Campaign Tagging

Ad platforms report a campaign's bookings inside their own dashboards, which you lose access to when the campaign ends, the agency changes, or the platform decides your account has seen enough. This puts the same information somewhere you own.

No patient details go anywhere. Nothing is sent to Meta, Google or to us — the campaign name is written into your practice management system, and only there.

There's nothing to switch on and nothing to configure in Your Booking. It works the moment you create a category and put a campaign code on a link.

Before You Start

• You'll need to be able to add a patient category in Optomate.
• You'll need to be able to edit the address your ads point at — a page on your own website, or your booking page.
• Two API permissions, on the Optomate account Your Booking connects with — Patient Categories (Read) and Patient Category Links (Read + Create). You can switch these on yourself in Optomate: System Settings → API Access, then Access List next to the Your Booking account. See the installation guide step 1.2 for where these sit alongside the rest.
• Optomate practices only, for now.

Step 1: Create the category in Optomate

In Optomate, go to Patient Settings → Categories and add a category. Put YB- followed by your campaign code in the Name box — for a spring sale, YB-SPRINGSALE.

The Identifier is Optomate's own short code — three characters, and it has to be one you're not already using. Pick anything free; we never read it. It's the same thing you already do for your other categories (SPP for the Spencil Kit promo, GVC for a gift voucher promo).

The Name is the one that matters. The YB- start tells us the category is yours to use for campaigns, so categories without it are never touched and nothing can be written into a clinical or administrative category by mistake.

Keep the campaign code to 17 characters or fewer after the YB-.

Step 2: Put the campaign code on your link

Add ?campaign= and the code to the address your ad, email or post points at:

https://yourpractice.com.au/book?campaign=SPRINGSALE

If your links already carry utm_campaign=SPRINGSALE for Google or Meta, that works too — there's no need for a second parameter.

If your booking page is embedded in your own website, or opens as a pop-over, the code is passed through to the booking flow automatically. There's nothing to add to your website beyond the code on the link.

Step 3: Check it worked

Make a test booking through the campaign link, then open that patient in Optomate and look at their categories — YB-SPRINGSALE should be listed. Remember to cancel the test appointment afterwards.

A newly-created category can take up to ten minutes to become available.

Worth Knowing

• A code with no matching category does nothing. A typo, or a code typed into the Identifier box instead of the Name box, means the booking is simply untagged. It never affects the booking itself.
• Nothing tells you a permission is missing. Because tagging is silent when it can't match, a missing Patient Category Links (Create) permission looks exactly like a typo: the booking works, and no tag appears. If your test booking doesn't tag and the category name is definitely right, check that permission next.
• Only patients who arrive through the campaign link are tagged. Someone who books from a reminder, recall or appointment link carries no campaign code — which is correct. Those are your own links, not campaign traffic.
• The code has to reach the booking page. We can see the address of the page the booking window sits on, and nothing else about your website. If a patient lands on a campaign link, browses a few other pages, then books from a page with no code on it, they arrive untagged. Whoever looks after your website can carry the code across if that matters for a particular campaign.
• The tag is permanent. Removing a category from a patient can only be done in Optomate. We can add one, never take it away.
• A patient can carry several. Someone who books from a spring campaign and again from a Christmas one ends up with both, which is usually what you want to see.

Reading the Results

Everything from here happens in Optomate, not in Your Booking — the tag is an ordinary patient category, so anything Optomate can do with categories works on it. Searching for a category tells you who came from a campaign; the same list is a recall audience next time you run something similar.

If you use a third-party marketing tool that reads categories out of Optomate, these appear alongside every other category you keep.