Bookings Made on Another Company's Booking Page

Where the trail stops

Many businesses take bookings through an online booking service. The book now button on the website sends visitors to a page on the service's own domain, where they pick a time and confirm.

Analytics on your site sees the click only as the moment the visitor left. Whatever happens next happens on someone else's website.

So the people who did exactly what you hoped look, in your reports, like people who gave up.

Owners who read the reports at face value can conclude that the website does not produce bookings, when it may be producing most of them.

What the reports show instead

• A high exit rate on the pages with the button.
• No goal completions for the main way customers book.
• Visits that end at the most valuable moment.
• Visits from the booking service when people return to your site.
• AdWords conversions that never register.

The fourth distorts everything else. A visitor who comes back from the booking page starts a new visit credited to the booking service, and the search or ad that actually found them loses the credit.

Count the click as an event

The minimum fix is recording each click on the book button. In Analytics this is an event, filed under three names you choose: a category such as booking, an action such as click, and a label such as the page.

Where Google Tag Manager is installed, it can do this without further changes to the site's code, using a trigger for clicks on links to the booking service's address. Without it, your developer adds a line to the button.

Then create a goal based on that event, so it appears alongside form submissions in your conversion reports.

Test it before relying on it. Click the button yourself and watch the event appear in the real-time reports.

A click is not a booking. It is intent, counted reliably, which is far better than nothing.

Use the service's own reports

The booking service knows what happened after the click. Most offer reports of bookings by date, by service and sometimes by how the booking was made.

Export a monthly total and put it next to the month's clicks from Analytics. The two will not match exactly: some people click twice, and some book with staff instead.

The ratio between them is the useful figure. If clicks hold steady and bookings fall, the problem is on the booking page, such as no available times or a step that is awkward on a phone.

Note cancellations and no-shows as well, if the service records them. A booking that never happens deserves its own line.

A worked example

A lactation consultant sees new parents in a small office and on home visits. The book a consultation button on her website opens an online scheduling service on its own domain.

In Analytics, the page with the button had the highest exit rate on the site and no goals were ever completed. She concluded the website was not bringing in clients and began pricing printed flyers instead.

The scheduling service told another story. Most of her bookings had been made online, many of them late in the evening or overnight, by parents awake with a newborn.

Analytics had recorded every one of those visitors as leaving. The booking happened on a domain it could not see.

The button click is now an event and a goal, and each month the service's booking total goes into a spreadsheet beside it. The flyers may still happen, but not as a response to a misleading report.

Connecting the two where the service allows

Some booking services go further, and it is worth asking yours what it supports.

Some have a setting for your Analytics tracking ID, so their booking pages record visits in your own reports.

A few support cross-domain tracking, which carries the visitor's session from your site to theirs so the whole visit counts as one. It needs setting up on both sides, and your developer will want the service's instructions.

Others can send customers back to a confirmation page on your own site after booking. That page can then be the goal, which counts real bookings rather than clicks.

Embedding the booking page inside one of your own pages rarely helps tracking, since the embedded part still belongs to the other domain.

Stop the booking service taking the credit

Whatever the service supports, add its domain to the referral exclusion list in your Analytics property settings.

Visitors who return from the booking page then continue their original visit, still credited to the search, ad or email that brought them.

Without it, the booking service will look like one of your best sources of business, which in a sense it is, but not one you can do anything with.

Revisit the list whenever you change booking services, since a new service usually means a new domain.

Paid ads and the missing conversion

AdWords conversion tracking normally needs a tag on the confirmation page, and a confirmation page on another company's domain is usually out of reach.

If the service lets you add an AdWords conversion tag to its own confirmation page, use it. That counts bookings rather than clicks.

Otherwise, Analytics goals can be imported into AdWords, so the click goal can serve as the conversion. Treat it as a measure of interest, and check it against actual bookings before judging a campaign.

The counter-case

If most bookings arrive by phone, call tracking matters more than any of this. And if the booking system is part of your own website, such as a plugin, an ordinary goal on its confirmation page does the job.

Some services offer no reports worth the name. The click is still worth tracking, because it is the only part of the booking you can see.

In every other case, count the click, read the service's figures beside it, and exclude the booking domain as a referrer.

Before judging the website

1. Find where the book button leads on each page.
2. Track clicks on it as an event.
3. Make that event a goal in Analytics.
4. Export bookings from the service monthly.
5. Exclude the booking domain as a referrer.
6. Ask the service what tracking it supports.
7. Compare clicks and bookings each month.

Step five takes two minutes and corrects the most misleading part of the reports, since the source that actually brought each customer keeps the credit.

The same blind spot with email links is covered in clicks on email addresses that Analytics never sees.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.