UTM source tracking

UTM source tracking is how Off The Couch attributes each booking, transaction, gift card, or active cart back to the marketing effort that drove it. Tag your links once (Google Ads, Facebook, email newsletter, partner site), and OTC captures the source on the resulting record so you can see — at the row level — which channel actually converted. Enable it per company group, build trackable links from the in-app Link builder, paste the booking-site embed script on your marketing site, and the source travels through the iframe on its own.

Why UTM tracking matters

Most venues spend real money to bring customers in — Google Ads, Facebook ads, email blasts, partner kickbacks, influencer collaborations, sponsored events. Without UTM tracking you can see how many bookings you got in a month, but you can't tell which marketing actually paid for them. Every channel ends up looking equally important (or equally suspect), and you make spend decisions on gut feeling.

Tagged links change that. Once UTM tracking is on, every booking, transaction, and gift card carries the source it came from, so you can answer real business questions instead of guessing:

The real value isn't visits — it's revenue. Google Analytics and similar tools can tell you how many people clicked a tagged link. OTC's role is different: it tells you how many of those clicks turned into actual bookings. That's what matters for ROAS, partner renewals, and ad-budget decisions, and it's the piece you can't get from web analytics alone because your booking conversion happens inside OTC.

A few concrete wins venues get once UTMs are in place:

• Justify or kill ad spend. Pull last month's bookings, count how many came from each paid source, multiply by booking value, divide by ad spend. That ratio is ROAS. If it's below 1, the campaign isn't paying for itself. If it's 3+, scale it up.
• Spot the quietly profitable channel. Most venues find at least one source they were under-investing in — a Reddit thread, a local podcast, a partner with great word of mouth — that's quietly producing high-converting bookings.
• Renew partner deals with data. When a partner asks for a bigger kickback or a renewed contract, "we saw 12 bookings tagged with your source last quarter at $X each" is a much better conversation than "yeah, you've sent us... some?"
• Tell which creative is working. Same Facebook campaign, two different ad creatives, two different utm_content values. Compare booking counts to see which creative actually drives revenue, not just clicks.
• Reduce wasted spend. Once you can see which sources don't convert, you stop paying for them. Most venues find at least one channel producing clicks but almost no bookings.

The compounding effect matters too: a few months of UTM data lets you spot seasonal patterns (which sources spike around holidays, which slump), compare year-over-year campaign performance, and build a real sense of which efforts deserve to be part of your standard rotation versus which were one-time experiments that didn't pay off.

What UTM is, in plain English

A UTM is a small set of tags you add to the end of a marketing URL. "UTM" stands for Urchin Tracking Module — a leftover name from Urchin, the analytics company Google bought and turned into Google Analytics. The tags don't change the page the visitor sees; they just travel along so your booking software (and your other analytics tools) can record where the visit came from.

A tagged link looks like this:

https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_sale

Everything after the ? is the tracking data.

There are five standard UTM parameters. The first three are the ones almost everyone uses.

The whole point is attribution — knowing which of your marketing efforts actually drives bookings (not just clicks) so you can spend time and money on what's working.

How Off The Couch supports source tracking

Off The Couch is a per-group setting and a small set of integrations:

When tracking is on and a customer arrives through a tagged link, OTC stores utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, plus the website the customer came from, on the cart and then on each resulting booking, transaction, and gift card. The Source badge shows the source on records. The Transactions and Purchases reports have Source, Medium, Campaign, Referrer and Traffic attribution columns, and dashboards can break sales down by source, medium and campaign. utm_term and utm_content are not stored.

How it works end to end

The cookie persistence is what makes attribution work for multi-session bookings — a customer who clicks an ad today, leaves, comes back tomorrow, and books still carries the original Facebook attribution.

What if UTMs never make it into OTC?

OTC can only stamp a source on a record if the UTM values reach the booking site's URL. There are a few ways that fails silently — and the result is always the same: the record gets created with an empty source and the Source field on the row shows -. Understanding when that happens helps you set up reliably.

The simple rule: if the URL of the page hosting the iframe shows the UTM parameters at the moment the iframe loads, OTC will catch them. If the UTMs were lost somewhere upstream — never tagged, stripped by a redirect, dropped during navigation between pages on your marketing site — there's nothing to attribute. The fixes are almost always one of three things: tag the source link, use the OTC embed snippet instead of a bare iframe, or persist UTMs across your marketing site so navigation doesn't lose them (covered in the next section).

