Booking links that tell you where guests came from

Most restaurants promote themselves in several places at once: an Instagram account, a Google Business Profile, a newsletter, a website, perhaps a local listing or a flyer with a QR code. Ask which of them brings in the most bookings and the honest answer is usually a guess. Every channel points at the same booking page, so every booking looks the same once it arrives.

Booking links that are different for each channel change that. Give Instagram its own link, the newsletter its own link, the Google profile its own link, and tag each so the clicks can be counted separately. You will not get a perfect picture, because guests are not that tidy, but you will get one good enough to decide where to spend the next hour or the next hundred on marketing.

This guide explains how to set up one booking link per channel, how to tag the links, how to read the clicks against your bookings, and what the numbers can and cannot tell you. Every figure in it is an example.

If every channel uses the same booking page address, the booking system sees only that a booking was made on the booking page. It cannot tell whether the guest came from Instagram, an email or a search. Your bookings by source show the booking page, a widget on your website, phone and walk-ins; they say nothing about what sent the guest to the booking page in the first place.

That matters because the channels cost different amounts of time and money. A newsletter takes an hour to write; Instagram takes an hour a week; a listing on a booking platform costs a fee per cover. Without knowing what each brings, it is hard to know where to put the effort.

The idea is simple. Instead of one booking address everywhere, use a slightly different address for each channel, all opening the same booking page. Each variation carries a tag that says where it was shared.

A typical set for a single venue:

Each gets its own tagged link. The guest sees no difference; the booking page opens as usual.

The common way to tag a link is with what are called UTM parameters: short labels added to the end of the address that say where the visit came from. The three most used are the source (for example, instagram), the medium (for example, social or email) and the campaign (for example, autumn-menu). Website analytics tools read these tags and report visits by source, medium and campaign.

You do not need to write the tags by hand. Google's free Campaign URL Builder turns your booking page address and the labels you choose into a tagged link. Keep a simple list of every tagged link you create, with where it is used, so the labels stay consistent.

Tags only help if they are consistent. "Instagram", "instagram" and "IG" will appear as three different sources in most reports. Decide your labels once and keep to them.

A short, written list beside the person who creates links prevents most tagging mess.

Tagged links show where visits came from, if your analytics can see the visits. Where the booking page sits on your own website and your website has analytics, the tags will appear there. Where the booking page is elsewhere, or has no analytics of yours, a link service that shortens addresses and counts clicks does a similar job: each channel gets its own short link, and the service tells you how many times each was clicked.

Either way, you end up with a number for each channel: how many people it sent to the booking page in a week or a month. That number is the first half of the picture.

The second half is bookings. If your booking system can record the tag on each booking, you can see bookings by channel directly. Many cannot, and then you have to put the two halves together with a little care.

Compare clicks by channel with bookings over the same period. If Instagram sent 400 visits to the booking page in a month and the newsletter sent 150, and your online bookings were 240, you cannot say exactly which bookings came from which channel, but you can see which channel sends more guests to the page. Combine that with what guests tell you and with the timing of bookings, such as a jump the day after a newsletter, and the picture becomes useful.

The simplest attribution tool is a question. A host who asks "how did you hear about us?" at the table, or a single optional question after the booking is confirmed, collects answers that clicks cannot: the friend's recommendation, the article, the guest who walked past.

Guests' answers are imperfect. People forget, and they tend to name the last thing they saw. But over a few months, the answers give a rough share for each channel that you can set beside the clicks. Our guide to booking form fields explains why that question is better asked after booking than on the form.

Bookings often arrive in a pattern you can read. A newsletter goes out on a morning and the booking page is busy that afternoon. A popular Instagram post is followed by a run of bookings for that weekend. A local article brings a week of new names.

Note when each campaign, post or email went out, and look at bookings over the following days. It is not proof, because other things happen at the same time, but repeated patterns are hard to argue with. Our guide to bookings from Instagram covers the Instagram side in detail.

When you have clicks by channel, you can estimate booking conversion by channel: of the people each channel sent to the booking page, roughly how many booked. Channels differ. Guests who searched for your name on Google often book at a high rate, because they had already decided; guests tapping through from a story are often just curious.

A channel with many clicks and few bookings is either sending the wrong guests or sending them somewhere that loses them. Check that its link opens the booking page itself and works on a phone, before deciding the channel is not worth it. Our guide to booking conversion from page view to confirmed explains how to find where guests drop out, and our guide to booking abandonment covers the screens where most are lost.

Booking links are useful and incomplete. Be clear about what they miss.

Treat every channel figure as a floor, not a total. The guests you can trace are some of the guests each channel brought.

The point of all this is a decision. After a few months of tagged links, clicks, bookings, timing and guests' answers, you should be able to say which channels bring the most guests to the booking page, which convert best, and which cost the most time or money for what they bring.

Use that to shift effort, not to abandon channels on one month's numbers. If the newsletter sends few clicks but a high share of them book, it may be worth more care, not less. If a listing that charges per cover is mostly booking guests who would have found you anyway, our guide to booking platforms explains how to rebalance.

Email tools report on emails: how many were sent, how many people clicked, how many unsubscribed. Useful as those numbers are, the question a venue cares about is whether the email filled tables. Campaign reporting that stops at the click stops one step short.

