Hi All, we need to be able to attribute sources of sales call bookings made via Calendly. Calendly seems to not be built for this.
Use case:
- In reality we have 1 type of sales call, and ideally 1 event type for it
- But there are many routes via which prospects can land on that event
- We need to determine which routes / sources of bookings perform best
- Ideally we’d have 1 event type with a breakdown of all referrers or sources of bookings
- Ideally that would be exportable to CSV. But if the data is accessible another way it’s OK
Problem with Calendly:
Calendly allows only 1 URL per event booking page. This is a major constraint because we can’t have different URLs to attribute bookings to different sources. Calendly does support UTM codes, but as we all know UTM are one of the best ways to make a good URL long and unusable. Specifically: several sources of bookings are via email or other places that huge long ugly URLs are not workable. URLs like this are not practical for popping into a sales email thread: https://calendly.com/sam-tuke/intro?utm_source=gerry+santana&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=outreach-22. Even one single UTM parameter is hard to get right when writing emails on a mobile devices, error prone, and is unwieldy for the recipient.
Using HTML to hide URLs is a good way to land in spam these days.
Calendly supports no other options for attributing bookings AFAICS.
Workaround:
Until now we have cloned events in order to get different event booking URLs to enable us to differentiate. That works. But it means that when we need to tweak event settings, we need to edit currently 6 different event types manually. E.g. every time we add or remove a booking form question we must manually edit them again, which is a major PITA, and makes errors quite likely.
I’m looking for any improvement on this workaround.
An option I’ve considered is using a third party link shortener as a workaround, effectively oursourcing URL redirection to another company like bit.ly. That should work, but may also trigger spam filters on emails, given that the end URL is not the same as the one in the email. It also means that we’d have to use the link shortening service UI to get our analytics stats instead of some other better suited system, which isn’t ideal.
How are you handling attribution better than the above? Thanks.
