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 in Insights, in a panel called Where bookings come from.
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 from that first visit. Whenever they book within that time, 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 — which cuts both ways: if their first visit to the booking page carried no tags, a click on your ad a week later changes nothing, and the booking counts as Direct / none.
- Their browser. The note stays in their browser until they book. If the customer closes a private window before booking, 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. (With Unfinished bookings switched on, an attempt they abandon carries the tags too.)
Booked also stores the referring website and the landing page on the booking. They are not shown in Insights, so a visit from a local directory with no tags still counts as Direct / none there. To see them, export your customers with Where they came from ticked, under Settings › Import & export.
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; term and content are kept on the booking and shown nowhere. Keep the values short — long ones are trimmed when stored.
Capitals do not split a row — facebook and Facebook are counted together — but spelling does: fb, facebook and facebook.com are three sources. Underscores appear as spaces, so flu_clinic_2026 reads "Flu clinic 2026", and a campaign tagged flu clinic 2026 with real spaces shows as a second row with the same name. Lower case with underscores, every time.
Reading the Where bookings come from panel
Go to Insights and scroll past the tiles, the charts, Most booked services, Busiest staff and, if you sell packages, Packages and passes. Where bookings come from is the full-width panel below them, split into three ranked lists. Until something in the period carries a tag, it shows Source alone beside a Nothing tagged yet note.
Insights
Tag the links in your ads and posts (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) and the bookings they bring show up here. Untagged visits count as direct.
Where bookings come from on Insights: 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.
- 2The panel — its line says how to tag links; with nothing tagged yet it shows a worked example to copy.
- 3Source — your top ten sources by number of bookings, with Direct / none for every booking that arrived with no source tag. 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. If your links carry a source but no medium, it reads "No tagged traffic yet."
- 5Campaign — the top ten campaigns, tagged traffic only. 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.
Your pixel is already on your website, tracking page views: put there by you, your agency, or the install fields below. Booked does not load a second copy. All this does is fire one event when a booking completes, with its real value attached.
Google Ads needs these two even when your Google tag is already installed. Copy them from the conversion action in Google Ads.
Only for a pixel that is not on your site yet. If it is already installed through a plugin, Tag Manager or your theme, leave it blank here so it is not loaded twice.
Settings › Tracking & pixels, with conversion events switched on.
- 1Tracking & pixels — under Advanced in the settings rail. It holds the conversion event, Google Ads, Install a pixel and Custom code.
- 2Fire a conversion when a booking completes — off by default. Turn it on and you choose which events fire at which moment: the form opening, a service chosen, a date and time chosen, details entered, the payment step opening, and the booking completing. Events go to the pixels already on your site; Booked does not load a second copy. The booking itself is counted once, with its real value, and a card booking counts when the payment lands.
- 3Conversion ID and label — Google Ads is the one network that needs both, even when your Google tag is already installed.
- 4Save — saves this section.
The Install a pixel card below (Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Meta, TikTok and X) 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.
Where bookings come from 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.
- The Short form carries no tags. The Short form (the whole booking on one card) 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 and declined 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".