertising.

Digital advertising platforms record impressions when an advertisement is served or displayed according to their measurement rules. Physical advertising requires estimates based on traffic, placement, and the time an advertisement remains visible. These differences make CPM useful for comparing costs, but less reliable when comparing advertising methods that measure exposure differently.

CPM also doesn’t tell us whether people remembered the advertisement, whether they live in the candidate’s district, or whether their opinions changed after seeing it.

Estimating the CPM of a Yard Sign

Suppose a campaign installs a sign along a road carrying 5,000 vehicles per day. The sign costs $5 to purchase and another $1 in estimated distribution expenses. It remains in place for 30 days, during which approximately 150,000 vehicles pass that location.

Using the CPM formula, the sign costs approximately $0.04 per thousand vehicle passages. That appears extremely inexpensive compared with most digital advertising, but the calculation comes with significant limitations.

The same commuter may pass the sign twice every day, and some drivers may live outside the candidate’s district. Others may not notice the sign or be able to read it from their position on the road. Traffic counts measure vehicle movements rather than people who actually viewed an advertisement.

For that reason, this calculation is better described as the cost per thousand potential vehicle exposures, rather than a verified advertising CPM.

Even with those limitations, the calculation can help campaigns compare possible sign locations.

While main road has the lowest cost per vehicle passage, it may carry substantial traffic from outside the district. A quieter residential street may provide repeated exposure to more eligible voters (more ‘targeted’ voters.) Signs displayed on supporters’ properties also communicate public support, which adds value that a traffic calculation cannot measure.

Reaching the Right People

When you take on the role of marketer for a political campaign, you’re trying to answer a fairly simple question: How do you get your message in front of the people you need to reach, convince them to support your candidate, and do it for as little money as possible?

The challenge is that almost no advertising method guarantees you’ll reach the exact people you’re looking for. A yard sign may be seen by thousands of drivers who cannot vote in your district. A Facebook advertisement may appear to someone who scrolls past it without reading. A postcard may arrive at the correct address and go straight into the recycling bin.

Consider a voter named Jo. Jo is 45, works at a machine shop, is registered as undeclared, and hasn’t decided whom to support. Your campaign wants Jo to recognize your candidate, understand their positions, and eventually vote for them.

You can place signs along Jo’s commute, advertise on websites Jo might visit, or mail a postcard to Jo’s household. Each gives Jo an opportunity to encounter your message, but none guarantees Jo will notice it or agree with it. Canvassing provides an opportunity for a direct conversation, although Jo may not be home when a volunteer knocks.

A campaign’s communications budget is an attempt to increase the chances that people like Jo encounter the right message at the right time.

Establishing Our Campaign Budget

To compare these methods, we’ll use a hypothetical New Hampshire municipal campaign with 8,000 registered voters and $1,000 available for communications over 30 days.

The candidate has limited name recognition and wants to introduce themselves to as many local voters as possible. The campaign has volunteers available for sign distribution and canvassing, but it must account for their time.

We’ll compare five ways to use the money: roadside signs, Facebook and Instagram advertising, Google Display advertising, targeted postcards, and volunteer canvassing.
Before calculating their costs, we need a few assumptions.

Roadside Traffic

The campaign has access to several suitable sign locations. We’ll use 12,000 vehicles per day as our example for a busy road.

This is based on a documented New Hampshire traffic volume. A regional transportation report recorded approximately 11,000–14,000 average daily vehicles on sections of Route 125 in Kingston. Those are historical counts, so campaigns should obtain newer figures for actual locations.

New Hampshire’s traffic count database can provide those estimates.
For our comparison, assume a standard yard sign costs $6, including its stake and basic distribution expenses. The sign will remain installed for 30 days.

At 12,000 vehicles per day, that road carries approximately 360,000 vehicle passages during the month.

However, that’s two-way traffic. If the sign faces only one direction and traffic is evenly divided, approximately 180,000 vehicle passages would approach its readable face. We still don’t know how many drivers live within the district or notice the sign.

We’ll use those 180,000 passages as potential viewing opportunities, with that limitation clearly stated.

Digital Advertising

For Facebook and Instagram, we’ll use an illustrative CPM of $15. For Google Display, we’ll use $6. Both fall within general advertising planning ranges, although actual political advertising prices vary.

At those rates, $1,000 would purchase approximately 66,700 Meta impressions or 166,700 Google Display impressions.

These are served impressions, rather than confirmed views by registered voters. The number of unique people reached will depend on the size of the platform’s available audience and the frequency of delivery.

The campaign will need to check actual geographic audience estimates before purchasing advertising.

