When a booking comes in, attribution tells you how that customer found you.

CaptainBook stores this information directly on the booking so you can answer questions like:

“Which campaign produced this booking?”

without exporting data or trying to reconstruct the customer journey later.
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If you market your business through several channels — Google Ads, Instagram, email, partner sites, or QR codes — attribution helps you understand what each one actually produced.

Instead of only knowing:

“We received 180 bookings.”

you can understand:

“42 came from the spring newsletter, 31 from Google, and 4 from Instagram.”
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A UTM tag is information added to the end of a link so CaptainBook can identify where the visitor came from.

For example:

https://yourwebsite.com/tours?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale

The page itself does not change for the visitor. The URL simply carries extra information about the campaign.

CaptainBook reads these UTM parameters:

The first three are the most important.|
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💡 Easy way to remember them
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Source = who sent them
​Medium = how
​Campaign = why
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Customers often interact with your marketing more than once before booking.

For example:

CaptainBook stores both:
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The campaign that first introduced the customer to your business.

This helps you understand acquisition.

The most recent campaign before the customer completed their booking.

This helps you understand conversion.

Both are stored on the booking.
If the customer only arrived through one campaign, first touch and last touch will be the same. That is normal.
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Attribution has some natural limitations.

It cannot reliably identify:

For offline marketing such as flyers or brochures, use a QR code that points to a tagged URL if you want the visit attributed.
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Your CaptainBook booking widget runs on your website.

When a visitor lands on a URL containing UTM parameters, the CaptainBook embed script reads those parameters and passes them into the booking widget.

The journey is:

Campaign link → Your website → CaptainBook widget → Booking

CaptainBook records campaign arrivals as touches.

When the booking is confirmed, it saves:

If a visitor refreshes a page while the same UTM parameters remain in the URL, CaptainBook does not record another campaign touch.

A genuinely different campaign does create a new touch.

CaptainBook keeps up to 10 campaign touches per visitor.

If more than 10 are recorded, the first and most recent touches are preserved.
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Open a booking and scroll to the Attribution section.

You will see:

Additional fields such as utm_term or utm_content appear only when they contain data.

If the booking has no attribution information, the section is not shown.
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The customer sidebar includes an Attribution (latest booking) card.

It shows attribution from the customer’s most recent booking and includes a link to the full booking attribution.

For repeat customers, remember that this card only reflects their latest booking.

Earlier bookings keep their own attribution records.

Start with a page on your website and add UTM parameters.

For example:

https://yourwebsite.com/tours/sunset-cruise?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_2026

Follow these rules to keep your reporting clean:

For example:

Use:

utm_source=google

instead of:

utm_source=Google

These would be treated as two different values.
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Google Ads may add:

gclid

Meta may add:

fbclid

CaptainBook does not use these for campaign attribution.

CaptainBook reads the standard utm_* parameters.

If your campaigns rely only on automatic platform tagging, attribution may not appear in CaptainBook.

Make sure your campaign URLs also include UTM parameters.
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Campaign attribution and behavioral tracking are handled differently.

If a visitor declines behavioral tracking:

This is because attribution is associated with the commercial transaction rather than general browsing activity.

If account-level tracking is completely disabled, attribution is also disabled.

If a customer completes a booking through the embedded CaptainBook AI Assistant, the Assistant becomes the last touch.

It is recorded as:

Any earlier campaign remains stored as the first touch.
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Check whether CRM and tracking are enabled on your account.
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Your campaigns may be using Google auto-tagging without UTM parameters.

Add UTM parameters to your campaign URLs.
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Check whether the UTM parameters are still present in the browser URL when the CaptainBook widget loads.

Some websites remove query parameters during navigation.
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Bookings created by staff do not have a visitor journey, so they do not have campaign attribution.
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This can happen because of:

This is usually normal.

Most visitors only arrive through one tracked campaign before booking.
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⚠️ Testing tip

If you test a tagged campaign link and then make a booking in the same browser, your test campaign can be recorded on that booking.

Use a private browser window for testing.
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CaptainBook campaign attribution has a few important limits:

Campaign attribution is available on:

Attribution is stored on the booking itself, so it is not removed after the 90-day behavioral Timeline retention period.
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Older bookings continue to keep the attribution that was recorded when they were created.