How to Read Your Audience Certificate

Your first Audience Certificate can look dense the first time you open it — headline number, a chart with a shaded band, direction splits, confidence labels, a QR code. This guide walks through it section by section so you know exactly what each part means, what to quote to a buyer, and what to point at when an agency asks how the number was made.

It follows on from estimating impressions from a week of footage — that guide builds the numbers; this one reads the finished document. Both sit under the OOH audience measurement guide.

Key takeaways

• The headline is projected weekly impressions, always shown with a range and a confidence label — quote all three, never just the big number.
• The hourly profile shows when the face performs, which is often more sellable than the total.
• The certificate separates measured counts from modelled multipliers, so you can show a buyer exactly where the number came from.
• The QR code makes the whole thing independently verifiable — that is what turns a claim into evidence.

The cover of your Audience Certificate: what and when

The top of the certificate states the face, the sampling window ("7 sampled days, 2–8 June 2026"), and a one-line method note. This matters more than it looks: an honest audience number is inseparable from when it was measured. A buyer should never have to guess whether your figure is from a quiet February or a peak December — the cover tells them.

The headline: weekly impressions, with a range

The big number is your projected weekly impressions — the audience with an opportunity to see the face over a week. It never appears alone. Next to it you will see:

• a most-likely range (for example, "34,000–50,000"), and
• a confidence label (low, medium, or high).

Quote all three together. "About 42,000 a week, most likely 34,000 to 50,000, high confidence" is a sentence an agency respects. "42,000" on its own is the kind of round claim they have learned to distrust — the exact problem covered in never selling on an unverified number.

The confidence label: how much to lean on it

The confidence label is your guardrail against over-claiming:

• Low / indicative — a spot reading, too short to project a full day. Use it as a teaser, not a sales figure. The certificate withholds a monthly projection at this level on purpose.
• Medium — a reasonable daily projection with a visible margin.
• High — enough footage across dayparts and separate days to project a week with confidence.

If your label is lower than you'd like, the fix is more capture, not a bigger claim — spread across more hours as described in the phone capture guide.

The hourly profile: your most sellable chart

The hourly (and daily) profile chart is often more valuable than the headline. It shows when your face delivers — the morning commute spike, the lunchtime plateau, the Friday-evening surge. That lets you:

• price dayparts differently instead of selling a flat week,
• match a buyer's campaign to the hours their audience is actually there, and
• prove a screen's rush-hour value that a single weekly total would hide.

The shaded band around the line is the confidence interval from your sampling — wider where you have less data, narrower where you have more.

Counts vs impressions: the two-layer number

A good certificate never blurs measurement and modelling. You will see both:

• Measured counts — the pedestrians and vehicles actually counted crossing the line in the visibility zone. This is observation.
• Impressions — those counts converted using standard occupancy and visibility multipliers, which the certificate prints explicitly.

Because the multipliers are listed, a buyer can see that the counts are yours and the multipliers are the industry's. That transparency is the entire reason the number holds up under scrutiny; the conversion itself is explained in estimating impressions from a week of footage.

Direction split: who could actually see it

For roadside and one-way faces, the certificate splits counts by direction of travel. This answers a question buyers ask more than you'd expect: does the audience number only count the traffic that could actually see the face? Because the counting line records each direction separately, you can show, for instance, that the northbound flow — the side your hoarding faces — carries the impressions you're selling.

The privacy note

Near the footer, the certificate states plainly that AdWitness counts silhouettes, not people — no faces are recognised, no identities are stored, and the source video is deleted after processing. This is not boilerplate; it is what lets you run measurement in public space without a privacy problem, and it reassures venue owners and buyers alike. The underlying compliance detail lives on the shared methodology hub rather than being restated here.

The QR code: independent verification

At the corner sits a QR code. Scanning it opens a public verification page showing the method, the sampling window, and the model version behind this exact certificate. This is the feature that changes the conversation: a buyer does not have to take your word for the number, and they cannot later claim you made it up. The artifact verifies itself.

What to hand a buyer

When you send a certificate into a pitch, lead with three things: the headline-plus-range-plus-confidence sentence, the hourly profile chart, and the QR link. Together they say here is the number, here is the uncertainty, and here is how to check it — which is exactly what a modern OOH buyer is looking for.

Ready to generate one for a real face? Certify one face for $99 and read your own certificate, or see network pricing. To zoom back out, return to the OOH audience measurement guide.