Billboard Prices: How Much Does Your Business Need to Spend?

Advertising billboards can be important marketing tools to draw customers to your business, boost brand awareness, and provide other marketing benefits. However, just like any effective tool, you need to set a good budget for your billboard ads – otherwise, you could overspend relative to how much revenue they generate in the long run.

But just how much does your business need to spend on billboards, and what can you expect in terms of billboard prices? Let’s answer both of these questions and more in detail!

Factors That Affect Billboard Costs

Many different factors can affect billboard prices. Depending on the type of billboard ads you place, these factors can weigh more or less on the bottom line prices for your advertisements.

Type of Billboard

Naturally, the type of billboard you place can impact its bottom line. There are two types of billboards to use:

• Standard billboards, which have static images. However, these images can have 3-D elements or textured elements to make them more visually interesting
• Digital billboards, which showcase animated or moving advertisements. These are like the high-quality billboard ads you see in Times Square

Generally, digital billboards are more expensive than standard billboards regardless of location (though this is not always true). That’s because it costs more to generate high-quality digital billboard advertisements than static ads regardless of the latter’s complexity.

Billboard Location

Of course, billboard location can also impact your overall marketing bottom line. In most cases, billboard ads placed in high-traffic locations – like very popular city squares or highways with lots of traffic – cost more than billboards placed in out-of-the-way spots.

Marketers and billboard companies set billboard prices based on their average impressions or apparent usefulness. Expect to pay more for billboards that you set up in prime spots.

Duration of Campaign

The longer your billboard ad campaign is, the more money you can expect to spend. On average, most billboards are rented or used by companies for four-week campaigns. You can continue to rent the billboard for more and more campaigns in a sequence. Shorter campaigns cost less in general, though there is a limit to this.

Billboard companies and marketers sometimes provide discounts for companies that rent a lot of time since they have to spend less time on labor removing and setting up new advertisements for different clients.

Likely Advertising Impressions

Then there are potential or likely advertising impressions. Most billboard companies rent out their spaces by CPM or cost per mille. This stands for cost per thousand impressions. In essence, the more impressions or the more effective a billboard advertisement is projected to be, the more money you’ll have to pay for that spot.

As an example, a small billboard that takes up a little bit of space on a dirt road can be expected to make fewer impressions compared to a digital billboard at the center of a metro square. The latter will almost always cost more money. 

Cost of Labor and Installation

Don’t forget the cost of labor and installing your billboard advertisement. On average, more complex or hard-to-install billboard ads cost more overall compared to basic billboard ads without a lot of moving parts, 3-D elements, or other fancy factors.

For instance, if your billboard largely uses big and bold colors spread across most of its surface, you can expect costs of labor and installation to be low. If you have a complex digital billboard ad with other components added to the front, it will likely cost more.

How Much to Expect for Billboard Ads

So, how much should you expect to spend on your billboards? In the US, the average cost of a billboard is $850. However, keep in mind that the average accounts for all the low-performing billboards on back dirt roads and low-traffic highways. It might be wiser to expect to spend thousands of dollars for a single billboard advertisement for a four-week campaign.

If you want to place a digital billboard, you can expect to spend more. The average cost of a digital billboard for a four-week campaign is over $2000. Since there are over 21,000 digital billboard locations, you also have fewer spots to place your animated advertisements (compared to the nearly 350,000 static or standard billboard locations).

Keep these average costs in mind when projecting:

• How many billboard ads you can place
• Whether billboard advertisements are worth your business’s time and money

Wrap Up

As you can see, billboard prices can vary dramatically based on their location, size, and other key factors. For the best results, take a look at your marketing budget and devote a sizable portion to billboard marketing for a while. Then you can adjust your budget – and how many billboard ads you pay for – based on how that initial campaign performs.