Direct Mail

For targeted postcards, we’ll use an estimated total cost of $0.75 per piece for printing, addressing, preparation, and postage. A 2026 direct mail pricing guide from Mail Processing Associates places common presorted postcard campaigns in a range of approximately $0.55–$0.90 per piece.

We’ll also include the cost of obtaining the voter checklist.

Under New Hampshire RSA 654:31, the town or city clerk must provide a public voter checklist upon request. One electronic copy is free per election. Additional electronic copies may cost up to $25.

The public checklist provides names and addresses, allowing campaigns to select households within the municipality. More detailed voter-history information is available through separate procedures to eligible candidates and political organizations, sometimes with additional fees.
For our example, we’ll allow $25 for voter-list acquisition, even though a first electronic request may be free.

We’ll reserve another $75 for basic design and list preparation. That leaves $900 to mail approximately 1,200 postcards at $0.75 each.

Volunteer Canvassing

Canvassing requires a different calculation because volunteer time is the principal resource.

The Massachusetts Voter Table advises campaigns to expect approximately 15–20 doors per volunteer-hour, depending on neighborhood density. It also suggests that conversations at roughly one in four or five doors are common.

For our example, we’ll use 20 attempted doors per hour and a 20% conversation rate. A three-hour volunteer shift would therefore cover approximately 60 doors and produce 12 conversations.

Ten volunteers completing one three-hour shift would contribute 30 volunteer-hours, attempt 600 doors, and have approximately 120 conversations.

We’ll budget $100 for literature and basic supplies. The volunteer labor is donated, so the campaign isn’t spending its entire $1,000 cash budget on this activity. That’s an advantage of volunteer canvassing, but those 30 hours remain a limited resource.

Spending Comparison

We now have enough information to make a more meaningful comparison. The table below uses the same 30-day period and shows what each activity can accomplish under our assumptions.

The yard-sign row describes one location, rather than spending the full $1,000. At $6 per sign, the budget could purchase approximately 166 signs, but their combined exposure depends on the traffic at each location. We cannot assume all 166 would have access to roads as busy as Route 125.

The comparison also demonstrates why raw impressions are a limited measurement. A vehicle passage, a served digital advertisement, a delivered postcard, and a conversation at someone’s door are different kinds of contact.

To compare their value, we need to consider how many of those contacts involve eligible local voters and how effectively each method communicates the message.

When Repetition Stops Helping

Seeing a candidate’s name repeatedly can help people recognize and remember it. However, additional advertising doesn’t always produce a proportional increase in recognition or support. At some point, a campaign may spend more money showing the same message to people who already know the candidate’s name, while other voters remain unfamiliar with them.

Marketers study this problem through several related concepts: audience saturation, advertising wearout, and diminishing returns. These help explain why campaigns should pay attention to how often people encounter an advertisement and whether additional spending reaches anyone new.

Audience Saturation

Audience saturation occurs when an advertising campaign has reached most of the people available through a particular channel. Additional spending then produces more impressions among existing audience members rather than expanding the number of people reached.

Consider a Facebook campaign targeting an available audience of 5,000 people. If it delivers 10,000 impressions evenly across that audience, each person receives an average of two. Another 10,000 impressions would raise the average to four without increasing reach, assuming the same 5,000 people receive all the advertisements.

This is why marketers distinguish reach, the number of different people exposed, from frequency, the number of exposures per person. Both measurements help advertisers understand what they’re purchasing.

Platforms have tools to manage frequency. Google Ads, for example, allows advertisers to limit how often an individual receives display or video advertisements over a day, week, or month.

A campaign can also experience geographic saturation with yard signs. If most signs are concentrated along the same commuter route, the campaign may provide repeated exposure to the same drivers while reaching few residents who travel elsewhere.

Advertising Wearout

Repeated exposure can eventually change how people respond to an advertisement. A voter may notice a campaign message during its first few appearances but begin paying less attention after seeing it repeatedly. Researchers call this advertising wearout.

In a 1976 study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers examined very high levels of repeated print advertising. They found declining recall under some conditions, with inattention helping explain the effect. When they controlled for inattention and other factors, that decline was no longer observed.

A 1980 study in the same journal found that repeating television advertisements could reduce viewers’ evaluations of both the commercials and the advertised products. The research demonstrated that additional repetition can sometimes produce less favorable reactions.
However, wearout doesn’t mean that repeated advertising automatically becomes ineffective.

A 2019 study published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing found that people initially reported greater annoyance with heavily repeated advertisements, but several weeks later showed greater preference for the frequently advertised brand. The researchers found that annoyance declined over time while brand memory remained relatively stable.

