What 18,000 scans taught us about when people scan
Scanning is an evening habit. It is overwhelmingly Android. And close to a fifth of what looks like traffic never had a person behind it. Here is one month of scans across a print agency's client book, and what we changed after reading it.
When do people scan QR codes?
People scan QR codes in the evening. Across 18,402 scans in one month, the busiest three hours were four to seven in the evening, and the morning barely registers. A code printed for a lunch offer is mostly scanned after work by someone deciding where to eat tomorrow.
Four in five scans are Android
81% Android, 14% iPhone, 5% desktop — someone typing the short link by hand. That ratio should decide how you test. A code that scans cleanly on a flagship iPhone in a studio is not evidence of anything. Test on the cheapest Android in the office, indoors, at dusk.
A fifth of the traffic was never a person
Paste a link into a WhatsApp group and WhatsApp fetches it to build the preview. So does Slack, so does iMessage. Across the month that came to 4,318 fetches against 18,402 real scans — 19% of what a naive counter would have reported as engagement. We keep them out of the total and show them separately, because the difference between a busy campaign and a much-shared link is worth knowing.
19% of apparent traffic. None of it in the 18,402.
What we changed
Three things. Evening-weighted campaigns get their destination swapped at 3pm rather than overnight. Every code is proofed on a mid-range Android before the print file goes out. And the reports we send clients lead with real scans, with bot fetches on a separate line so nobody has to ask which number is which.