Where your bookings come from
See which ads, posts and campaigns actually produce appointments.
You spend money on ads, posts, leaflets and email. Booked keeps its own record of where each booking came from, so you can stop guessing which of those actually filled the diary. It lives at the bottom of Analytics, in a panel called Marketing attribution.
What first-touch attribution actually records
When somebody lands on the page that carries your booking form, Booked quietly notes how they got there — the tags on the link they clicked, the website that sent them, and the page they landed on. That note is kept in their own browser for 30 days. Whenever they eventually book, the note travels with the booking.
Two words in that sentence do a lot of work.
- First touch. The very first visit wins. If a customer clicks your Facebook ad on Tuesday, thinks about it, then types your web address in directly on Friday and books, Facebook still gets the credit. Once a note exists it is never overwritten.
- Their browser. Nothing is stored on your site until the booking is made. If the customer books in a private window, clears their browsing data, or clicks the ad on their phone and books on their laptop, the trail is broken and the booking arrives untagged.
Booked also records the referring website and the landing page, so a visit from a local directory is recognisable even with no tags on the link at all.
The note is taken on the page carrying the booking form, nowhere else. If your ad sends people to a general landing page and they click through from there, the tags are gone before Booked ever sees them and the booking is recorded as Direct / none.
Building a tagged link
A UTM tag is extra text on the end of a web address. You add it when you set up the ad or write the post; your booking page works exactly the same with or without it.
Start with the address of your booking page, add a ?, then join each tag with an &.
One tagged link: where it came from, how, and for which campaign.
- 1utm_source — the place the click came from: facebook, google, instagram, newsletter. This is the only tag that has to be there; without it the booking counts as Direct / none.
- 2utm_medium — how they got there: cpc for paid search, paid_social, email, print for a QR code on a leaflet.
- 3utm_campaign — which push it belongs to, so you can compare your flu clinic against your travel clinic rather than lumping all of Facebook together.
| Tag | Answers | Example for a pharmacy |
|---|---|---|
| utm_source | Which platform or list? | facebook, google, newsletter |
| utm_medium | What kind of link was it? | cpc, paid_social, email, print |
| utm_campaign | Which campaign paid for it? | flu_clinic_2026, travel_jabs_summer |
| utm_term | Which keyword? (paid search) | travel_vaccinations_stockport |
| utm_content | Which version of the advert? | video_a, image_b |
Booked records all five, but only source, medium and campaign are broken down on screen. Keep the values short — long ones are trimmed when stored.
utm_source=facebook and utm_source=Facebook are counted as two separate sources, even though the report shows both with a capital letter. Underscores appear as spaces, so flu_clinic_2026 reads "Flu clinic 2026". Lower case with underscores, every time.
Reading the Marketing attribution panel
Go to Analytics and scroll past the tiles, the charts, Top services and Staff. Marketing attribution is the full-width panel below them, split into three ranked lists.
Bookings, revenue, customers and where they come from.
Marketing attribution on the Analytics screen: source (3), medium (4) and campaign (5).
- 1The date range — the panel counts bookings by the date they were made, not the date of the appointment. Analytics always opens on Last 30 days and never remembers the range you chose last time.
- 2The "i" tooltip — hover or tab onto it for the short version: "Tag your ad and campaign links with UTM parameters — e.g. ?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=spring — and tagged bookings break down here by source, medium and campaign. Untagged visits show as “Direct / none”."
- 3Source — your top ten sources by number of bookings. This list always includes a Direct / none bucket for every booking that arrived with no tags, so it is never empty. A large Direct figure is normal, especially early on.
- 4Medium — the top ten mediums. Unlike Source, this lists tagged traffic only, so the totals across the three columns will not match. Until you tag anything it reads "No tagged traffic yet."
- 5Campaign — the top ten campaigns, again tagged traffic only, with the empty state "No campaigns tagged yet." This is the column that answers "was the flu push worth it?"
The number beside each row is a count of bookings, not money. That is easy to misread, because the Most valuable customers panel just below uses the same look and shows currency amounts.
Sending conversions to your ad platforms
The attribution report is for you. If you also want Meta or Google Ads to know a booking happened, so their bidding can use it, that is a separate switch under Settings › Tracking & pixels.
Configure how Booked works.
Already running Meta, Google, GTM, TikTok or X on your site? Just turn this on — every completed booking is sent as a Purchase/conversion, with its value, into the pixels you already have.
Settings › Tracking & pixels, with conversion tracking switched on.
- 1Tracking & pixels — the fifth tab down the rail. It holds three cards: Conversion tracking, Install a pixel and Custom code.
- 2Fire a conversion event when a booking is completed. — off by default. Turn it on and each completed booking is reported to the pixels already on your site, carrying the booking value, your currency and the booking reference. Nothing extra is loaded, so nothing double-counts.
- 3Google Ads conversion ID and label — Google Ads is the one network that needs both, even when your Google tag is already installed. Copy them from the conversion action inside Google Ads; Meta, GA4, Tag Manager and TikTok need no ID here.
- 4Save settings — one button saves every changed field across all the savable tabs at once. The flip side: leave Settings without pressing it and everything you typed is lost.
The Install a pixel card below is only for businesses that do not already have that pixel on the site. Anything you type there is printed across your whole public website — so filling in an ID for a pixel that another plugin or Tag Manager already loads will double-count every conversion.
Marketing attribution is Booked's own record of the bookings you took. Conversion tracking is a message sent out to the ad platforms, which apply their own rules about clicks, views and time windows. Treat Booked's figure as the count of real appointments.
What the report cannot tell you
Attribution is a useful signal, not an audit. Before you move a budget on the strength of it, know where the gaps are.
- Only the full booking form carries tags. The compact booking form sends no attribution at all, and bookings you or your staff add from inside Booked never have any. All of those land in Direct / none.
- Follow-up visits dilute it. A multi-visit course creates a separate booking for each later visit, and bundled back-to-back appointments are stored separately too. Those extra bookings carry no tags, so even a well-tagged sale adds rows to Direct / none.
- Everything is capped at ten. Each column shows its top ten only, and nothing on screen says so — a long tail of small sources is invisible.
- Cancelled bookings are excluded, so a source that brings in appointments people then cancel looks better here than it deserves to.
- You cannot look forward. The date picker refuses future dates, and bookings are counted by when they were made — so a campaign whose appointments all fall next month still lands in this month's figures.
The practical answer to most of these is the same: tag every paid link you publish, spell the tags the same way every time, and read Direct / none as "not yet tagged" rather than "word of mouth".