There are a handful of ways to set up conversion tracking for Calendly, but most of them don’t accurately report the source of traffic, which as a PPC consultant, makes them useless. But after working through the various methods for one of my clients, I’ve found a straightforward approach that I wanted to share, to save you the time of going through the same trial and error that I had to endure.
Things You’ll Need
Step 1 - Thank You Page
If you haven’t already, you’ll need to create a thank you page on your website. For anyone who is new to the concept of thank you pages, it’s a really simple page on your website that literally has a few sentences to confirm to users that the enquiry/form has been sent. Below is an example:
I have a few extra tips for your thank you page. The first tip is to make sure you noindex it. This might sound a bit technical, but it should be fairly simple to do if you are using something like WordPress. If you are using WordPress, one of the most popular SEO plugins called Yoast will allow you to noindex the page in just a few clicks, here are the instructions.
Why you might ask? If you allow the thank you page to become indexed, it means it can show up in the Google search results. This means users can access it without filling out a form or whatever your desired goal is. So if you end up setting up a destination goal in Analytics for anyone who visits the thank you page, it will start to fire goals even for people who simply discovered it in the search results.
I’d also recommend adding some extra info or resources to your thank you page. Maybe include a little sentence about the next steps and any brochures or downloads that the user might find useful.
Step 2 - Calendly Settings
Once you have your thank you page, you need to configure the settings in Calendly. To do this, you need to use Calendly’s redirect feature. As mentioned in the ‘What You Need’ list, this is a Pro-level feature, so make sure you have the right subscription.
- First, head to the Calendly homepage and then click on the event you want to add a redirect to.
- Under ‘Additional Options’, click on ‘confirmation page’ to expand the section and look at the options there.
- For the ‘on confirmation’ option, select ‘Redirect to an external site’.
- You can then enter the URL of your thank you page.
If you need more help, here is a video directly from Calendly to talk you through it.
Step 3 - Thank You Page Tracking
Once all that is done, now you can set up your tracking. I created this blog post with more of a focus on Google Ads as that was what I needed it for. But with this tracking approach, you can set up tracking for all sorts of platforms.
For Google Ads, you'll need to set up conversion tracking for a 'page load' event. Through this process, you'll need to add an event snippet to your thank you page, either directly via your CMS or via Google Tag Manager. How it works is that once a user had booked a meeting and is redirected to your thank you page, the event snippet will fire and will let Google Ads know that it has resulted in a conversion. You can follow a similar process for Facebook using the Facebook Pixel.
For Google Analytics, simply set up a destination goal using the Thank You page as the destination. So whenever a user books a meeting using Calendly, they will be redirected to the thank you page which will generate a conversion.
Step 4 - Start Tracking Bookings
It’s as simple as that. Once you have your tracking in place, be sure to submit a test enquiry to ensure the tracking is working as expected. If you get stuck at any point, feel free to drop me an email and I’d be more than happy to talk you through it in more detail.