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Jun 27, 20224 min read

How to Calculate impressions for Ads on Moving Vehicles





When we started dKilo post the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to pay people for being stuck in traffic after pushing ads to their cars, we had one question in mind. How can we sell the digital ad space? Can we even sell it? Why would people buy from us? This thinking spiral led us to the obvious. We‘re not in the business of selling digital ad space, instead, we are in the business of selling value to advertisers. But, what value would the advertiser want from an ad? CMOs and marketing directors face a challenge on how to translate the marketing budget they’re spending into tangible results, whether the results translate into brand value or the obvious; revenues. Because probabilities and possibilities govern mostly everything in life, business development, and sales growth included; we know that if you have a killer product and phenomenal content but no exposure, well.. that’s possibly bad for business and as Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” Advertising is an integral part of a successful business. And to start an advertising campaign outdoors, this will probably cost a fortune, right? well, not really! Because we’ve discovered the tools to boost that exposure and show the world how great your product is. We didn’t reinvent the wheel. We just realigned it.

dKilo puts digital ads on moving cars and pays the car owners as long as they keep driving around with these ads.

dKilo’s business model was built with both the car owner and the advertiser in mind. both of them balancing the supply and demand scale. On one side, we have the car owners who install dKilo’s transparent, plug n play and internet-connected LED screens, and on the other hand, we have the advertiser or the company who have a brilliant product, exquisite content, and well-thought marketing campaign. The car owners drive around the city with the LED, remotely displaying the digital ads whether in video or pictures where they can make up to $300 monthly driving around with our screens, and the advertisers manage their campaign online with real-time updates seeing the number of panels their ads are displayed on, the number of impressions every ad received, track conversions and have real-time visibility of their ads locations on the map.


So, How do we calculate the number of impressions? dKilo’s Ad slots are 7.5 seconds per slot. Breaking the minute into 8 ad slots. Think of the ad slot as a mini skirt, long enough to cover what’s important, but short enough to keep things interesting. If you think about it, with the evolved attention span caused by TikTok and YouTube ads, any Ad longer than 5 seconds triggers the psychological skip-ad subliminal thought. Fortunately for the Out Of Home Advertising industry, ads are unskippable. The only way to skip an ad on a billboard is to close your eyes, which is not a great idea at all given the fact you’ll be probably driving.

Anyway, with 8 ad slots per minute, we need to get an average idea about how many people would see your phenomenal creative in that 7.5 seconds ad slot.



Because it takes a minimum of 1 person to drive a car, we know with certainty that there’s someone behind the wheel seeing the ads (unless the car is an autonomous self-driven vehicle, but that’s a story for another article) Anyway, a car might also have up to 4 occupants, right? Also, what if the car drives into a crowded street with pedestrians walking on both sides? Wouldn’t that increase the number of people seeing the Ads? And, what if the opposite happens, and the car takes the wrong exit and ends up on AlGalala Road heading to Hurghada with no one to see the ads! what then?

Well… After running rigorous tests and numerous researches we’ve concluded that we can safely use 60 impressions/minute as dKilo’s benchmark metric for vehicle back ads. This result came from various on-ground research, carefully studying historical offline geo data from the industry experts, using the visibility audience index (VAI) and insights from geopath.org as the basis for calculation, and analyzing meticulous real-time data from Waze, Tomtom, PositionStack, Location IQ, and google maps.



With these 60 impressions/minute, we deliver an average of 3600 impressions per hour, 21,600 impressions per day, and 648K impressions per month for every car we have on the street. With a network of 1000 cars, a total of 648 Million impressions will be delivered monthly. Our CPI model or cost per impressions model was built on a 1/1000 conversion rate. (for every 1000 times someone sees your ads, we expect 1 to convert) with that said, our cost of conversion (CPCon) or CPA stands at around $5. Of course, the CPA model relies on many factors as the content of your ad, the creatives you’re using, the product, or the call-to-action you’ve specified. (Your conversion rates WILL differ if you run a campaign selling charbroiled burgers with a 50% discount & free delivery compared to advertising the new phase of beachfront villas on the north coast)

Traffic is predictable, and so are impressions

With access to data, decision-making becomes more accurate. We leverage technology to provide accurate data to our advertisers.


Understanding data and building prediction models that guarantee minimal variance between forecast and actual results is what gives advertisers the right tools to plan effective campaigns with dKilo. Knowing beforehand with acceptable accuracy the congestion levels in certain locations, the average number of cars in a specific geo radius, the DEC (Daily Effective Circulation) historical data, then feed our platform with all of the information to predict the aggregate number of expected impressions, nevertheless, realtime; definitely provides value to those advertisers who harness the power of turning data into $$$$.





dKilo pays people for being stuck in traffic by pushing digital ads to their cars, and sell the digital ad space to companies and brands through an intelligent impressions' based online ads manager platform.


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