A QR landing page for trade fair visitors.
The QR code at a trade fair stand should lead not to the home page but to a single landing page prepared for that fair. The page opens quickly on a phone, shows on the first screen what you produce, the evidence for it and whom to write to, does not choose the language for the visitor but makes choosing easy, and measures incoming visitors by the fair’s name. When the fair ends, the page does not close; it becomes a follow-up page.
Which page should the QR code lead to?
To a permanent address on your own domain, opened for that fair. A QR that leads to the home page takes the visitor away from the topic they discussed at the stand: the home page is written for all visitors, while the buyer at the fair is looking for the continuation of the product they have just seen. The landing page carries the product groups you are exhibiting at that fair, the topic of the conversation at the stand and the next step.
A printed QR does not change; once the brochure has been handed out, you cannot correct the address. That is why the address the QR points to must be under your control. If a third-party shortening service shuts down or your account is deleted, every QR in the brochure goes dead. A short path on your own domain (e.g. /fair/) does not carry this risk; if the target page changes, the path is redirected. Which redirect to use when is covered in the 301 or 302 comparison.
From the fair QR to the follow-up page
- 01QR: printed, unchangeable
- 02Fair landing page: on your own domain, permanent address
- 03Request form: what is measured is the request
- 04After the fair: follow-up page
- 05The follow-up email links to the same page
Test before you print: scan the QR with different phones, in the stand’s lighting and at the size it will be printed. A typo at the end of the address means no visitor reaches the page for the whole fair. Also write the address next to the QR as plain text, so a visitor whose camera does not read QR codes, or who does not want to scan, can type it in.
How should the language be chosen?
By leaving it to the visitor. The phone’s language or the country it is in does not tell you which language the visitor wants to read: at a fair in Istanbul, a German buyer’s phone connects in Turkey, and the phone of a Turkish purchaser who reads English may be set to German. Forcing visitors to a language version by their location or browser language is a pattern that traps both the user and the search engine; the details are in the automatic redirect trap guide.
There are two better routes. The first is a language switcher clearly visible at the top of the page; how to design it is in the language switcher design guide. The second is separate QR codes matching the language of the printed material: the QR in the English brochure goes to the English page, the one in the German brochure to the German page. The websites of two textile manufacturers among our clients are live in seven languages each; the fair page should be in the site’s languages too, not only Turkish and English.
What should be on the first screen?
The first screen of a supplier website should answer the B2B buyer’s three questions: what does this company produce, can it prove it, and whom do I write to. On a fair page, a fourth is added to these three: where is the continuation of what I discussed at the stand? The details are in the how B2B buyers look for suppliers guide.
- The fair’s name and dates, the stand number: the visitor sees they are on the right page
- The product groups exhibited at the fair, each linked to its product page
- Evidence: one link each to the certificate record and the factory page
- A person: name, role, email address and a meeting request
- A short request form: name, company, email, product of interest
Do not lock the page’s content behind a registration form. In Nielsen Norman Group’s 2006 B2B observation, locking content behind a registration form turned users away; for a visitor browsing on a phone at a fair, this barrier is even higher. The catalog and technical information stay open; the form is only for those who want a meeting.
How fast should the page open on a phone?
As fast as possible, because the visitor who scans the QR has only their phone in hand, and you cannot know in advance what the connection in the hall will be like. According to data Google published in 2017, when mobile load time rises from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of bouncing increases by 123%. On the agricultural marketplace Agrofy, when the page’s loading metrics improved, abandonment during loading fell from 3.8% to 0.9%; this is a correlation, but its direction is clear.
That is why the fair page should be the lightest page on the site: no large video or scroll animation, images sized for the phone, text visible on first load. Why the same page opens more slowly on a phone than on a desktop is covered in the mobile performance gap guide.
How are visitors from the fair measured?
By adding a parameter identifying the fair to the QR’s address. Two routes are common: the campaign parameters your analytics tool recognizes (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) or your site’s own parameter (e.g. source=fair-name). You can also see how parameters work from another example: when ChatGPT refers a user to a site, it adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the address itself. If you keep the parameter separate for each printed item (brochure, stand panel, business card), you also see which item brought visitors.
What you want to measure is not visits but requests. Define submission of the request form as a key event in your analytics tool; Google Analytics 4 calculates the key event rate as the ratio of sessions with a key event to all sessions. If your site still has an old analytics tag starting with “UA-”, measurement never starts: that tag has not collected data since July 2023. Writing the fair’s name into a hidden field in the form shows which fair an incoming inquiry came from, even without an analytics tool.
What happens to the page after the fair?
It does not close; it becomes a follow-up page. Brochures stay on desks after the fair, and the QR is scanned weeks later; a closed page shows that visitor an error. When the fair ends, the page’s heading switches to “we met at the fair” language, the stand information comes off, and in its place come products added after the fair, a sample request and the date of the next fair.
The follow-up email links to the same page: the first email to a buyer who left a business card at the stand carries the link to the fair page, the page of the product discussed and the name of the person who held the conversation. At the next fair, the same address is updated with the new fair’s content, or each fair gets its own path; in the second case, the old fair’s path is redirected to the new one.
How to test it: before printing the brochure for your next fair, scan the QR and count on your phone the time until the page opens; then submit the request form yourself and check whether it shows up in your analytics tool.
Let’s set up the QR landing page for your next fair together, so that the address, languages, first screen and measurement are ready before the fair.
For a site that shows your certificates as a record buyers can verify, B2B website builds and measures the certificate page, the product scope and the path to a quote together.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Is it enough to point the QR code to the home page?
It brings the visitor to the site but takes them away from the conversation at the stand. A page prepared for that fair shows the continuation of the product the visitor saw and the next step.
Should I print a separate QR for each language?
If the printed material is separate by language, yes; if there is a single brochure, a single QR and a language switcher clearly visible on the page. Do not redirect visitors automatically by their phone’s language.
Should the fair page appear in search engines?
It does not have to appear during the fair, but if it stays on permanently as a follow-up page after the fair, there is no harm in it being indexed. If you do not want it to appear, set the page to noindex; do not take it down.