The exact setup to see which customers your ads actually brought in.

Ask which customers your ads actually brought in last month and most owners can only guess, or quote what the ad platform says. The platforms count the results they give themselves credit for. That isn’t the same as the customers in your booking calendar or your till.

This guide sets up five things so every new customer is recorded with where they came from: your ads, and everything else. None of them needs a developer, and none of them is running the ads.

Decide where “a customer” officially lives: your booking calendar, your CRM, your Shopify orders or a signed-jobs sheet. Every other number gets checked against this one.

• If customers live in two places, say walk-ins in a notebook and online bookings in an app, pick one and copy the other into it every week.
• Add a field called Source to each customer record. The next three steps fill it in.

A UTM is a short tag on the end of a link that tells your website where the visitor came from. Add one to every link you control: your Instagram bio, the website button on your Google Business Profile, your newsletter, your link-in-bio page, the QR code on your flyers.

https://yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=bio&utm_campaign=evergreen

• utm_source is the platform: instagram, facebook, tiktok, google, newsletter, qr.
• utm_medium is the spot on that platform: bio, story, profile, email, print.
• utm_campaign is what you’re promoting: evergreen for everyday links, or the offer and month, like spring-offer-april.

Lowercase only, dashes instead of spaces, and keep a list of every name you use. To a report, instagram and Instagram are two different sources.

A tagged link only helps if the tag survives to the customer record. Two checks:

1. Forms keep the UTM. Most booking tools, CRMs and form builders can save UTM values into hidden fields. Look in the form settings for “UTM”, “hidden fields” or “tracking parameters”. Then test it: open your site with ?utm_source=test on the end of the address, submit the form, and check that the new record says test.
2. The sale sends a signal. If you advertise, or plan to, the ad platforms need to be told when a booking or an order actually happens, not just when someone opens a page. Ask whoever built your site to show you the signal firing on the booking-confirmed or order-complete page. Meta’s Events Manager and Google’s Tag Assistant both have a test view that shows it live.

Links miss word of mouth, walk-ins and people who saw a post and searched your name later. So ask. Add a required question to your booking form or checkout, and ask it on the phone:

How did you hear about us?
- Instagram
- Facebook
- TikTok
- Google search
- Google Maps
- A friend or family member
- Walked or drove past
- Other

Keep the answers fixed. Free-text replies are impossible to count. When the answer and the link disagree, keep both: someone who clicked a Google link because a friend mentioned you came from both.

For a lot of local businesses, the sale starts on the phone. Give each place you list your number its own number: your website, your Google Business Profile, your ads. Call-tracking tools do this, and many booking and CRM tools include it. Then you can see which one rings.

If you can’t do that yet, write the source on every call you take, using the same answers as the question above.

Every Monday, fill in last week from your one place, one row per source. Put your ad spend on the rows for your ads. After a month you’ll see which sources bring in customers and which only bring clicks.

Week	Source	Leads	New customers	Revenue	Ad spend	Notes

Then divide a month of ad spend by the new customers your ads brought in. That’s what a customer from your ads really costs. Guide 001 shows how to read that number.