Tracking real bookings in Google Analytics

A park whose booking engine sits on a different domain is probably measuring its marketing wrongly. Not slightly. The traffic source that gets credited for a booking can be the park's own website rather than whatever actually sent the camper.

What goes wrong, in plain terms

A camper searches, lands on the park website, browses, then clicks through to book. The booking pages are on the platform's domain rather than the park's.

Unless the two domains are configured to share a session, analytics treats that click as the end of one visit. A new visit then begins. The new visit appears to have come from the park's own website.

The result is a report where the park's website is the leading source of bookings. Whatever actually brought the camper gets no credit at all.

What has to be true to fix it

Three conditions, in this order. All three are questions of configuration rather than effort.

1. The same analytics property has to run on both domains. Without that, the booking side is invisible regardless of anything else.
2. The two domains have to be configured as one site in the analytics settings, so a session survives the handover.
3. The booking domain has to be excluded as a referral source, or it will keep appearing as the origin of its own traffic.

Whether a platform permits the first is the decisive question, and it is the one to ask before anything else. Some allow a park's own analytics on the booking pages, some do not, and some offer their own reporting instead.

What to ask the platform's support

• Can the park's own analytics measurement ID be added to the booking pages?
• What domain do the booking pages actually use? The exact hostname, for the referral exclusion.
• Is a conversion or purchase event sent when a booking completes, and under what name?
• Do booking links carry query parameters through, so campaign tagging survives the handover?
• Is there platform reporting that shows booking source independently?
• Can bookings be exported with a date and source, so figures can be reconciled by hand?

Ask them in writing. The answers determine what a park can measure, and they are worth keeping.

When the platform will not allow it

Some will not, and that is a real constraint rather than a failure of setup.

The fallback is to measure the step before the booking. Track the click on the book or check-availability button as a conversion on the park's own site. That is not a booking, but it is measured consistently and it moves with the same things bookings move with.

Then reconcile once a month: booking counts from the platform, against enquiry and click counts from analytics. Two imperfect numbers compared over time beat one confident number that is wrong.

Why this matters more at a park than elsewhere

Because a park's marketing decisions are seasonal and largely irreversible within a year.

An owner deciding in February what to spend on for the coming season is reading last year's report. Say that report credits the park's own website for bookings that came from the Google listing. The money then goes to the wrong place for a full season.

What to do with the numbers once they are trustworthy is in tracking RV park bookings from Google. Tagging the Google listing separately is in UTM tracking.