Measuring the bookings that start with a call
How to tell which bookings on your site came from a call your assistant handled, and what you need to connect to get there.
When someone calls your property and your assistant sends them a link to book, that booking lands on your website like any other. As far as your reports are concerned, it looks no different from someone who arrived through Google or an email campaign.
This section is about changing that: connecting your analytics tools so every booking is tied back to the call that started it.
Two different questions
Section titled “Two different questions”Worth keeping them apart, because they are answered by different things and they are easy to confuse.
“How much business does the call channel bring me?” — A question about origin. It is answered by UTMs, tags that travel in the link and tell your analytics where each visit came from. The links your assistant sends already carry them: source whatsapp, medium phone, campaign inboundcall. With that, your reports can group traffic and bookings by that origin, the same way they group Google or your newsletters.
“Which call produced this €1,240 booking?” — An individual question. UTMs cannot answer it: they tell you the visit came from the call channel, not which call. That needs a unique identifier for each call to travel along, and your analytics to store it next to the booking.
The first one works on its own. The second is what the setup in this section is for.
What you need
Section titled “What you need”Two Google tools, which you probably already use:
Google Analytics is where your website data is stored and queried: visits, pages, bookings, revenue. It is your warehouse.
Google Tag Manager measures nothing by itself. It is a middleman that decides which scripts run on your site and with what data. It is what sends information to Google Analytics.
The distinction matters because each one solves half the problem:
- Tag Manager makes sure the call identifier travels with your booking event.
- Analytics makes sure it is stored in a way you can actually query later.
If either is missing there is no attribution: the data never arrives, or it arrives and stays invisible.
The five words you need
Section titled “The five words you need”If you don’t work with these tools daily, these are the terms the rest of the pages use.
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Event | Something that happens on your site and gets recorded: a visit, a search, a confirmed booking. The booking one is usually called purchase. |
| Parameter | A piece of data attached to an event. Your booking event already carries several: booking number, amount, currency. |
| Custom dimension | A parameter you have registered in Analytics so it can be used in reports. Without registering it, the data is stored but cannot be queried. |
| Container | The set of scripts Tag Manager manages on your site. Each site has its own, with a code like GTM-XXXXXX. |
| Publish | In Tag Manager, changes do not take effect when you save them: they sit as a draft until someone publishes. Until then your site behaves exactly as before. |
What Bookline provides and what you provide
Section titled “What Bookline provides and what you provide”Our side is already done: the links your assistant sends include the call identifier and the origin UTMs. Nothing to configure there.
What is needed is permission to connect your two tools, and letting the setup go live:
- Connect Google Analytics and register the identifier as a custom dimension.
- Connect Google Tag Manager, install the tracking and publish it.
Both are done from the client portal, under Integrations, and at no point do you share passwords: the connection is made with your own Google account.