Scheduling Apps for Digital Marketing: A Comparison

Scheduling apps are quite common these days, with even standard business subscriptions like office 365 and google workspace including them for free. However, while having the basic functionality of a booking app is quite easy, its less so when looking at the tracking capabilities of the apps themselves. If you’re a marketer looking to for appointments, either for yourself or for your clients, there’s a lot to be said about which app is best.

With that in mind, lets go over which app is best from a digital marketing tracking perspective.

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Calendly

Calendly is the big dog when it comes to booking apps. With $270m in revenue and being the most popular of the bunch, its certainly the contender to beat in many ways. However, when it comes to tracking, its not actually all that perfect.

Calendly has, like most apps, its own booking page and its the ability to embed the scheduler into another page. For both cases, it actually does have an integration with facebook ads itself ! Which means you could build campaigns directly optimizing for setting up appointments. 

Sadly, there’s limited direct integration besides the facebook pixel itself. Calendly does have a way to integrate with something like Google Tag Manager if using an embedding (see more here) but it requires some setup at least. It also doesn’t include any information about the appointment, so no sending emails to ad platforms

All in all, its a solid ⅗.

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Google Calendar Scheduling/Microsoft Booking

Some people might wonder why these 2 options are mixed together, but the reason is actually quite simple. They’re pretty much the same in many ways. Both are included as part of a business subscription thats usually chosen for other reason (email, videochat, etc.) and are more or less brought along.

They also share the same problem from a marketing  point of view. Neither integrates with anything. There’s no documentation about how they could be used for tracking, which makes them pretty bad options.

0/5

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Acuity Scheduling

Acuity these days is also called Squarespace Scheduling since its acquisition and is mainly used through the latter. Nonetheless, it's still around and it has quite good capabilities. It has native integrations with facebook pixel and google analytics. Even more, it has a feature much like the one that Calendly has except it also provides email, price, date, etc. 

If looking to have the best tracking option, it seems to be the case that the best thing to do is to embed the acuity scheduling, use their custom code option to get the appointment information on the site and then send that to facebook with the click id and browser id cookies. That, if done properly, give facebook everything it needs!

All in all, 5/5.

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Conclusion

To conclude, the best option at the moment seems to be Acuity Scheduling with Calendly in second place. The rest are far behind since they can’t track anything at all. So if you’re a digital marketer who needs to use a scheduling tool, you need which way to go!