Which post sold the tickets? Tracking ticket sales by source

Why the plain link isn't enough

When someone clicks through to your ticket page, their browser usually says which site they came from — so StallsApp can tell a sale came from Instagram. It can't tell whether that was your Story, your bio link or a stallholder's message, and a link opened from an email app or a QR code often arrives with no source at all. A tagged link fixes that: it's the same page with a few labels on the end of the address naming where you put it.

Get a link for each place

Open your market's Marketing page (under Set up). Under "Share links that say where a sale came from", choose whether the link should go to the tickets page or the market's home page, optionally name the campaign ("Spring launch"), and copy the link for each place you're posting:

• Instagram Story (the link sticker), Instagram bio, Instagram message
• Facebook post, Facebook event, Facebook group
• WhatsApp
• Email newsletter
• Poster or flyer — use this link to make the QR code on your print
• Your own website

For anywhere else — a council what's-on listing, a radio station's site — use Somewhere else and type the name. Instagram feed posts can't carry a link, so a sale "from a post" is really a sale from the bio link — which is why the bio has its own.

Paid ads on Meta

Don't tag each Facebook or Instagram ad by hand. The Marketing page has a line of URL parameters to paste into the URL parameters field of each ad in Meta Ads Manager; Meta fills in the platform and placement itself, so an Instagram Story ad and a Facebook feed ad report as separate lines. If you also connect your Meta pixel, Ads Manager gets the sale too — see the advertising guide.

Reading the report

Ticket sales → Sales by source shows, for each source, the orders, tickets, revenue and share of tickets — paid orders only. Filter by market day to see what sold one particular day. Sales through stallholders' promo links show as their own line, with a link through to Stallholder promo to see which stallholder.

A sale is credited to the last link the buyer came through before paying, within three months. Sales without a tag fall back to the site the buyer came from where their browser said, which is why you may see Facebook or Instagram listed as untagged — real sales from those sites, through links that weren't tagged. A growing untagged share is the sign to swap the plain link for a tagged one somewhere.

Use it to decide something

The report pays off when it changes what you do next time. If the Facebook event outsells the boosted post, stop boosting. If a poster at one café sold more than three posts, print more posters. If tickets for the first market day came mostly from the newsletter, the list deserves more of your effort than the algorithm does. Check it a week before the market, while there's still time to double down on what's working.

For stall applications, the equivalent is simpler: add a "Where did you hear about us?" question to your application form. The answers appear in your stallholder exports.