For political campaigns, these studies suggest that people may stop paying close attention to a familiar advertisement while still remembering the candidate’s name. They don’t establish that repeated political yard signs produce the same effects as the commercial advertisements studied.

How Much Repetition Is Useful?

There is no universal number of times someone needs to see an advertisement before it works, or after which additional exposure becomes harmful.

A 2015 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Advertising examined advertising repetition across previous experiments. The researchers found that recall continued increasing through at least eight exposures, while favorable attitudes reached their highest point at approximately ten exposures under the experimental conditions.

Those figures describe averages from advertising experiments. They shouldn’t be treated as instructions to show every voter a campaign message exactly eight or ten times.

The type of advertisement, the audience, the time between exposures, and the message itself can influence the results. A roadside sign containing a candidate’s surname creates a different experience from a detailed political video or a personal conversation.

Campaigns should monitor whether additional spending is reaching new people, increasing repetition among existing viewers, or producing meaningful responses.

Why Campaigns Use Multiple Communications Channels

One way to address saturation is to reach voters through different channels. Someone who rarely uses Facebook may regularly encounter roadside signs. Another resident may work from home and see digital advertisements more frequently than physical signs. A postcard can reach a selected household, while canvassing creates an opportunity for personal conversation.

Researchers refer to the interaction between different advertising channels as cross-media synergy. The idea is that advertising delivered through one channel can influence how people respond to advertising delivered through another.

A 2019 study published in Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry analyzed 52 advertising campaigns using television and magazines. The researchers found evidence that combining channels could improve campaign recognition, although the results depended on audience characteristics and media-use habits.

Another 2015 study published in the Journal of Advertising examined 900 advertising campaign tracking observations. It found that the relationship between advertisements across channels influenced results, with some combinations improving campaign evaluations while producing different effects on memory.

These studies support evaluating how channels work together rather than assuming that simply adding more channels always improves results.

For a political campaign, the practical approach is to give different communications complementary jobs. A yard sign can introduce the candidate’s name, a postcard can explain a policy position, and a canvassing conversation can answer a voter’s questions. Consistent visual design and messaging can help voters recognize that these communications come from the same campaign.

Diversification also has costs. Producing several kinds of advertising requires time and money, and a small budget can become less effective if divided among too many activities. Campaigns should choose channels that reach useful portions of the electorate and serve clear objectives.
When additional spending on one channel mostly repeats the same advertisement to the same audience, another channel may offer a better opportunity to reach new voters or communicate a more detailed message.

What Percentage of the Audience Can Actually Vote?

Suppose the sign on Route 125 generates 180,000 potential viewing opportunities over the month. Some drivers may live in Kingston, while others are traveling between communities or visiting businesses.

If 25% of those approaching vehicles carried eligible voters from the town, the sign would have approximately 45,000 potential local-voter exposures. If drivers actually noticed the sign during 20% of those opportunities, that would leave approximately 9,000 local-voter attention opportunities. Those percentages are hypothetical. They demonstrate the calculation, but they are not measured audience data for Route 125.

The number still represents repeated opportunities rather than 9,000 different voters. A commuter passing the sign every weekday may account for dozens of them.
Digital advertising requires similar adjustments. Suppose Facebook reports 50,000 impressions delivered to 5,000 different people within the campaign’s selected geographic area. That’s an average frequency of ten.

If only 70% of those people are eligible voters in the municipality, the campaign would have reached approximately 3,500 local voters. Again, 70% is an assumption that would need supporting audience information.

Direct mail gives the campaign greater control over eligibility and geography. A mailing list built from the municipality’s voter checklist can direct postcards to addresses associated with registered voters.

However, one household may contain several registered voters, and the campaign should remove duplicate addresses before mailing. The number of postcards delivered is therefore different from the number of registered voters represented by those households.
Canvassing provides another form of targeting. A campaign can generate walk lists from voter addresses and send volunteers to those households, although an unanswered door provides no conversation.

Each method has some audience uncertainty. What differs is how much the campaign knows about the recipient and whether it can establish that the message was actually received.

Comparing Costs for More Meaningful Contacts

For a useful budget decision, campaigns should calculate costs against the type of contact each activity can credibly measure.

These calculations use the assumptions established above. The yard-sign figures apply to the single $6 sign on the example road. The digital costs exclude creative production, while the canvassing cost excludes the monetary value of volunteer labor.

The yard sign appears remarkably inexpensive, even after making assumptions about local traffic and attention. However, its audience and attention estimates are much less certain than a completed canvassing conversation.

The postcard is delivered to a selected address, but we don’t know whether anyone reads it. The canvassing contact represents an actual conversation, although the person may disagree with the candidate.

These differences explain why the cheapest contact is not necessarily the most valuable one.