Persist UTMs across your marketing site

This is the piece most venues miss. The OTC embed snippet handles the iframe boundary, but it only sees what's on the booking page's URL at the moment that page loads. If your customer landed somewhere else on your marketing site first, browsed around, and then clicked through to the booking page, the UTMs were almost certainly dropped on the way — because internal navigation between your site's pages doesn't carry query parameters by default.

Example flow that silently loses attribution:

The OTC snippet on /book does its job correctly — it reads the page's current URL — but the URL no longer has the UTMs because they were dropped two clicks ago. The result is a perfectly valid booking with no source attribution.

The standard fix is a site-wide UTM capture script on your marketing site. It runs on every page, grabs UTMs the moment a customer lands on a tagged URL, and persists them to localStorage and a cookie so they're still available when the customer eventually reaches the booking page. The OTC snippet then reads them from the cookie even though the booking page's URL is bare.

This is industry-standard practice for any customer-facing marketing site that runs paid or referral traffic — most marketing-aware site builders wire this in as table stakes, alongside Google Analytics 4 and the Meta pixel. It's not part of OTC because it has to live on your marketing site, not inside the booking iframe.

A starting-point capture script

Drop this into your marketing site so it loads on every page (footer / global include / your CMS's "custom code" slot). It captures UTMs on landing and persists them for 30 days with first-touch attribution.

<script>
(function () {
  var params = ['utm_source', 'utm_medium', 'utm_campaign', 'utm_term', 'utm_content', 'gclid', 'fbclid'];
  var url = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
  var stored = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('mkt_attribution') || '{}');

  params.forEach(function (p) {
    var val = url.get(p);
    if (val) {
      stored[p] = val;
      // Also set a cookie so the OTC embed snippet (and any server-side code) can read it
      document.cookie = p + '=' + encodeURIComponent(val) + ';path=/;max-age=2592000;SameSite=Lax';
    }
  });

  // First-touch: only overwrite when a new tagged visit arrives, otherwise keep the original
  if (url.get('utm_source') || url.get('gclid') || url.get('fbclid')) {
    localStorage.setItem('mkt_attribution', JSON.stringify(stored));
  }
})();
</script>

A few things this script does intentionally:

• Runs on every page, so a customer who lands on /about?utm_source=facebook gets captured even though /about is not your booking page.
• First-touch by default — once UTMs are stored, a later untagged visit won't overwrite them. So a customer who clicks your Facebook ad today and returns through a Google search next week still gets attributed to Facebook. Swap to last-touch by removing the "only overwrite when a new tagged visit arrives" check.
• 30-day cookie window (max-age=2592000 is 30 days in seconds), matching the OTC embed snippet's TTL. Make this longer if you want.
• Also captures gclid and fbclid — the ad-platform click IDs. UTMs tell you the campaign; click IDs tie back to the exact ad click for ROAS math in Google Ads and Meta.
• Sets both localStorage and a cookie. The cookie is the important part for OTC — the booking-site embed snippet reads cookies, not localStorage.

WordPress / Elementor

The most common stack venues run their marketing sites on. A few specifics:

• Elementor: paste the script above into Elementor > Custom Code and set it to load in the footer on all pages. Or use a code snippets plugin (e.g., Code Snippets) if you'd rather keep it out of Elementor itself.
• Elementor Pro forms with UTM hidden fields: if you also use Elementor forms for waitlists or contact, set hidden field default values to "Get value from URL parameter." That works on the current page only — it does not persist across navigation, which is the whole problem this section addresses. Pair it with the site-wide script above so the persisted values fill the form fields even when the URL is bare.
• Plugins that handle it for you: UTM Grabber, WP Fastest UTM, and the attribution features in CookieYes / Independent Analytics each capture-and-persist without writing code. Reasonable if you'd rather not maintain the script yourself.

Squarespace, Webflow, custom-built sites

Same pattern — drop the script into the site's global header/footer (Squarespace: Settings > Advanced > Code injection > Footer; Webflow: Project settings > Custom code > Footer code; custom-built: your shared layout template). The script is plain JavaScript, not tied to any CMS.

Confirming it works

Once the script is in place, test it like this:

If step 3 fails, the script isn't loading on the page you tested — usually because of where it's pasted (not actually site-wide) or because some other plugin clears localStorage aggressively. If step 5 fails but step 3 worked, the OTC snippet isn't on the booking page or isn't picking up the right cookie names.

