Knowing what brings customers in

You put a poster in the window, run an ad, send an email. A fortnight later you're wondering which one was worth it. A campaign link answers that — and it takes about twenty seconds to make.

What a campaign link is

It's your ordinary storefront address with a label on the end:

https://yourshop.pekkish.co.uk/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=january-offer

It goes to exactly the same place as your plain link. The difference is that when someone arrives through it, we can tell you where they came from — and, more to the point, whether they ordered.

Customers never see the label. It's a few characters on the end of a web address; nobody has to read it, type it or understand it. Give the campaign whatever name makes sense to you — "table cards", "January offer", "market stall".

Making one

In your shop admin, go to Share & promote and press Create a campaign link. You're asked two things:

• A campaign name — your label for this push. If you're running the same offer in three places, use the same name for all three; they'll add up together, and you'll still see which place each visit came through.
• Where it's going — the one that matters, below.

Press Create and you get the link, what to do with it, and a QR code if the place you named could use one.

"Where it's going", and why it's worth getting right

This is the only technical decision on the page, and we made it a plain question because the alternative is jargon. What you pick decides how the visit is recorded:

Two things worth noticing. A Facebook post and a Facebook ad are separate choices — both are recorded as Facebook, but only the ad counts as paid. That's the difference between "my advertising worked" and "somebody shared us", and you want to be able to tell them apart when the bill arrives.

And picking the real place beats picking "somewhere else". A link you tag as Facebook groups with every other Facebook arrival — including people who found you because a customer shared your menu — so you see the whole picture for that platform rather than a column of odds and ends.

The QR code and the poster

You get a QR code and a printable A4 poster on the campaigns that could use one — a QR code for a table card, a printed flyer, or "somewhere else". You don't get them on a Facebook ad or an email, because nobody can scan a code on the screen they're already holding the link on.

The poster is your shop's name, the QR code, and your address written out in words for anyone who'd rather type it. Print it for the counter, the van, or a noticeboard at a stop.

If you'd rather put the code in a design of your own, right-click it and save it.

One thing to know about the poster. Scans of it are recorded as a QR scan, even on a campaign you also run somewhere else. That's deliberate: a sheet of paper on a wall isn't a Facebook ad, and counting it as one would tell you your advertising was working when it was the poster doing the work. Both still add up under the campaign name.

Using one in a Facebook or Instagram ad

In Ads Manager, paste the link into the ad's Website URL field. That's it.

You don't need to add any tracking on top — the link already carries everything Pekkish needs, and Facebook's own click ID rides along with it automatically. If your agency or a how-to guide tells you to append extra parameters, you can, but nothing here requires it.

Reading the results

Two places, answering two different questions.

Share & promote lists every campaign link you've made with its visits and when the last one was. It's the quick "has anyone used this yet?" check.

Analytics → Where customers come from is the one that settles arguments. It has three columns — the source, visits, and orders. Visits tell you the ad was seen and clicked. Orders tell you it sold something. A campaign with plenty of visits and no orders is a message that's working and an offer that isn't, which is a much more useful thing to know than a click count.

Underneath, Which pages they land on shows where people arrive — useful if you're linking to something more specific than your front page.

Why your number is lower than Facebook's

It usually will be, and it's not a fault.

Pekkish only counts a visit once the customer has accepted cookies on your storefront. Anyone who declines, or who closes the banner without answering, still gets their lunch exactly as normal — we simply don't record where they came from. Ad platforms count every click at their end, before any of that.

So treat the platform's number as "people who clicked" and ours as "people who clicked, and told us they didn't mind us noticing". The ratio between your campaigns is the useful part, and that stays honest.

A few habits worth having

• One link per place, not one per campaign. The poster and the Facebook ad for the same offer want the same campaign name and different places — then the offer's total is one number and you can still see which half of it worked.
• Make it before you need it. A link made after the ad is live can't count the visits that already happened.
• Removing a link from your list doesn't recall it. A flyer already out there keeps working and its visits keep counting — removing it only tidies your list. There's no way to un-print a poster, and we'd rather say so than pretend.
• Don't edit the tags by hand. If you want the same campaign somewhere else, make a second link for that place; it takes less time than getting the spelling right.

If you just want your plain link

It's at the top of Share & promote, with its own QR code and poster, untagged. Use that for your Instagram bio, your email signature and your website's "Order online" button — the places that are permanent and don't need measuring. See Sharing your storefront link for those.

Stuck on something? Contact support.