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Tracking referrals and campaigns

Learn how to use tracking IDs for marketing initiatives or affiliate referrals, including adding tracking to your booking page URL or integrated website and using custom fields to track referrals.

 

Which plans include this feature?

Legacy:  Soho, Pro, Plus, Enterprise, Flex
New:  Starter, Growth, Managed  |  Learn more about our new plans or how to change your plan.


Where can I find this feature using the top menu?

Use with your Booking Page, integrated websites, or custom fields.

What prerequisites are there?

  • Admin permissions to Manage your account and Integrations.
  • You must own the custom domain from which you would like to send. Generic email addresses from sites such as Gmail.com and Live.com are not supported.

Which Checkfront version supports this feature - classic, new, or both?

  • The Referral & Campaign Tracking feature is available to both those using items (Inventory > Items), a key feature of our classic version of Checkfront, and those using products (Inventory > Products), a key feature of our newest version of Checkfront.

 

Products

New to Checkfront - Products ✨

With our newest version of Checkfront, we have added Products (Inventory > Products) as the successor to items (Inventory > Items).

Are you interested in migrating to our newest version? Please reach out to our Technical Support team for more information.

 

Checkfront blog

Download our free marketing strategy workbook that you can use campaign tracking alongside: 

 

Using tracking IDs

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Although Checkfront already tracks the referring host of a booking (for example, an external website such as Facebook that directs traffic to your website), it can be helpful to add a tracking ID for marketing initiatives (email, pay-per-click advertising, etc.), or tracking agency/affiliate referrals. Checkfront makes this easy by allowing you to pass a tracking ID on your booking page, an integrated website, or via custom fields.

 

Adding tracking IDs to your booking page URL

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You do not need to register a tracking ID. You can supply it in the URL of any booking page. This works with any of our booking page integrations from within your website, Dropbox, or the hosted booking page.

To pass a tracking ID, add the TID (tracking ID) parameter to the URL of your booking page. Here is an example of a tracking ID on our Hosted Booking Page:

https://demo.checkfront.com/reserve/?tid=summer-promo

 

Referral TID

Bookings are tracked, and the TID is recorded if a booking is created via this URL. Tracking IDs can be viewed within the booking (below the invoice) and in the general Booking Index report.

 

Suggestion

Do you know that it is possible to add multiple TIDs to the same booking page URL so that the booking tracks more than a single TID at once? Each TID can be separated with a comma, like so:

https://demo.checkfront.com/reserve/?tid=summer-promo,fall promo

 

Note

The Source IP and TID are NOT displayed on the Customer invoice or when printing from within the admin interface.

 

Alert A TID attached to a booking by URL cannot be modified after the booking is created. A TID can only be adjusted using the above custom Booking Form field alternative.

 

Adding tracking IDs to integrated websites

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Website TID

Similarly, the TID can be added to website integrations like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. The TID can be input through the various configuration pages and automatically added to the code when the system generates it.

In this case, the WordPress shortcode might look something like this:

[checkfront end_date="20160731" tid="summer-promo" lang_id="en"]

 

Tracking using custom fields

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TID Field

You can also track bookings using booking field IDs. 

Start by creating a new field in the field editor and call it TID, with an ID of tracking-id, for example. This can be a select box populated with a list of IDs or a free-form text box.

Next, make the field available to Staff only.

Staff then manually enter the tracking ID or choose it from a prepopulated list when creating or editing a booking. Staff can adjust this field's contents anytime when editing a booking.

You can then report on the field's contents with a report such as the Booking Index.

 

 

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