Setup

Turn on source tracking

Build a tracking link

Click Generate tracking link to open the Link builder modal.

Type the source, medium, and (optionally) campaign, click the copy icon, and paste the URL into your ad, email, or social post. The link is fully formed — there's no separate "save" step.

(Embedded only) Add the booking-site embed script to your marketing site

If your booking site is embedded as an iframe on your own marketing site, you also need the embed script that forwards UTMs across the iframe boundary. Browser cross-origin rules mean the iframe can't read its parent's URL on its own — the script bridges the two sides.

That's it. After the snippet is in place, every tagged visit carries its UTM source into OTC automatically, and the 30-day cookie means a customer can come back days later to finish their booking and the attribution still sticks.

See where each booking, transaction, gift card, or cart came from

When tracking is on and a record was created with a UTM source, OTC displays a Source badge on the row.

Records created without a UTM source show a - in the same spot.

Reference

Where to turn it on

Marketing card on the Integrations tab

Link builder modal

The five UTM parameters

Off The Couch's Link builder captures Source, Medium, and Campaign, the three that drive almost every report and the three OTC stores. You can add utm_term and utm_content to a link by hand for other analytics tools, but OTC does not record them.

Embed script behavior

The booking-site embed script handles the cross-origin problem on its own. On every page load:

Source attribution surfaces

What's stamped on the record

OTC stamps the record with the UTM source values present at the moment the cart converts. If the cookies preserve a first-touch source from days earlier, the record reflects that first touch (not the most recent visit).

Good to know

• The toggle is the master switch. When Enable purchase source tracking is off for the group, OTC ignores any UTM parameters that arrive in URLs — nothing is stamped on records and no badges render. Turn it on per group, ideally before you launch a campaign so you don't miss any conversions.
• The Link builder is for outbound links, not inbound configuration. Use it any time you're about to put a marketing link somewhere — an ad, an email, a social post, a partner site. There's no separate "save" step; the modal just produces a URL.
• The embed script handles the iframe gap automatically. Cross-origin browser rules normally block an iframe from reading its parent's URL — that's why naive iframe embeds lose UTMs. The snippet from Booking site settings bridges that gap by reading the parent's URL, stashing UTMs in cookies, and appending them to the iframe URL.
• Cookies persist 30 days and preserve first-touch. A customer who clicks your ad today and books two weeks later still gets attributed to the original ad. The script never overwrites an existing cookie with new UTMs unless the new visit actually has a tagged URL — that keeps "last-touch organic visits" from clobbering "first-touch paid clicks."
• Pick a naming convention and stick to it. Lowercase everything, decide between email and newsletter (not both), agree whether it's facebook or fb. The reports turn into a mess of near-duplicates fast if every campaign manager invents their own labels. The hardest part of UTM hygiene is consistency, not setup.
• UTMs only capture what you tag. They don't track anything automatically — if a link goes out without UTMs, that traffic shows up as "direct" and the attribution is lost. Get into the habit of always building outbound marketing links through the Link builder.
• UTMs aren't PII, but the records they attach to are. Pairing UTM data with customer data (names, emails) means your privacy policy and consent flows should account for it, especially under GDPR/CCPA. If you serve a consent-required audience, make sure your cookie banner covers attribution cookies.
• UTMs are one half of the attribution story. Ad platforms also use their own click IDs (gclid for Google, fbclid for Meta) for precise ad-level attribution. UTMs tell you the campaign; the click IDs tie back to the exact ad click for conversion uploads and ROAS math. Capturing both alongside one another is the gold standard for serious ad reporting.
• Source attribution is at the cart level. Once a cart has a UTM source attached, every record born from that cart — the booking, the transaction, the gift card line — inherits it. You don't need to retag the link mid-flow.
• Records created before tracking was enabled have no source. Turning the toggle on doesn't retroactively attribute anything; only records created after the toggle is on can carry a UTM source.

FAQ

Q: What's the difference between Source on a transaction and a UTM source?

A: They mean different things on different surfaces. The Source column in Transactions and Purchases reports describes the channel of creation — was the record born from the public booking site, an internal staff booking, etc. The Source badge that appears when UTM tracking is on describes the marketing source (facebook, google, newsletter) recorded from the UTM parameter on the inbound URL. Both can be true at the same time — a transaction can be created from the "public booking site" channel and tagged with utm_source=facebook because the customer arrived there from a Facebook ad.

