Where Small Businesses Point Their QR Codes: Order Data 2023 to 2026

Where business QR codes point

Base: 260 business QR and NFC items with a link in the order. Some carry two or more links, so the bars add up to more than 100%.

Only 83 of the 260 (32%) pointed solely to the business's own website. The rest sent customers to Instagram, Google, Linktree, Facebook, a payment page or a review site. One practical consequence: UTM tracking tags only work on a website you run with analytics, so for two in three codes, scans can only be seen in the platform's own insights, if at all.

29 of the 260 items (11%) carried two or more destinations. The most common pairing was Instagram and Facebook.

Instagram is the social platform businesses put on signs

On "follow us" signs with a link in the order (87 items), Instagram appeared on 54%, the business website on 39%, Facebook on 24% and TikTok on 2%. Across all business codes, Instagram links outnumbered Facebook links 66 to 23, and TikTok appeared only twice.

Most Google review signs get the link right

Of 61 Google review signs, 45 (74%) came with Google's direct "write a review" link, which opens the review box straight away. Two (3%) came with a Google Maps or business listing link instead, which opens the listing and leaves the customer to find the review button. Thirteen (21%) had no link in the order itself because it reached us after ordering, and one pointed to Instagram.

The direct link is the one Google gives you: search for your business on Google, choose Get more reviews, and copy the link it shows. More on this in how to get more Google reviews and which Google review sign a business needs.

Name badge QR codes point to link pages, not LinkedIn

Of 33 QR and NFC name badges with a link in the order, 18 (55%) pointed to a Linktree page, 13 (39%) to the wearer's or employer's website, and just one each to LinkedIn and Facebook. Most badge buyers chose a single code that opens a page of links, rather than one profile. Badges are also where volume sits: QR name badges were 41% of all QR and NFC units we engraved, because events and teams order them in bulk.

See QR code and NFC name badges for events and the free vCard QR generator for a code that saves contact details straight to a phone.

What people order, and how it's changing

Menu signs that came with a link (40) mostly pointed to the business website (58%), but one in five (20%) pointed to Instagram, using the grid as the menu.

NFC hasn't displaced QR. Its share held at about one in nine items for three years, and more than a third of the NFC items we made carry a QR code as well, for phones that don't read NFC.

Four practical takeaways

1. Decide what you want to measure before you choose the link. A code pointing to your own website can be tracked with a UTM link; a code pointing to Instagram or Google can't.
2. Use the direct review link on review signs. It opens the review box; a Maps link makes customers hunt for it.
3. Several destinations? Use a link page or a second code. About one in nine business codes pointed to a Linktree page, and as many carried two or more links, most often Instagram and Facebook. On a small sign with room for one code, a link page is the usual answer.
4. Check the code scans at the size you'll print or engrave. Our free QR code generator includes an engraving size check, and QR codes on wood explains minimum sizes.

How we collected the data

We went through every order in our shop's records from 1 January 2023 to 29 October 2026 and picked out every QR or NFC sign, badge, block and coaster, the first dated 19 January 2023 and the last 28 October 2026. We excluded cancelled and test orders. For the destination figures we also excluded gift cassettes that link to Spotify playlists, so those figures cover business items only.

Customers paste the web address for their code into the order. We classified each address by its domain (instagram.com, g.page, linktr.ee and so on); anything that wasn't a known platform counted as the business's own website. 260 of the business items had a link in the order. The others were mainly WiFi signs, which encode a network name and password rather than a web address, or orders where the customer emailed the link afterwards.

Limits: this is one maker's customers, mostly small UK hospitality, retail and event businesses who chose an engraved sign. It isn't a random sample of all QR codes, and the smaller groups (such as 33 name badges) carry wide margins. We publish only aggregated counts, never a customer's name, link or wording.

Download the aggregated data (CSV)

How to cite it

You're welcome to quote these figures or redraw the charts. Please credit Cherry Grove Craft and link to this page:

Licence: you're free to reuse this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0), as long as you credit Cherry Grove Craft and link to this page.

For wider figures on contactless payments and QR use in UK hospitality from UK Finance, Barclays and others, see our UK hospitality QR and contactless stats hub. For when businesses order through the year, see our seasonality data. Our follow-up study, do QR codes expire?, tested whether links like these still work, and what UK businesses put on their signs looks at the wording and codes on the signs themselves.