Tagged booking links take it one step further. Give every campaign email its own tagged link to the booking page, with the campaign named in the tag, and you can see how many people each email sent to the booking page. Then look at bookings in the two or three days after each send, against the same days in a week without a send. The difference is a fair, if rough, estimate of what the campaign did.

Over a few months, the pattern tells you which kinds of email work for your guests: menu news, events, seasonal invitations, quiet-night offers. That is the campaign reporting worth having, and it costs nothing but consistent tags and a little arithmetic.

All of this can live on one page, updated once a month. A table with a row per channel and a few columns is enough:

Read it once a month with whoever runs the venue's marketing, even if that is you. The point is not precision; it is noticing trends early enough to act on them. A channel whose clicks fall three months running is telling you something, whatever its exact contribution to bookings.

Some booking links are spoken or printed rather than tapped: a radio mention, a local paper, a sign in the window, a host telling a guest how to book next time. These cannot carry tags in the usual way, but they can still be measured.

Use a short, memorable address for each, such as a simple page on your own website that redirects to the booking page with a tag added. The guest types or remembers something easy, and the tag records where it came from. Keep the address short enough to say aloud and spell without confusion.

Printed materials can carry tagged links too, through QR codes. A flyer, a card left on tables or a line on the receipt can each have a QR code that opens a tagged booking link, so the scans from each are counted separately. Keep the codes simple and test each with a few different phones before printing.

Print is the channel venues most often assume works or does not work without any evidence. A tagged QR code turns that assumption into a number.

Tagged links work only if one person owns them. That person creates every new link, keeps the list of where each is used, checks that old links still work, and makes sure that a new channel gets its own link from the start rather than borrowing another's.

Without an owner, links multiply in the hands of whoever happens to be posting or sending that day, tags drift, and within a few months nobody trusts the numbers. With an owner, the whole system takes a few minutes a week and stays clean.

Sometimes the different sources tell different stories. The clicks say Instagram, the guests say a friend told them, the timing says the newsletter. That is normal, not a sign that the method has failed.

Each source sees a different part of the guest's journey. A guest might hear about you from a friend, look you up on Instagram, receive your newsletter a week later and then book. All three are true. Use the disagreement to understand how guests actually find you, rather than to crown a single winner, and give credit to the channels that keep appearing in the story.

In a group, give each venue its own set of tagged links, pointing at its own booking page, with the venue in the campaign or content label if your analytics needs it. Use the same source and medium labels in every venue, so the numbers can be compared across the group as well as within each venue.

Keep the list of links in one place for the whole group. Tagged links multiply quickly, and a group that loses track of which link is used where soon has numbers nobody trusts.

An invented cafe-bistro uses one booking link everywhere. Its owner suspects the newsletter does little and Instagram does a lot, and is considering stopping the newsletter.

She creates tagged links for Instagram, the Google profile, the newsletter, the website and a table card with a QR code. After two months, the click counts show Instagram sending the most visits to the booking page, Google next, the newsletter well behind and the table card very few. But the timing of bookings tells a different story about the newsletter: every send is followed by a busy two days on the booking page, mostly regulars booking for the coming weekend, and many guests mention the newsletter when asked.

She keeps the newsletter, cuts the table cards and moves an hour a week from posting to answering Instagram messages faster. The decision rests on a mix of clicks, timing and guests' answers, which is about as good as attribution gets for a single venue.

servearound gives each venue its own booking page and a widget for its own website. In Analytics, bookings are broken down by source, such as the booking page, the widget on your website, phone, staff and walk-in, so you can see how much of your trade arrives online at all. See Analytics and the reservations module.

servearound does not record which outside channel or tag sent a guest to the booking page, so the tagged links, click counts and guests' answers in this guide are how to see that today. Campaigns sends email to guests who have opted in, with its own reporting on the emails themselves, including the unsubscribe rate.

Booking page addresses with tags added, one per channel, so that visits from each channel can be counted separately. The guest sees the same booking page whichever link they use.

Short labels added to a link, such as source, medium and campaign, that analytics tools read to report where visits came from. Google's Campaign URL Builder creates them for you.

Only if your booking system records the tag on each booking. Otherwise, compare clicks by channel with bookings over the same period, read the timing, and ask guests.

It helps if the booking page is on your own site. If not, a link service that counts clicks on short links does a similar job.

Consistently: lower case, the same source name for each channel every time, the medium for the type, and a campaign only for something specific and time-limited.

Because many guests book by phone, walk in, come through word of mouth or see you in one place and book in another. Treat each channel figure as a floor.

Not on one month's numbers. Look at its conversion, its timing effect and what guests say, and check that its link works properly first.

Yes, with a QR code that opens a tagged booking link, one per type of material, tested before printing.

Not in any meaningful way, as long as the tagged versions are only used in your own sharing and the booking page itself has one main address. Use the plain address for anything search engines see, such as your website's booking button.

A few months of consistent tagging, alongside guests' answers and the timing of bookings, gives a picture good enough for decisions.

One booking link for everything hides which channel brings guests. Give each channel its own booking link, tagged with consistent UTM labels, and count the clicks in your website analytics or a link service. Compare clicks with bookings over the same periods, read the timing of bookings after each send or post, and ask guests where they heard about you.

Treat every number as a floor: phone bookings, walk-ins, word of mouth and guests who see you in one place and book in another never show up in the clicks. Use the combined picture to shift effort between channels gradually, and keep a single list of every tagged link so the numbers stay trustworthy.