Q: My booking site is embedded as an iframe. Will UTMs still work?

A: Yes, if you've pasted the booking-site embed script onto your marketing page. The script reads UTMs from the parent page's URL, stores them in cookies, and forwards them across the iframe boundary into OTC. A naive `` embed without the script will lose UTMs because cross-origin rules block the iframe from reading the parent's URL.

Q: How long do attribution cookies last?

A: 30 days. A customer who clicks a tagged ad today and books within the next 30 days still gets attributed to the original ad. After 30 days the cookie expires and a new visit would start fresh.

Q: Is OTC's attribution first-touch or last-touch?

A: First-touch. The embed script never overwrites an existing UTM cookie unless the new visit actually has a tagged URL of its own. So if a customer clicks your Facebook ad (tagged), comes back later through an organic Google search (untagged), and then books, OTC attributes the booking to Facebook — not "direct."

Q: Can I generate a UTM link by hand instead of using the Link builder?

A: Yes. UTMs are just query parameters on the URL. The Link builder is a convenience — anything you build by hand or with a third-party tool (Google Campaign URL Builder, for example) works just as well.

Q: Where do I see a list of all bookings from a specific source?

A: OTC displays Source as a badge on each row but doesn't have a built-in "filter by source" today. The fastest way to slice attribution is to export the Transactions or Purchases data via the CSV download on the Transactions list — Source is included in the export — and group by utm_source in a spreadsheet.

Q: I turned on tracking and pasted the embed script. Why are some of my conversions still showing - for Source?

A: See the What if UTMs never make it into OTC? table above for the full list, but in rough order of likelihood:

1. The customer arrived through an untagged link (direct, organic search, an unbranded referral). Untagged visits show - — only tagged visits get a Source.
2. The marketing link wasn't actually tagged — paste it into a browser and confirm the URL contains utm_source=....
3. The booking site is embedded but the OTC embed script is missing (a bare `` can't see the parent's UTMs). Replace with the snippet from Booking site settings.
4. The embed script isn't on every page that hosts the iframe — only on the landing page, for example.
5. The customer was using a privacy tool or browser setting (Brave, Safari ITP, an ad blocker) that strips UTMs or limits cookies, breaking attribution.
6. The customer's last tagged visit was more than 30 days before they finally converted, so the attribution cookie had expired.

Q: Does OTC capture more than just utm_source?

A: Yes. When a tagged URL arrives at the booking site, OTC stores every standard UTM field present — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content — on the cart and on each downstream booking, transaction, and gift card. The console UI today surfaces only utm_source (as the Source badge), but the other fields are saved on the records. That means historical data is preserved for when richer breakdowns ship later — there's no need to retag any links once they go live. Tag with at least source, medium, and campaign now so the future reporting has clean data to work with.

Q: Do I need separate links for each campaign?

A: Yes, that's the point. Build a different tracking link for each ad, email send, or partner placement so the reports can distinguish them. The Link builder is fast enough that this isn't a heavy lift.

Q: What if I have multiple company groups and they all run the same campaign?

A: Tracking is per group. Generate the link from each group's settings — the parent domain (and embedded vs hosted choice) is per group too, so the right destination URL gets built each time.

Q: Do tagged links keep the UTM parameters visible to the customer?

A: Yes — UTMs sit in the URL the customer's browser sees. Some campaign managers shorten links through a redirect tool (Bitly, your own URL shortener) to hide the parameters. That works fine with OTC; the redirect resolves to the tagged URL before the page loads.

Q: Should I use UTM tracking even if I only get organic traffic?

A: Yes, especially for any structured outbound effort — a newsletter, a referral partner, a one-off post in a community forum. Even without paid ads, knowing whether bookings came from your email list, a specific partner, or your social posts tells you which efforts are paying off.

Q: Can I track UTMs without enabling the toggle?

A: No. The toggle is the master switch. UTMs that arrive on URLs while the toggle is off are ignored — nothing is stamped on records and no badges render. Turn the toggle on for the group before you launch any campaign you want attributed.

Q: Why does my Source badge always show capitalized (Google) when I tagged the link with lowercase (google)?

A: OTC capitalizes the first letter of the source value for display purposes only. The underlying value stays lowercase, so your stored data is consistent with what you tagged.