Open your Google Business Profile on your phone. Tap the website link on your own listing, and the booking link too if your listing has one. Now look at where you land.
That one tap tells you whether you have a blind spot.
Two ways in, one set of books
Most operators check one number for direct bookings: the visits and Book Now clicks on their website. That number is incomplete if your Google listing links straight to your booking engine.
A guest searches your town on Google Maps. Your listing comes up. They tap the link and arrive in the booking engine. They never loaded your homepage, so if your booking engine sits on a separate address with its own tracking, the analytics on your website never saw them. The booking is real, and no OTA took a cut. It just does not appear in the number you watch.
If your listing link goes to your homepage instead, this blind spot does not apply to you, and you have your answer in ten seconds. Some listings may go straight to the booking engine, and some owners have never checked.
The fix: label the link so those guests show up
The fix is small. Put a short tag on the end of the link your Google listing uses, so that every visit through it arrives labelled with where it came from. A common tag looks like this, and it goes before any # in the address:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=business-profile
If the address has no question mark in it, add the tag as it is. If it already has one, drop the leading question mark from the tag and join it on with an ampersand instead.
Then do three things:
- Open the link on your phone after you edit it and check it still lands on the right page.
- Look in your booking engine’s reports for a source or referrer line, and see whether the tag appears there after your own test visit.
- Write the number down each month, next to your website figure, as its own line.
If your booking engine does not show where visits came from, ask whoever supports it whether it can, or whether those visits show up some other way.
What you will see
Within a month you have a second line next to your website number. Either way you stop guessing, and that changes what you decide. A faster homepage does nothing for a guest who never opens it. Your listing, its photos and its link do.
What this is one piece of
Counting the Maps path is one fix, and it is worth doing this week whoever looks after your site. The same idea sits behind our post on counting the taps it takes to book you on a phone: you cannot improve a path you cannot see.
Counting is one job. The listing also needs current photos, accurate hours and replies to reviews. The website behind it has to load fast and book in a few taps. Your direct rate has to beat what the guest saw on the OTA. Someone has to check that the tag still works after every site update. Ongoing work like that is what Boost Direct is built for. Our team handles your website, SEO, paid ads, social media and ongoing optimisation, on a flat fee or a performance-based model. If you would rather keep doing it yourself, this post and the ones after it are written for you too. The rest of what we do is on our services page.
Open your listing tonight and tap the link.
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